by Louise Hay
The dictionary defines pain as an “unpleasant or distressing sensation due to bodily injury or disorder,” as well as a “mental or emotional suffering or torment.” Since pain is an outgrowth of both mental and physical disease, it is clear that both the mind and the body are susceptible to it.
I recently witnessed a wonderful example to illustrate this point as I watched two little girls playing in a park. The first child raised her hand to playfully slap her friend on the arm. Before she was able to connect, the other little girl said, “Ow!” The first little girl looked at her and said, “Why did you say ’Ow’? I haven’t even touched you yet.” To which her friend quickly replied, “Well, I knew it was gonna hurt.” In this instance, the mental pain presumed the expected physical pain.
Pain comes to us in many forms. A scratch. A bump. A bruise. Dis-ease. Uneasy sleep. A threat. A knotty feeling in your stomach. A numbing sensation in your arm or leg. Sometimes it hurts a lot, sometimes only a little, but we know it’s there. In most cases, it is trying to tell us something. At times, the message is obvious. A sour stomach experienced during the work week, but not on the weekend, may indicate a need for a job change. And many of us know the significance of the pain that occurs after a night of excessive drinking.
Whatever the message, we must remember that the human body is a wonderfully constructed piece of machinery. It tells us if there are problems but only if we are willing to listen. Unfortunately, many of us do not take or make the time to listen.
Pain is actually one of the body’s “last-resort” messages to tell us that something is wrong in our lives. We’re really off-track somewhere. The body is always aspiring for optimum health no matter what we do to it. However, if we abuse our bodies tremendously, we contribute to the conditions of our disease.
When we first feel pain, what do we do? We usually run to the medicine cabinet or to the drugstore, and we take a pill. In effect, we say to the body, “Shut up, I don’t want to hear you.” The body will quiet down for a little bit, then the whisperings return, this time a little louder. Maybe we go to the doctor for an injection or a prescription, or we do something else. At some point, we have to pay attention to what is going on because we may have a full-blown disease of some sort. Even at that point, some people still want to play victim and still don’t listen. Others awaken to what’s going on and are willing to make changes. It’s okay. We all learn in different ways.
The answers may be as simple as getting a good night’s sleep, or not going out seven nights a week, or not pushing yourself at work. Allow yourself to listen to your body because it does want to get well. Your body wants to be healthy, and you can cooperate with it.
When I first feel pain or discomfort, I quiet myself. I trust that my Higher Power will let me know what needs to be changed in my life, so I can be free from this disease. In these quiet times, I visualize the most perfect natural setting with my favorite flowers growing in abundance all around me. I can feel and smell the sweet, warm air as it blows gently across my face. I concentrate on relaxing every muscle in my body.
When I feel that I have reached a state of complete relaxation, I simply ask my Inner Wisdom, “How am I contributing to this problem? What is it that I need to know? What areas of my life are in need of change?” Then I let the answers pour over me. The answers may not come at that moment but I know that they will be revealed to me soon. I know that whatever changes are needed are the right ones for me and that I will be completely safe no matter what unfolds before me.
Sometimes you wonder how you can accomplish such changes. “How will I live? What about the children? How will I pay my bills?” Again, trust your Higher Power to show you the means to live a plentiful, pain-free life.
I also suggest that you make changes one step at a time. Lao-Tse said, ‘The journey of a thousand miles begins with one step. “ One small step added to another can create significant, major advancements. Once you go about making your changes, please remember that pain does not necessarily disappear overnight, and yet it may. It has taken time for pain to surface; therefore, it may take some time to recognize it is no longer needed. Be gentle to yourself. Don’t gauge your progress by someone else’s. You are unique and have your own way of handling your life. Put your trust in your Higher Self in order to free yourself of all physical and emotional pain.
Forgiveness Is the Key to Freedom
I often ask clients, “Would you rather be right or would you rather be happy?” We all have opinions on who was right and who was wrong according to our own perceptions, and we can all find ways to justify our feelings. We want to punish others for what they did to us; however, we are the ones running the story over and over in our own minds. It is foolish for us to punish ourselves in the present because someone hurt us in the past.
To release the past, we want to be willing to forgive, even if we don’t know how. Forgiveness means giving up our hurtful feelings and just letting the whole thing go. A state of nonforgiveness actually destroys something within ourselves.
No matter what avenue of spirituality you follow you will usually find that forgiveness is an enormous issue at any time, but most particularly when there is an illness. When we are ill we really need to look around and see who it is we need to forgive. And usually the very person who we think we will never forgive is the one we need to forgive the most. Not forgiving someone else doesn’t harm the person in the slightest, but it plays havoc with us. The issues aren’t theirs; the issues are ours.
The grudges and hurts you feel have to do with forgiving yourself, not someone else. Affirm that you are totally willing to forgive everyone. “I am willing to free myself from the past. I am willing to forgive all those who may ever have harmed me and I forgive myself for having harmed others.” If you think of anyone who may have harmed you in any way at any point in your life, bless that person with love and release him or her, then dismiss the thought.
I wouldn’t be where I am today if I hadn’t forgiven the people who have hurt me. I would not want to punish myself today for what they did to me in the past. I’m not saying that it would be easy. It’s just that now I can look back at that stuff and say, “Oh yes, that’s something that happened.” However, I don’t live there anymore. It is not the same thing as condoning their behavior.
If you feel ripped-off by another, know that nobody can take anything from you that is rightfully yours. If it belongs to you, it will return to you at the right time. If something doesn’t come back to you, it wasn’t meant to. You need to accept it and go on with your life.
To become free, you need to get out of your self-righteous resentment and off your pity pot. I love this expression, which originated with Alcoholics Anonymous, because it is such a wonderful, accurate description. When you are sitting on your pity pot, you are this helpless person who has no power at all. In order to have power, you have to stand on your own two feet and take responsibility.
Take a moment and close your eyes and imagine a beautiful stream of water in front of you. Take the old painful experience, the hurt, and the unforgiveness, and put the whole incident in the stream. See it begin to dissolve and drift downstream until it totally dissipates and disappears. Do this as often as you can.
This is a time for compassion and healing. Go within and connect with that part of yourself that knows how to heal. You are incredibly capable. Be willing to go to new levels to find capabilities of which you were not aware, not to just cure disease, but to truly heal yourself on all possible levels. To make yourself whole in the deepest sense of the word. To accept every part of yourself and every experience you have ever had, and to know that it is all part of the tapestry of your life this time around.
I love Emmanuel’s Book. There is a passage in it which has a good message.
The question to Emmanuel is:
“How do we experience painful circumstances without becoming embittered by them?’
And Emmanuel’s reply is:
“By seeing the
m as lessons and not as retribution. Trust life, my friends. However far afield life seems to take you, this trip is necessary. You have come to traverse a wide terrain of experience in order to verify where truth lies and where your distortion is in that terrain. You will then be able to return to your home center, your soul self refreshed and wiser. “
If only we could understand that all of our so-called problems are just opportunities for us to grow and to change, and that most of them come from the vibrations that we have been giving off! All we really need to do is change the way we think, be willing to dissolve the resentment, and be willing to forgive.
PART THREE
Loving Yourself
Can you remember the last time you were in love? Your heart went ahhhh. It was such a wonderful feeling. It’s the same thing with loving yourself except that you will never leave. Once you have your love for yourself, it’s with you for the rest of your life, so you want to make it the best relationship you can have.
Chapter 8
How to Love Yourself
When you forgive and let go, not only does a huge weight drop off your shoulders, but the doorway to your own self-love opens.
For many of you who have been working on loving yourselves and for those of you who are just beginning, I am going to explore some ways to help you learn how to love yourselves. I call it my Ten Steps, and I have sent thousands of people this list over the years.
Loving yourself is a wonderful adventure; it’s like learning to fly. Imagine if we all had the power to fly at will? How exciting it would be! Let’s begin to love ourselves now.
Many of us seem to suffer from a lack of self-esteem at one level or another. It is very difficult for us to love ourselves because we have all these so-called faults inside us that we feel make it impossible to love ourselves exactly as we are. We usually make loving ourselves conditional, and then when we are involved in relationships, we make loving the other person conditional also. We’ve all heard that we really can’t love someone else until we love ourselves. So now that we have seen the barriers we have set up for ourselves, how do we catapult to the next step.
10 Ways to Love Yourself
1. Probably the most important key is to stop criticizing yourself. I talked about criticism in chapter five. If we tell ourselves that we are okay, no matter what is going on, we can make changes in our lives easily. It is when we make ourselves bad that we have great difficulty. We all change—everyone. Every day is a new day, and we do things a little differently than we did the day before. Our ability to adapt and flow with the process of life is our power.
Those who have come from dysfunctional homes often have become super-responsible and have gotten in the habit of judging themselves unmercifully. They have grown up amidst tension and anxiety. The message they get as children of dysfunctional homes is: “There must be something wrong with me.” Think for a moment about the words you use when scolding yourself. Some of the phrases people tell me are: stupid, bad boy, bad girl, useless, careless, dumb, ugly, worthless, sloppy, dirty, et cetera. Are these the same words you use now when describing yourself?
There is a tremendous need to build self-worth and value in ourselves, because when we feel not good enough, we find ways to keep ourselves miserable. We create illness or pain in our bodies; we procrastinate about things that would benefit us; we mistreat our bodies with food, alcohol, and drugs.
We are all insecure in some ways because we are human. Let us learn not to pretend that we are perfect. Having to be perfect only puts immense pressure on ourselves, and it prevents us from looking at areas of our lives that need healing. Instead, we could discover our creative distinctions, our individualities, and appreciate ourselves for the qualities that set us apart from others. Each one of us has a unique role to play on this earth, and when we are critical of ourselves, we obscure it.
2. We must also stop scaring ourselves. Many of us terrorize ourselves with frightful thoughts and make situations worse than they are. We take a small problem and make it into a big monster. It’s a terrible way to live, always expecting the worst out of life.
How many of you go to bed at night creating the worst possible scenario of a problem? That is like a little child who imagines monsters under the bed and then gets terrified. It’s no wonder you can’t sleep. As a child you needed your parent to come and soothe you. Now as an adult you know you have the ability to soothe yourself.
People who are ill do this a lot. Often they visualize the worst or they are immediately planning their funerals. They give their power to the media and see themselves as statistics.
You may also do this in relationships. Someone doesn’t call and you immediately decide that you are totally unlovable and you’ll never have another relationship again. You feel abandoned and rejected.
You do the same thing with your job. Someone makes a remark at work, and you begin to think you’re going to be fired. You build these paralyzing thoughts in your mind. Remember, these frightening thoughts are negative affirmations.
If you find yourself habitually reviewing a negative thought or situation in your mind, find an image of something you really would like to replace it with. It could be a beautiful view, or a sunset, flowers, a sport, or anything you love. Use that image as your switch-to image every time you find that you are scaring yourself. Say to yourself, “No, I’m not going to think about that anymore. I’m going to think about sunsets, or roses, or Paris, or yachts, or waterfalls,” whatever your image is. If you keep doing this, you will eventually break the habit. Again, it takes practice.
3. Another way is be gentle and kind and patient with yourself. Ore Arnold humorously wrote, “Dear God—I pray for patience. And I want it right now! Patience is a very powerful tool. Most of us suffer from the expectation of immediate gratification. We must have it now. We don’t have the patience to wait for anything. We get irritable if we have to wait in lines or are stuck in traffic. We want all the answers and all the goodies right now. Too often, we make other people’s lives miserable by our own impatience. Impatience is a resistance to learning. We want the answers without learning the lesson or doing the steps that are necessary.
Think of your mind as if it were a garden. To begin with, a garden is a patch of dirt. You may have a lot of brambles of self-hatred and rocks of despair, anger, and worry. An old tree, called fear, needs pruning. Once you get some of these things out of the way, and the soil is in good shape, you add some seeds or little plants of joy and prosperity. The sun shines down on it, and you water it and give it nutrients and loving attention.
At first, not much seems to be happening. But you don’t stop, you keep taking care of your garden. If you are patient, the garden will grow and blossom. The same with your mind—you select the thoughts that will be nurtured, and with patience they grow and contribute to creating the garden of experiences you want.
We All Make Mistakes
It’s okay to make mistakes while you are learning. As I said, so many of you are cursed with perfectionism. You won’t give yourselves a chance to really learn anything new because if you don’t do it perfectly in the first three minutes, you assume you are not good enough.
Anything you are going to learn takes time. When you first begin doing something, it usually doesn’t feel right. To show you what I mean, take a moment right now and clasp your hands together. There is no right or wrong way to do this. Clasp your hands and notice which thumb is on top. Now open your hands and then clasp your hands again with the other thumb on top. It probably feels strange, odd, maybe even wrong. Clasp them again the first way, then the second, and the first again, and the second way and hold it. How does it feel? Not so odd. Not so bad. You’re getting used to it. Maybe you can even learn to do it both ways.
It’s the same when we are doing something a new way. It may feel different, and we immediately judge it. Yet, with a little bit of practice, it can become normal and natural. We’re not going to love ourselves totally in one day, but we can lov
e ourselves a little bit more every day. Each day, we give ourselves a little bit more love, and in two or three months, we will have come so much further in loving ourselves.
So mistakes are your stepping stones. They are valuable because they are your teachers. Don’t punish yourself for making a mistake. If you are willing to learn and grow from the mistake, then it serves as a step toward fulfillment in your life.
Some of us have been working on ourselves for a very long time and wonder why we still have issues that come up for us. We need to keep reinforcing what we know, not resisting by throwing our hands up in the air and saying, “What’s the use?” As we learn new ways, we need to be gentle and kind to ourselves. Remember the garden above. When the negative weeds grow, pluck them out as quickly as you can.
4. We must learn to be kind to our minds. Let’s not hate ourselves for having negative thoughts. We can think of our thoughts as building us up rather than beating us up. We don’t have to blame ourselves for negative experiences. We can learn from these experiences. Being kind to ourselves means we stop all blame, all guilt, all punishment, and all pain.
Relaxation can help us as well. Relaxation is absolutely essential for tapping into the Power within, because if you are tense and frightened, you shut off your energy. It only takes a few minutes a day to allow the body and the mind to let go and relax. At any moment you can take a few deep breaths, close your eyes, and release whatever tension you’re carrying. As you exhale, become centered and say to yourself silently: “I love you. All is well. “ You will notice how much calmer you feel. You are building messages that say you don’t have to go through life tense and frightened all the time.
Meditate on a Daily Basis
I also recommend quieting your mind and listening to your own inner wisdom. Our society has made meditation into something mysterious and difficult to achieve, and yet meditation is one of the oldest and simplest processes there is. All we need to do is get into a relaxed state and repeat silently to ourselves words like love or peace or anything meaningful to us. ? M is an ancient sound that I use at my workshops and it seems to work very well. We could even repeat: I love myself, or I forgive myself, or I am forgiven. Then listen for a while.
