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 !!
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