You Can Heal Your Life [Paperback]

Louise Hay (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 1, 1984

Louise L. Hay, bestselling author, is an internationally known leader in the self-help field. Her key message is: "If we are willing to do the mental work, almost anything can be healed." The author has a great deal of experience and firsthand information to share about healing, including how she cured herself after being diagnosed with cancer.

 

An excerpt from You Can Heal Your Life:

 

Life Is Really Very Simple. What We Give Out, We Get Back

 

What we think about ourselves becomes the truth for us. I believe that everyone, myself included, is responsible for everything in our lives, the best and the worst. Every thought we think is creating our future. Each one of us creates our experiences by our thoughts and our feelings. The thoughts we think and the words we speak create our experiences.

Product Details

• Paperback: 272 pages
• Publisher: Hay House; 2 edition (January 1, 1984)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 9780937611012
• ISBN-13: 978-0937611012
• ASIN: 0937611018
• Product Dimensions: 0.8 x 5.3 x 8.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (705 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #20,315 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #88 in Books > Religion & Spirituality > New Age > Mental & Spiritual Healing

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

If you haven't seen Hay House's Lifestyles series of gorgeous gift books, there is no better way to acquaint yourself than with publisher/author Louise Hay's You Can Heal Your Life. A bestseller for many years, You Can Heal Your Life has been republished with bright, beautiful illustrations in full, living color and exquisite typography--each and every page is a work of art by artist Joan Perrin Falquet. The timeless message of the book is that we are each responsible for our own reality and "dis-ease." Hay believes we make ourselves ill by having thoughts of self-hatred. She includes a directory of ailments and emotional causes for each with a corresponding affirmation to help overcome the illness. For example, the probable cause of multiple sclerosis is "mental hardness, hard-heartedness, iron will, and inflexibility." The healing "thought pattern" would be: "By choosing loving, joyous thoughts, I created a loving joyous world. I am safe and free." --P. Randall Cohan --This text refers to the Perfect Paperback edition.

Review

This book turned my life around. Martine McCutcheon After I read You Can Heal Your Life I realised that salvation lay in myself. She Magazine Louise L Hay - the patron saint of affirmations. Woman & Home Magazine Loving yourself is the basis for all self-healing. The Times 20100911 Hay has been responsible for helping countless people get their lives back on track The Sun A lovely inspiring book The Sun Responsible for helping countless people get their lives back on track...a lovely, inspiring book. -- Natasha Harding The Sun 20100210 Self help: the classics. The Times 20100911 A guide to how negative mental processes can cause physical illness. The Times Louise Hay's 'You Can Heal Your Life' is without a doubt one of the best-known spiritual books ever released, and continues to inspire men and women all over the world to better their lives. An absolute favourite in the S&S office, it's something everyone should read at least once in their lives. Soul & Spirit magazine

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 272 pages
• Publisher: Hay House; 2 edition (January 1, 1984)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 9780937611012
• ISBN-13: 978-0937611012
• ASIN: 0937611018
• Product Dimensions: 0.8 x 5.3 x 8.5 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (705 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #20,315 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #88 in Books > Religion & Spirituality > New Age > Mental & Spiritual Healing

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

647 of 674 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars This Book Saved My Life December 21, 1999

By M. Johnson

Format:Perfect Paperback

Louise Hay has been there and done that and this is evidenced by the content of her book. When I first bought a copy of You Can Heal Her Life, I read the first 2 chapters, and put the book down. I was angry because Ms Hay was telling me like it was, and I didn't want to hear the truth. I didn't want to look at myself and take responsibility for my life and my happiness and my health. I wanted to be told that My situation was beyond my control. A couple of years later, I picked up that copy of You Can Heal Your Life, ready to read it and hear the truth that saved Ms Hay's life, years before. As I worked through the exercises and started practicing the affirmations in the way Ms Hay instructed, I literally began to heal my life of suicidal depression, kidney disfunction, arthritis, and the hurt of child sexual abuse, as well as a slew of other problems. A miracle happened. I started to become happy. Since this time, I have continued to use the mirror exercises and affirmations that she describes, and continued to work to change my thought patterns. As a result of this, my attitudes have changed, and I have become a much more positive, optimistic person. Everything that I need in life seems to come to me as I need it. I used to get sick with great regularity, catching everything whether it was a common disease/disorder or not, and I rarely get sick or become injured now. I am happy almost every day and am seeing my dreams come true. The last 10 years, since I read You Can Heal Your Life for the first time, have been a wonderous journey, and I wouldn't trade it for anything. While I did the work, I owe a debt of gratitude to Louise Hay for writing and marketing this book so that her message could reach me and countless others.... I have seen the same kind of results in almost a dozen other people who have read You Can Heal Your Life. There is a better way, and this is it. Give it a try, you're worth it! Love and Peace! Read more ›

194 of 207 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars Exactly What I Needed July 20, 2007

By Alex Lovejoy

Format:Paperback

When purchasing self help books, I think it helps to remember that, like ordering food or clothing, you're choosing something for yourself, not anyone else. The book doesn't need to suit anyone's needs but your own and if a book doesn't suit your needs, that doesn't mean it might not offer someone else exactly what they need to work through their situations.

During years of researching the topics of healing, happiness and love and having read dozens of excellent books on these topics, Louise Hay's "You Can Heal Your Life" (YCHYL) is by far my favorite book of all. More than any other author, Louise Hay helped me get to the very core of the things I needed to know most in order to transform my own life from within.

I originally picked up this book because it was referred to very favorably in another book I'd read and I was interested in that portion of "YCHYL" that dealt with the link between physical ailments and the unresolved emotional issues we carry around inside us. Having already cured myself of an ulcer by addressing such issues, I was most interested, initially, in learning everything I could in order to free myself of some other problems that had plagued my body over the years. I found this portion of YCHYL VERY helpful in clearing up several problems I had at that time, but then set the book aside for a time, feeling I'd gotten from it about all I could.

Years later, my girlfriend and I began reading it again, and it was like rediscovering the book all over again. She had also read it when she was younger and we thought it would be good for us to read through it together. WOW were we right.... Speaking only for myself, I can say that on a second reading, I realized at a much deeper level just how completely ALL the "less than wonderful" issues of our lives stem from one basic cause ... a lousy relationship with ourselves.

During all my years of researchings these topics, I'd become convinced on my own that Love ... true, unconditional acceptance of ourselves and others ... really was the central choice we had to make in order to have harmonious lives in every way. What Louise helped me REALLY understand was that I had not yet truly accepted MYSELF on an entirely unconditional basis. I had focused most of my efforts outward, toward other people ... forgetting ... or, more honestly ... not wanting to admit that I can't give to someone else what I haven't yet given myself. Paraphrasing from YCHYL ... "The most important thing you can do to help heal your entire life ... is stop criticising yourself".

For reasons I need not go into here, I was still carrying around a HUGE amount of self criticism ... most of which was so automatic for me, I didn't even notice it. Because I'd rid my body of most of the physical problems that were bugging me, I thought I'd done a pretty good job of clearing house emotionally, getting rid of most of my old "I'm not good enough" baggage. What a second and third reading of YCHYL showed both me and my girlfriend was that there was a lot more self criticism left inside us than we realized and that it affected areas of our lives ... relationships with friends ... our financial lives ... our job fulfillment ... that we'd never imagined.

For us, YCHYL has been a miracle in its own right. It's helped us make a committment to making total acceptance of ourselves, just as we are today, our number one daily task. Louise has helped us see that living our lives from a place of total self acceptance transforms EVERY part of our lives from "working far less well than they could" to "working so well, we're AMAZED".

Our work with this book is not over yet. But we both wanted to thank Louise for writing such a clear, easy to understand book about what we need to do to really come to grips with what throws our lives out of balance and what we can do, alone and together, to get things back on center and realize the full potential we have in every area of our lives. For us, this book has been PERFECT !! Read more ›

123 of 139 people found the following review helpful

5.0 out of 5 stars The Psychological Side of Healing November 4, 2008

By Tammy P.

Format:Perfect Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase

You Can Heal Your Life (Gift Edition) is all about using your thoughts to fix the problems in your life. What kind of problems? Well, the book specifically looks into healing some pretty major life areas: relationships, work, success, prosperity, and your body. But wait a minute, did I say the book is using thoughts to heal your body? What's up with that? Is that even possible? Well, after reading this book, I think in many cases, yes, it is possible.

While I think it is the way to go to treat things such as an acute appendicitis with surgery, fractures with a cast, and pneumonia with antibiotics, there are many conditions where conventional medicine blatently falls short. Of course I'm talking about health problems such as migraines, backaches, or stomach ulcers- you know, those kinds of nagging disorders where we all know that stress/mental processes DO play a role. But while few would argue that psychological factors can cause an ulcer, what about more serious conditions such as, say, arthritis?

Well it may not be too far fetched. Consider this. One study of 1,198 subjects found that only 56% of men with SEVERE knee arthritis had any pain (Lawrence 1966). Another study X-rayed 84 seventy-nine year-olds and 76 eighty-five year-olds and found that only 43% of them with SEVERE knee arthritis had any pain complaints (Bagge 1991). There are plenty more examples in the scientific literature, but obviously there two alone show us that there is NO clear-cut association between severe knee arthritis and pain.

ON THE OTHER HAND, when one looks at the relationship between psychological variables and knee arthritis, one does see a clear association.... For instance, one study looked at 65 patients (ages 55 to 87) with hip and/or knee arthritis. X-rays, pain, depression levels, anxiety levels, coping styles, and functional impairment were all assessed. The findings? Researchers discovered that the severity of one's arthritis showed little relationship to pain, BUT, psychological variables were strong predictors of who had pain and how impaired they were (Summers 1988).

Along the same lines, Salaffi examined 61 women (ages 51-79) with knee arthritis. Here again, results showed that how disabled someone was, was more related to psychological variables than how bad their knee looked on an X-ray film. Interestingly, both anxiety and depression WERE important predictors of pain (Salaffi 1991). Any one conducting a literature review on Medline will find more such examples IF you're looking for them. While I used knee arthritis as an example, there are MANY more studies on other health problems with similar findings.

All of this should be causing us to raise an eyebrow. The literature is telling us that it is far from being clear cut that things like bad knee arthritis ALWAYS mean pain. And the research is also giving us clues that the mind and our thought processes definitely play a role. So the question now becomes, if bad thought patterns can play a role in health problems such as arthritis, why not in other diseases such as cancer, as the book suggests?

You be the judge. I found that the main value in this book was getting me to look at how our thinking does influence the functioning of our bodies- as well as our life in general. Note that I'm NOT saying that you can think yourself well all the time either.

Remember that while Louise Hay did change her thought patterns and was cured of cancer, she has also written that she used other alternative treatments as well, such as foot reflexology and colon therapy (Chapter 16). Therefore, my advice is to look at ALL the options when dealing with a health problem, one MAJOR one being changing your mental patterns (which is the what the book does a nice job of addressing). And for this reason, I can recommend this book to anyone who needs physical healing or otherwise. Other alternative healing books of interest include The Divided Mind: The Epidemic of Mindbody Disorders and The Prayer Project: How Each One of Us Can Make The World a Better Place to Live - In a Few Minutes a Day. Thank you Louise Hay! Read more ›