by Louise Hay
I worked with my Science of Mind practitioner and teacher, Eric Pace, to clear the mental patterns so the cancer wouldn’t return. I said affirmations and did visualizations and spiritual mind treatments. I did daily sessions in front of a mirror. The most difficult words to say were, “I love you, I really love you.” It took a lot of tears and a lot of breathing to get through it. When I did, it was as if I took a quantum leap. I went to a good psychotherapist who was skilled in helping people express and release their anger. I spent a long period of time beating pillows and screaming. It was wonderful. It felt so good because I had never, ever had permission to do that in my life.
I don’t know which method worked; maybe a little bit of everything worked. Most of all I was really consistent with what I did. I practiced during all my waking hours. I thanked myself before I went to sleep for what I had done during the day. I affirmed that my healing process was taking place in my body while I slept, and that I would awaken in the morning bright and refreshed and feeling good. In the morning, I’d awaken and thank myself and my body for the work during the night. I would affirm that I was willing to grow and learn each day and make changes without seeing myself as a bad person.
I also worked on understanding and forgiveness. One of the ways was to explore my parents’ childhoods as much as I could. I began to understand how they were treated as children, and I realized that because of the way they were brought up, they couldn’t really have done anything differently than they did. My stepfather was abused at home, and he continued this abuse with his children. My mother was brought up to believe the man was always right and you stood by and let him do what he wanted. No one taught them a different approach. It was their way of life. Step by step, my growing understanding of them enabled me to start the forgiveness process.
The more I forgave my parents, the more willing I was to forgive myself. Forgiveness of ourselves is enormously important. Many of us do the same damage to the inner child that our parents did to us. We just continue the abuse, and it’s very sad. When we were children and other people mistreated us, we didn’t have many options, but when we grow up and we still mistreat the inner child, it’s disastrous.
As I forgave myself, I began to trust myself. I found that when we don’t trust life or other people, it’s really because we don’t trust ourselves. We don’t trust our Higher Selves to take care of us in all situations, so we say, “I’ll never fall in love again because I don’t want to get hurt,” or “I’ll never let this happen again.” What we are really saying to ourselves is, “I don’t trust you enough to take good care of me, so I’m going to stay away from everything.”
Eventually, I began to trust myself enough to take care of me, and I found it easier and easier to love myself once I trusted myself. My body was healing, and my heart was healing.
My spiritual growth had come in such an unexpected way.
As a bonus, I began to look younger. The clients I now attracted were almost all people who were willing to work on themselves. They made enormous progress without me really saying anything. They could sense and feel that I was living the concepts I was teaching, and it was easy for them to accept these ideas. Of course, they had positive results. They began to improve the quality of their lives. Once we begin to make peace with ourselves on the inner level, life seems to flow much more pleasantly.
So what did this experience teach me personally? I realized that I had the power to change my life if I was willing to change my thinking and release the patterns that kept me living in the past. This experience gave me the inner knowledge that if we are really willing to do the work, we can make incredible changes in our minds, our bodies, and our lives.
No matter where you are in life, no matter what you’ve contributed to creating, no matter what’s happening, you are always doing the best you can with the understanding and awareness and knowledge that you have. And when you know more, you will do it differently, as I did. Don’t berate yourself for where you are. Don’t blame yourself for not doing it faster or better. Say to yourself, “I’m doing the best I can, and even though I’m in a pickle now, I will get out of it somehow, so let’s find the best way to do it.” If all you do is tell yourself that you’re stupid and no good, then you stay stuck. You need your own loving support if you want to make changes.
The methods I use are not my methods. Most of them I learned at Science of Mind, which is what I basically teach. Yet these principles are as old as time. If you read any of the old spiritual teachings you will find the same messages. I am trained as a minister of the Church of Religious Science; however, I do not have a church. I am a free spirit. I express the teachings in simple language so that they reach many people. This path is a wonderful way of getting your head together and really understanding what life is all about, and how you can use your mind to take charge of your life. When I started all this 20 or so years ago, I had no idea that I would be able to bring hope and help to the number of people that I do today.
Chapter 3
The Power of Your Spoken Word
Every day declare for yourself what you want in life. Declare it as though you have it!
The Law of Mind
There is a law of gravity, and there are several other physical laws, like physics and electricity, most of which I don’t understand. There are also spiritual laws, like the law of cause and effect: what you give out comes back. There is also a law of mind. I don’t know how it works, in much the same way that I don’t know how electricity works. I only know that when I flick the switch, the light comes on.
I believe that when we think a thought or when we speak a word or sentence, it somehow goes out from us into a law of mind and comes back to us as experience.
We are now beginning to learn the correlation between the mental and the physical. We are beginning to understand how the mind works and that our thoughts are creative. Our thoughts speed through our minds very quickly, so it is difficult to shape them at first. Our mouths, on the other hand, are slower. So if we can start editing our speech by listening to what we say and not letting negative things come out of our mouths, then we can begin to shape our thoughts.
There is tremendous power in our spoken words, and many of us are not aware just how important they are. Let us consider words as the foundation of what we continually create in our lives. We use words all the time, yet we babble away, seldom thinking about what we are truly saying or how we are saying it. We pay very little attention to the selection of our words. In fact, most of us speak in negatives.
As children we were taught grammar. We were taught to select words according to these rules of grammar. However, I have always found that the rules of grammar continually change, and what was improper at one time is proper at another time, or vice versa. What was slang in the past is considered common usage in the present. However, grammar does not take into consideration the meaning of words and how they affect our lives.
On the other hand, I was not taught in school that my choice of words would have anything to do with what I would experience in life. No one taught me that my thoughts were creative, or that they could literally shape my life. Nobody taught me that what I gave out in the form of words would return to me as experiences. The purpose of the golden rule was to show us a very basic law of life: “Do unto others as you would do unto yourself. “ What you give out comes back to you. It was never meant to cause guilt. No one ever taught me that I was worth loving or that I deserved good. And nobody taught me that life was here to support me.
I remember that as children, we would often call each other cruel and hurtful names and try to belittle one another. But why did we? Where did we learn such behavior? Look at what we were taught. Many of us were told repeatedly by our parents that we were stupid or dumb or lazy. We were a nuisance and not good enough. Sometimes we heard our parents say that they wished we had never been born. Maybe we cringed when we heard these words, but little did we realize how deeply imbedded the hurt and pain would become
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Changing Our Self-Talk
Too often, we accepted the early messages that our parents gave us. We heard, “Eat your spinach,” “Clean your room,” or “Make your bed,” in order to be loved. You got the idea that you were only acceptable if you did certain things—that acceptance and love were conditional. However, that was according to somebody’s idea of what was worthwhile and had nothing to do with your deep, inner self-worth. You got the idea that you could only exist if you did these things to please others, otherwise you did not have permission to even exist.
These early messages contribute to what I call our self-talk—the way we talk to ourselves. The way we talk to ourselves inwardly is really important because it becomes the basis of our spoken words. It sets up the mental atmosphere in which we operate and which attracts to us our experiences. If we belittle ourselves, life is going to mean very little to us. If we love and appreciate ourselves, then life can be a wonderful, joyous gift.
If our lives are unhappy, or if we are feeling unfulfilled, it’s very easy to blame our parents, or them, and say it’s all their fault. However, if we do, we stay stuck in our conditions, our problems, and our frustrations. Words of blame will not bring us freedom. Remember, there is power in our words. Again, our power comes from taking responsibility for our lives. I know it sounds scary to be responsible for our lives, but we really are, whether we accept it or not. If we want to be responsible for our lives, we’ve got to be responsible for our mouths. The words and phrases we say are extensions of our thoughts.
Start to listen to what you say. If you hear yourself using negative or limiting words, change them. If I hear a negative story, I don’t go around repeating it to everyone. I think it has gone far enough, and I let it go. If I hear a positive story, however, I will tell everyone.
When you are out with other people, begin to listen to what they say and how they say it. See if you can connect what they say with what they are experiencing in life. Many, many people live their lives in shoulds. Should is a word that my ear is very attuned to. It is as if a bell goes off every time I hear it. Often, I will hear people use a dozen shoulds in a paragraph. These same people wonder why their lives are so rigid or why they can’t move out of a situation. They want a lot of control over things that they cannot control. They are either making themselves wrong or making someone else wrong. And then they question why they aren’t living lives of freedom.
We can also remove the expression have to from our vocabulary and our thinking as well. When we do, we will release a lot of self-imposed pressure on ourselves. We create tremendous pressure by saying, “I have to go to work. I have to do this. I have to … I have to … “Instead, let’s begin to say, choose to. “I choose to go to work because it pays the rent right now.” Choose to puts a whole different perspective on our lives. Everything we do is by choice even though it may not seem to be so.
A lot of us also use the word but. We make statements, then we say but, which heads us in two different directions. We give conflicting messages to ourselves. Listen to how you use the word but the next time you speak.
Another expression we need to be mindful of is don’t forget. We’re so used to saying, “Don’t forget this or that,” and what happens? We forget. We really want to remember and instead we forget, so we can begin to use the phrase please remember in place of don’t forget.
When you wake up in the morning, do you curse the fact that you have to go to work? Do you complain about the weather? Do you grumble that your back or head hurts? What is the second thing and the third thing you think or say? Do you yell at the children to get up? Most people say more or less the same thing every morning. How does what you say start your day? Is it positive and cheerful and wonderful? Or is it whining and condemning? If you grumble and complain and moan, you’re setting yourself up for such a day.
What are your last thoughts before going to bed? Are they powerful healing thoughts or poverty worry thoughts? When I speak of poverty thoughts, I don’t only mean about the lack of money. It can be a negative way of thinking about anything in your life—any part of your life that is not flowing freely. Do you worry about tomorrow? Usually, I will read something positive before I go to sleep. I am aware that when I sleep I am doing a lot of clearing that will prepare me for the next day.
I find it very helpful to turn over to my dreams any problems or questions I may have. I know my dreams will help me take care of whatever is going on in my life.
I am the only person who can think in my mind, just like you are the only person who can think in your mind. Nobody can force us to think in a different way. We choose our thoughts, and these are the basis for our self-talk. As I experienced how this process worked more in my life, I began to live more of what I was teaching others. I really watched my words and my thoughts, and I constantly forgave myself for not being perfect. I allowed myself to be me, rather than struggling to be a super person who may only be acceptable in others’ eyes.
When I began for the first time to trust life and to see it as a friendly place, I lightened up. My humor became less biting and more truly funny. I worked on releasing criticism and judgment of myself and other people, and I stopped telling disaster stories. We are so quick to spread bad news. It’s just amazing. I stopped reading the newspaper and gave up the 11 o’clock news at night, because all the reports were concerned with disaster and violence and very little good news. I realized that most people don’t want to hear good news. They love to hear bad news, so they have something to complain about. Too many of us keep recycling the negative stories until we believe that there is only bad in the world. For awhile there was a radio station that broadcast only good news. It went out of business.
When I had my cancer, I decided to stop gossiping, and to my surprise, I found I had nothing to say to anyone. I became aware that whenever I met a friend, I would immediately dish the latest dirt with them. Eventually, I discovered there were other ways of talking, although it wasn’t an easy habit to break. Nonetheless, if I gossiped about other people, then other people probably gossiped about me, because what we give out we get back.
As I worked more and more with people, I really began to listen to what they said. I really began to hear the words, not just get the general drift. Usually, after ten minutes with a new client, I could tell exactly why they had a problem because I could hear the words they were using. I could understand them by the way they were talking. I knew that their words were contributing to their problems. If they were talking negatively, imagine what their self-talk was like? It must be more of the same negative programming—poverty thinking—as I called it.
A little exercise I suggest you do is to put a tape recorder by your telephone, and every time you make or get a call, push the record button. When the tape is full on both sides, listen to what you have been saying and how you say it. You will probably be amazed. You will begin to hear the words you use and the inflection of your voice. You will begin to become aware. If you find yourself saying something three times or more, write it down because it is a pattern. Some of the patterns may be positive and supportive, and you also may have some very negative patterns that you repeat over and over and over again.
The Power of the Subconscious Mind
In light of what I’ve been speaking of, I want to discuss the power of our subconscious minds. Our subconscious minds make no judgments. The subconscious mind accepts everything we say and creates according to our beliefs. It always says yes. Our subconscious minds love us enough to give us what we declare. We have choice, though. If we choose these poverty beliefs and concepts, then it is assumed that we want them. It will continue to give us these things until we are willing to change our thoughts and words and beliefs for the better. We are never stuck because we can always choose again. There are billions and billions of thoughts from which to choose.
Our subconscious minds don’t know true from false or right from wrong. We don’t want to deprecate ourselves in any way. We don
’t want to say something like, “Oh stupid, old me,” because the subconscious mind will pick this self-talk up, and after a while you will feel that way. If you say it enough times, it will become a belief in your subconscious.
The subconscious mind has no sense of humor, and it is important for you to know and understand this concept. You cannot make a joke about yourself and think it doesn’t mean anything. If it is a put-down about yourself, even if you are trying to be cute or funny about it, the subconscious mind accepts it as true. I don’t let people tell put-down jokes in my workshops. They can be raunchy but not put-downs of a nationality or sex or whatever.
So don’t joke about yourself and make derogatory remarks about yourself because they will not create good experiences for you. Don’t belittle others either. The subconscious mind doesn’t distinguish between you and the other person. It hears the words, and it believes you are talking about yourself. The next time you want to criticize someone, ask why you feel that way about yourself. You only see in others what you see in yourself. Instead of criticizing others, praise them, and within a month, you will see enormous change within you.
Our words are really a matter of approach and attitude. Notice the way that lonely, unhappy, poor, sick people talk. What words do they use? What have they accepted as the truth for themselves? How do they describe themselves? How do they describe their work, their lives, their relationships? What do they look forward to? Be aware of their words, but please don’t run around telling strangers that they are ruining their lives by the way they talk. Don’t do it to your family and friends either because the information will not be appreciated. Instead, use this information to begin to make the connection for yourself, and practice it if you want your life to change, because even on the smallest level, if you change the way you talk, your experiences are going to change.
