The Essential Louise Hay Collection

by Louise Hay

  If you fall asleep when you meditate, that’s all right. Let the body do what it needs to do, it will balance out in time.

  Reprogramming your negative beliefs is very powerful. A good way to do it is by making a tape with your own voice saying your affirmations. Play it as you go to sleep. It will have a great deal of value for you because you will be listening to your own voice. An even more powerful tape would be your mother’s voice telling you how wonderful you are and how much she loves you. Once you have the tape, it’s good to relax the body before you begin reprogramming. Some people like to start from the tips of their toes and move up to the top of their head, tensing and relaxing. However you do it, release the tension. Let the emotions go. Get to a state of openness and receptivity. The more relaxed you are, the easier it is to receive the new information. Remember, you are always in charge, and you are always safe.

  It is wonderful to listen to tapes or read self-awareness books, and do your affirmations. But, what are you doing for the other 23 hours and 30 minutes of the day? You see, that is what really matters. If you sit down and meditate and then get up and rush to work and scream at someone, that counts, too. Meditation and affirmations are wonderful, yet the other times are just as important.

  Treat Doubt as a Friendly Reminder

  I am often asked questions about whether people are doing affirmations correctly or whether they are even working. I’d like you to think of doubt a little differently than you may have been. I believe that the subconscious mind resides in the solar plexus area of the body, where you carry those gut feelings. When something sudden happens don’t you immediately get a strong feeling in your gut? It is where you take everything in and store it.

  Ever since we were little children, every message we have received, everything we have done, all the experiences we have had, all that we have said, have all gone into the filing cabinet right there in the solar plexus area. I like to think that there are little messengers in there, and when we think thoughts or have experiences, the messages go in, and the messengers file them in the appropriate files. For many of us we have been building up files labeled: I’m not good enough. I’ll never make it. I don’t do it right. We have gotten absolutely buried under these files. Suddenly we do affirmations such as: I’m wonderful and I love myself. The messengers pick them up and say, “What’s this??? Where does it go? We’ve never seen this one before!”

  So the messengers call Doubt. “Doubt! Come over here and see what’s going on.” So Doubt picks up the message and asks the conscious mind, “What’s this? You have always been saying these other things.” On a conscious level we can react in two ways. We can say, “Oh you’re right, I’m terrible. I’m no good. I’m sorry. That’s not the right message,” and go back to our old ways. Or we can say to Doubt, “That was the old message. I have no need for it now. This is the new message.” Tell Doubt to start a new file because there will be lots of these loving messages coming through from now on. Learn to treat doubt as a friend, not the enemy, and thank it for questioning you.

  It doesn’t matter what you do in this world. It doesn’t matter if you are a bank president or a dishwasher, a housewife or a sailor. You have wisdom inside of you that is connected to Universal Truth. When you are willing to look within and ask a simple question such as, “What is this experience trying to teach me?” and if you are willing to listen, then you will have the answer. Most of us are so busy running around creating the soap opera and drama we call our lives that we don’t hear anything.

  Don’t give your power over to other people’s pictures of right and wrong. They only have power over us when we give our power to them. Groups of people give their power over to others. It happens in a lot of cultures. Women in our culture give their power to men. They say things like, “My husband won’t allow me to.” Well that’s certainly giving your power away. If you believe it, you box yourself into a place where you can’t do anything unless you are given permission by another person. The more open-minded you are, the more you learn, and the more you can grow and change.

  A woman once shared with me that when she got married she was very unassertive because that was the way she was brought up. It took years for her to realize that her conditioning kept her locked in a corner. She blamed everyone—her husband and her in-laws—for her problems. Eventually, she divorced her husband, however, she still blamed him for so many things that were not right in her life. It took her ten years to relearn her patterns and to take her power back. In hindsight, she realized that she was responsible for not speaking up and for not standing up for herself—not her husband or her in-laws. They were there to reflect back to her what she felt inside—a sense of powerlessness.

  Don’t give your power away based on what you read either. I remember years ago I read some articles in a well known magazine and I happened to know something about each subject described in the articles. In my opinion, the information was totally erroneous. The magazine lost all credibility for me, and I didn’t read it again for many years. You are the authority in your life, so don’t think that because something is in print that it’s always the truth.

  Inspirational speaker Terry Cole-Whittaker wrote a wonderful book called What You Think Of Me Is None Of My Business. It’s true. What you think of me is none of my business—it’s your business. In the end, what you think of me is going out from you in vibrations and will come back.

  When we have illumination, when we become conscious of what we are doing, we can begin to change our lives. Life is really here for you. You need only ask. Tell life what you want, and then allow the good to happen.

  PART TWO

  Dissolving the Barriers

  We want to know what is going on inside us, so we can know what to let go. Instead of hiding our pain, we can release it totally.

  Chapter 5

  Understanding the Blocks That Bind You

  Chronic patterns of self-hate, guilt, and self-criticism raise the body’s stress levels and weaken the immune system.

  Now that we understand a little more about the power that we have within us, let’s take a look at what keeps us from using it. I think that almost all of us have barriers of some kind or another. Even when we do a lot of work on ourselves, and clear out the blocks, new layers of old barriers still keep coming up.

  Many of us feel so flawed that we believe that we are not good enough and never will be. And, if we find something wrong with us, then we are going to find something wrong with other people as well. If we are still continuing to say, “I can’t do this because my mother said …, or my father said …, “ then we have not yet grown up.

  So now you want to let your barriers go, and perhaps learn something different that you didn’t know before now. Perhaps one sentence here will trigger a new thought.

  Can you imagine how wonderful it would be if every day you learned a new idea that would help you let go of the past and create harmony in your life? When you become aware and understand the individual process of life, you will know what direction to take. If you put your energies into learning about yourself, you will eventually see those problems and issues that you need to dissolve.

  We all have challenges in life. Everybody does. Nobody goes through life without them; otherwise, what would be the purpose of coming to this particular school called Earth? For some, there are health challenges, and for other people there are relationship challenges, or career or financial challenges. Some have a little or a lot of everything.

  I think one of our biggest problems is that most of us haven’t the faintest idea of what it is we want to let go. We know what is not working and we know what we want in our life, yet we don’t know what’s holding us back. So let’s take this time to look at the blocks that bind us.

  If you think for a moment about your own patterns and problems and the things that hold you back, which categories do they fall into—criticism, fear, guilt, or resentment? I call these categories, The Big Four. Which is your favorite one? Mine was a
combination of criticism and resentment. Maybe you are like me and have two or three. Is it fear that always comes up, or guilt? Are you very, very critical or resentful? Let me point out that resentment is anger that is stuffed down. So if you believe you are not allowed to express your anger, then you have stored a lot of resentment.

  We cannot deny our feelings. We cannot conveniently ignore them. When I had my cancer diagnosis, I had to look very clearly at myself. I had to acknowledge some nonsense that I didn’t want to admit about myself. For instance, I was a very resentful person, and I carried a lot of bitterness from the past. I said, “Louise, you have no time to indulge in that anymore. You really must change.” Or as Peter Mc Williams says, “You can no longer afford the luxury of a negative thought.”

  Your experiences always reflect your inner beliefs. You can literally look at your experiences and determine what your beliefs are. Maybe it’s disturbing to consider, but if you look at the people in your life, they are all mirroring some belief you have about yourself. If you are always being criticized at work, it is probably because you are critical and have become the parent who once criticized the child. Everything in our lives is a mirror of who we are. When something is happening out there that is not comfortable, we have an opportunity to look inside and say, “How am I contributing to this experience? What is it within me that believes I deserve this?”

  We all have family patterns, and it is very easy for us to blame our parents, or our childhood, or our environment, but that keeps us stuck. We don’t become free. We remain victims, and we perpetuate the same problems over and over again.

  So it really doesn’t matter what anybody else did to you or what they taught you in the past. Today is a new day. You are now in charge. Now is the moment in which you are creating the future in your life and your world. It really doesn’t matter what I say either, because only you can do the work. Only you can change the way you think and feel and act. I’m just saying that you can. You definitely can because you have a Higher Power within you that can help break you free from these patterns if you allow It.

  You can remind yourself that when you were a little baby, you loved yourself for who you were. There is not one little baby who criticizes its body and thinks, “Oh, my hips are too big.” Babies are thrilled and delighted just because they have bodies. They express their feelings. When a baby is happy, you know it, and when a baby is angry, the whole neighborhood knows it. They are never afraid to let people know how they feel. They live in the moment. You were like that once. As you grew up, you listened to people around you, and learned about fear and guilt and criticism from them.

  If you grew up in a family where criticism was the norm, then you are going to be critical as an adult. If you grew up in a family where you were not allowed to express anger, then you are probably terrified of anger and confrontation, and you swallow it and let it reside in your body.

  If you were raised in a family where everybody was manipulated by guilt, then you are probably going to be the same way as an adult. You are probably a person who runs around saying “I’m sorry” all the time, and can never ask for anything outright. You feel you have to be manipulative in some way in order to get what you want.

  As we grow up, we begin to pick up these false ideas and lose touch with our inner wisdom. So we really need to release these ideas and return to the purity of spirit where we truly love ourselves. We need to re-establish the wonderful innocence of life and the moment-by-moment joy of existence, the same joy that a baby feels in its blissful state of wonder.

  Think of what you want to become true for yourself. State them in positive, not negative affirmations. Now, go to the mirror and repeat your affirmations. See what obstacles are in your way. When you begin to state an affirmation like, “I love and approve of myself, “ really pay attention to what negative messages come up because as you recognize them they become the treasures that will unlock the door to your freedom. Usually, the messages are one of the four I mentioned earlier—criticism, fear, guilt, or resentment. And, most likely you learned these messages from people “back there.”

  Some of you have chosen some difficult tasks to handle in this lifetime, and it is my belief that we really come here to love ourselves in spite of what they say or do. We can always go beyond our parents’ or our friends’ limitations. If you were a good little girl or boy, you learned your parents’ limited way of looking at life. You see, you are not bad; you are ideal children. You learned exactly what your parents taught you. Now that you are grown up, you’re doing the same thing. How many of you hear yourself saying what your parents used to say? Congratulations! They were very good teachers and you were very good students, but now it is time for you to begin to think for yourself.

  A lot of us may face resistance when we look in the mirror and repeat our affirmations. However, resistance is the first step to change. Most of us want our lives to change, but when we are told that we have to do something different, we say, “Who me? I don’t want to do that.”

  Others may experience feelings of despair. Often, if you look at the mirror and say, “I love you,” the little child inside says, “Where have you been all this time? I’ve been waiting for you to notice me.” Waves of sadness come up because you have been rejecting the little child for a long, long time.

  When I did this exercise in one of my workshops, a woman said she was very, very scared. I asked her what frightened her, and she shared the fact that she was an incest survivor. Many of us have had this experience called incest and we are learning to come through it. It’s interesting that it occurs so often on our planet. We read so much about incest these days, yet I don’t think it is happening any more now than it ever did. We have advanced to a state where we now feel that children have rights and we are allowing ourselves to see this ugly sore in society. In order to release the problem, we have to first recognize it and then we can work through it.

  Therapy is so important for incest survivors. We need a safe space where we can work through these feelings. When we have let the anger and rage and shame out then we move to the space where we can love ourselves. No matter what we are working on we want to remember that the feelings that come up are just feelings. We are not in the experience anymore. We need to work on making the inner child feel safe. We have to thank ourselves for having had the courage to survive this experience. Sometimes when we are dealing with an issue such as incest, it’s difficult to accept that the other person was doing the best he or she could at the time with the understanding and awareness and knowledge that they had. Acts of violence always come from people who were violated themselves. We all need healing. When we learn to love and cherish who we are, we will no longer harm anyone.

  Stop All Criticism

  When we are dealing with criticism, we are usually criticizing ourselves all the time for the same things over and over. When are we going to wake up and learn that criticism doesn’t work? Let’s try another tactic. Let’s approve of ourselves as we are right now. Critical people often attract a lot of criticism because it is their pattern to criticize. What we give out, we get back. They may also need to be perfect at all times. Who’s perfect? Have you ever met a perfect person? I haven’t. If we complain about another person, we are really complaining about some aspect of ourselves.

  Everyone is a reflection of us, and what we see in another person, we see in ourselves. Many times we don’t want to accept parts of who we are. We abuse ourselves with alcohol or drugs or cigarettes or overeating or whatever. These are ways of beating up on ourselves for not being perfect—but, being perfect for who? Whose early demands and expectations are we still trying to meet? Be willing to let that go. Just be. You will find that you are wonderful just as you are this very moment.

  If you have always been a critical person who sees life through very negative eyes, it is going to take time for you to turn yourself around to be more loving and accepting. You will learn to be patient with yourself as you practice letting go of th
e criticism which is only a habit, not the reality of your being.

  Can you imagine how wonderful it would be if we could live our lives without ever being criticized by anyone? We would feel totally at ease, totally comfortable. Every morning would be a wonderful new day because everyone would love you and accept you and nobody would criticize you or put you down. You can give this happiness to yourself by becoming more accepting of the things that make you unique and special.

  The experience of living with yourself can be the most wonderful experience imaginable. You can wake up in the morning and feel the joy of spending another day with you.

  When you love who you are, you automatically bring out the best in you. I’m not saying you will be a better person because that implies that you are not good enough now. However, you will find more positive ways to fulfill your needs, and to express more of who you really are.

  Guilt Makes Us Feel Inferior

  Many times people give you negative messages because it is the easiest way to manipulate you. If someone is trying to make you feel guilty, ask yourself, “What do they want? Why are they doing this?” Ask these questions in stead of inwardly agreeing, “Yes, I’m guilty, I must do what they say.”

  Many parents manipulate their children with guilt because they were raised the same way. They tell lies to their children to make them feel less than. Some people are still manipulated by their relatives and friends when they grow up because, first of all, they don’t respect themselves, otherwise they wouldn’t let it happen. Secondly, they are manipulative themselves.

  Many of you live under a cloud of guilt. You always feel wrong, or that you are not doing the right thing, or apologizing to someone for something. You will not forgive yourself for something you did in the past. You berate yourself for a lot that goes on in your life. Let the cloud dissipate. You don’t need to live that way any longer.