by Louise Hay
Loving the Self
I continue to explain that no matter what their problem seems to be, there is only one thing I ever work on with anyone, and this is Loving the Self. Love is the miracle cure. Loving ourselves works miracles in our lives.
I am not talking about vanity or arrogance or being stuck-up, for that is not love. It is only fear. I am talking about having a great respect for ourselves and a gratitude for the miracle of our bodies and our minds.
“Love” to me is appreciation to such a degree that it fills my heart to bursting and overflows. Love can go in any direction. I can feel love for:
The very process of life itself.
The joy of being alive.
The beauty I see.
Another person.
Knowledge.
The process of the mind.
Our bodies and the way they work.
Animals, birds, fish.
Vegetation in all its forms.
The Universe and the way it works.
What can you add to this list?
Let’s look at some of the ways we don’t love ourselves:
We scold and criticize ourselves endlessly.
We mistreat our bodies with food, alcohol, and drugs.
We choose to believe we are unlovable.
We are afraid to charge a decent price for our services.
We create illnesses and pain in our bodies.
We procrastinate on things that would benefit us.
We live in chaos and disorder.
We create debt and burdens.
We attract lovers and mates who belittle us.
What are some of your ways?
If we deny our good in any way, it is an act of not loving ourselves. I remember a client I worked with who wore glasses. One day we released an old fear from childhood. The next day she awakened to find her contact lenses were bothering her too much to wear. She looked around and found her eyesight was perfectly clear.
Yet she spent the whole day saying, “I don’t believe it, I don’t believe it.” The next day she was back to wearing contacts. Our subconscious mind has no sense of humor. She couldn’t believe she had created perfect eyesight.
Lack of self-worth is another expression of not loving ourselves.
Tom was a very good artist, and he had some wealthy clients who asked him to decorate a wall or two in their homes. Yet somehow he was always behind in his own bill paying. His original quote was never enough to cover the time involved to complete the work. Anyone who gives a service or creates a one-of-a-kind product can charge any price. People with wealth love to pay a lot for what they get; it gives the item more value. More examples:
Our partner is tired and grouchy. We wonder what we have done wrong to cause it.
He takes us out once or twice and never calls again. We think something must be wrong with us.
Our marriage ends, and we are sure we are a failure.
We are afraid to ask for a raise.
Our bodies do not match those in Gentleman’s Quarterly or Vogue magazine, and we feel inferior.
We don’t “make the sale,” or “get the part,” and we are sure we are “not good enough.”
We are afraid of intimacy and allowing anyone to get too close, so we have anonymous sex.
We can’t make decisions because we are sure they will be wrong.
How do you express your lack of self-worth?
The Perfection of Babies
How perfect you were when you were a tiny baby. Babies do not have to do anything to become perfect; they already are perfect, and they act as if they know it. They know they are the center of the Universe. They are not afraid to ask for what they want. They freely express their emotions. You know when a baby is angry—in fact, the whole neighborhood knows. You also know when babies are happy, for their smiles light up a room. They are full of love.
Tiny babies will die if they do not get love. Once we are older, we learn to live without love, but babies will not stand for it. Babies also love every part of their bodies, even their own feces. They have incredible courage.
You were like that. We were all like that. Then we began to listen to adults around us who had learned to be fearful, and we began to deny our own magnificence.
I never believe it when clients try to convince me how terrible they are, or how unlovable they are. My work is to bring them back to the time when they knew how to really love themselves.
Exercise: Mirror
Next, I ask clients to pick up a small mirror, look into their own eyes, and say their names and, “I love and accept you exactly as you are.”
This is so difficult for many people. Seldom do I get a calm reaction, let alone enjoyment from this exercise. Some cry or are close to tears, some get angry, some belittle their features or qualities, some insist they CAN’T do it. I even had one man throw the mirror across the room and want to run away. It took him several months before he could begin to relate to himself in the mirror.
For years I looked into the mirror only to criticize what I saw there. Recalling the endless hours I spent plucking my eyebrows trying to make myself barely acceptable amuses me now. I remember it used to frighten me to look into my own eyes.
This simple exercise shows me so much. In less than an hour, I am able to get to some of the core issues that are beneath the outer problem. If we work only on the level of the problem, we can spend endless time working out each and every detail; and the minute we think we have it all “fixed up,” it will crop up somewhere else.
“The Problem” Is Rarely the Real Problem
She was so concerned with her looks, and especially with her teeth. She went from dentist to dentist feeling each one had only made her look worse. She went to have her nose fixed, and they did a poor job. Each professional was mirroring her belief that she was ugly. Her problem was not her looks, but that she was convinced something was wrong with her.
There was another woman who had terrible breath. It was uncomfortable to be around her. She was studying to be a minister, and her outer demeanor was pious and spiritual. Beneath this was a raging current of anger and jealousy that exploded now and then when she thought someone might be threatening her position. Her inner thoughts were expressed through her breath, and she was offensive even when she pretended to be loving. No one threatened her but herself.
He was only 15 when his mother brought him to me with Hodgkin’s dis-ease and three months to live. His mother was understandably hysterical and difficult to deal with, but the boy was bright and clever and wanted to live. He was willing to do anything I told him to, including changing the way he thought and spoke. His separated parents were always arguing, and he really did not have a settled home life.
He wanted desperately to be an actor. The pursuit of fame and fortune far outweighed his ability to experience joy. He thought he could be acceptable and worthwhile only if he had fame. I taught him to love and accept himself, and he got well. He is now grown up and appears on Broadway with regularity. As he learned to experience the joy of being himself, the parts in plays opened up for him.
Overweight is another good example of how we can waste a lot of energy trying to correct a problem that is not the real problem. People often spend years and years fighting fat and are still overweight. They blame all their problems on being overweight. The excess weight is only an outer effect of a deep inner problem. To me, it is always fear and a need for protection. When we feel frightened or insecure or “not good enough,” many of us will put on extra weight for protection.
To spend our time berating ourselves for being too heavy, to feel guilty about every bite of food we eat, to do all the numbers we do on ourselves when we gain weight, is just a waste of time. Twenty years later we can still be in the same situation because we have not even begun to deal with the real problem. All that we have done is to make ourselves more frightened and insecure, and then we need more weight for protection.
So I refuse to focus on excess weight or on die
ts. For diets do not work. The only diet that does work is a mental diet—dieting from negative thoughts. I say to clients, “Let us just put that issue to one side for the time being while we work on a few other things first.”
They will often tell me they can’t love themselves because they are so fat, or as one girl put it, “too round at the edges.” I explain that they are fat because they don’t love themselves. When we begin to love and approve of ourselves, it’s amazing how weight just disappears from our bodies.
Sometimes clients even get angry with me as I explain how simple it is to change their lives. They may feel I do not understand their problems. One woman became very upset and said, “I came here to get help with my dissertation, not to learn to love myself.” To me it was so obvious that her main problem was a lot of self-hatred, and this permeated every part of her life, including the writing of her dissertation. She could not succeed at anything as long as she felt so worthless.
She couldn’t hear me and left in tears, coming back one year later with the same problem plus a lot of other problems. Some people are not ready, and there is no judgment. We all begin to make our changes in the right time, space, and sequence for us. I did not even begin to make my changes until I was in my forties.
The Real Problem
So here is a client who has just looked into the harmless little mirror, and he or she is all upset. I smile with delight and say, “Good, now we are looking at the ‘real problem’; now we can begin to clear out what is really standing in your way.” I talk more about loving the self, about how, for me, loving the self begins with never, ever criticizing ourselves for anything.
I watch their faces as I ask them if they criticize themselves. Their reactions tell me so much:
Well, of course I do.
All the time.
Not as much as I used to.
Well, how am I going to change if I don’t criticize myself?
Doesn’t everyone?
To the latter, I answer, “We are not talking about everyone; we are talking about you. Why do you criticize yourself? What is wrong with you?”
As they talk, I make a list. What they say often coincides with their “should list.” They feel they are too tall, too short, too fat, too thin, too dumb, too old, too young, too ugly. (The most beautiful or handsome will often say this.) Or they’re too late, too early, too lazy, and on and on. Notice how it is almost always “too” something. Finally, we get down to the bottom line, and they say, “I am not good enough.”
Hurrah, hurrah! We have finally found the central issue. They criticize themselves because they have learned to believe they “are not good enough.” Clients are always amazed at how fast we have gotten to this point. Now we do not have to bother with any of the side effects like body problems, relationship problems, money problems, or lack of creative expressions. We can put all our energy into dissolving the cause of the whole thing: “NOT LOVING THE SELF!”
In the infinity of life where I am,
all is perfect, whole, and complete.
I am always Divinely protected and guided.
It is safe for me to look within myself.
It is safe for me to look into the past.
It is safe for me to enlarge my viewpoint of life.
I am far more than my personality—past, present, or future.
I now choose to rise above my personality problems
to recognize the magnificence of my being.
I am totally willing to learn to love myself.
All is well in my world.
Chapter Three
WHERE DOES IT COME FROM?
“The past has no power over me.”
All right, we have gone through a lot of stuff, and we have sifted through what we thought the problem was. Now we have come up with what I believe is the real problem. We feel we are not good enough, and there is a lack of self-love. From the way I look at life, if there is any problem, then this has to be true. So let us look at where this belief came from.
How did we go from being a tiny baby who knows the perfection of itself and of life to being a person who has problems and feels unworthy and unlovable to one degree or another? People who already love themselves can love themselves even more.
Think of a rose from the time it is a tiny bud. As it opens to full flower, till the last petal falls, it is always beautiful, always perfect, always changing. So it is with us. We are always perfect, always beautiful, and ever changing. We are doing the best we can with the understanding, awareness and knowledge we have. As we gain more understanding, awareness and knowledge, then we will do things differently.
Mental Housecleaning
Now is the time to examine our past a bit more, to take a look at some of the beliefs that have been running us.
Some people find this part of the cleansing process very painful, but it need not be. We must look at what is there before we can clean it out.
If you want to clean a room thoroughly, you will pick up and examine everything in it. Some things you will look at with love, and you will dust them or polish them to give them new beauty. Some things you will see that need refinishing or repair, and you will make a note to do that. Some things will never serve you again, and it becomes time to let those things go. Old magazines and newspapers and dirty paper plates can be dropped into the wastebasket very calmly. There is no need to get angry in order to clean a room.
It is the same thing when we are cleaning our mental house. There is no need to get angry just because some of the beliefs in it are ready to be tossed out. Let them go as easily as you would scrape bits of food into the trash after a meal. Would you really dig into yesterday’s garbage to make tonight’s meal? Do you dig into old mental garbage to create tomorrow’s experiences?
If a thought or belief does not serve you, let it go! There is no written law that says that because you once believed something, you have to continue to believe it forever.
Let’s look at some limiting beliefs and where they came from:
LIMITING BELIEF: “I’m not good enough.”
WHERE IT CAME FROM: A father who repeatedly told him he was stupid.
He said he wanted to be a success so his daddy would be proud of him. But he was riddled with guilt, which created resentment, and all he could produce was one failure after another. Daddy kept financing businesses for him, and one after another, they failed. He used failure to get even. He made his daddy pay and pay and pay. Of course, he was the biggest loser.
LIMITING BELIEF: Lack of self-love.
WHERE IT CAME FROM: Trying to win daddy’s approval.
The last thing she wanted was to be like her father. They couldn’t agree on anything and were always arguing. She only wanted his approval, but instead all she got was criticism. Her body was full of pains. Her father had exactly the same kind of pains. She did not realize her anger was creating her pains just as her father’s anger was creating pain for him.
LIMITING BELIEF: Life is dangerous.
WHERE IT CAME FROM: A frightened father.
Another client saw life as grim and harsh. It was difficult for her to laugh, and when she did, she would become frightened that something “bad” would happen. She has been reared with the admonition, “Don’t laugh or ‘they’ might get you.”
LIMITING BELIEF: I’m not good enough.
WHERE IT CAME FROM: Being abandoned and ignored.
It was difficult for him to talk. Silence had become a way of life for him. He had just come off drugs and alcohol and was convinced that he was terrible. I discovered his mother had died when he was very young, and he had been reared by an aunt. The aunt seldom spoke except to give an order, and he was brought up in silence. He even ate alone in silence and stayed quietly in his room day after day. He had a lover who was also a silent man, and they spent most of their time alone in silence. The lover died, and once again he was alone.
Exercise: Negative Messages
The next exercise we do is to get a large she
et of paper and make a list of all the things your parents said were wrong with you. What were the negative messages you heard? Give yourself enough time to remember as many as you can. A half hour usually works well.
What did they say about money? What did they say about your body? What did they say about love and relationships? What did they say about your creative talents? What were the limiting or negative things they said to you?
If you can, just look objectively at these items and say to yourself, “So that’s where that belief came from.”
Now, let’s take a new sheet of paper and dig a little deeper. What other negative messages did you hear as a child?
From relatives _______________________________
From teachers _______________________________
From friends ________________________________
From authority figures ________________________
From your church ___________________________
Write them all down. Take your time. Be aware of what feelings are going on in your body.
What you have on these two pieces of paper are the thoughts that need to be removed from your consciousness. These are the very beliefs you have that are making you feel “not good enough.”
Seeing Yourself as a Child
If we were to take a three-year-old child and put him in the middle of the room, and you and I were to start yelling at the child, telling him how stupid he was, how he could never do anything right, how he should do this, and shouldn’t do that, and look at the mess he made; and maybe hit him a few times, we would end up with a frightened little child who sits docilely in the corner, or who tears up the place. The child will go one of these two ways, but we will never know the potential of that child.
