by Laurel Phillips

Created on: February 28, 2009

Taking Control of Life's Direction: What a Contemporary Self-Help Guru Tells Us is the Key to Living a Life of Contentment.

Author Louisa L Hay, "You Can Heal Your Life"

In the recent movie based on her best selling book "You Can Heal Your Life", eighty plus year old Louisa Hay sits basking in an almost tangible glow of success recounting for us a life of extremely humble beginnings. Beginning with her childhood, Hay recounts for us the physical and sexual abuse by her step-father, an adolescent rape by a neighbour, dropping out of school and leaving home a young teen, a teen-age pregnancy and giving the child up for adoption, and the end of her 27 year marriage. After relating these tragedies, she then takes us on a new trajectory one of tremendous success.

Hay attributes her success to a turning point in her life involving a visit to a local church (The First Church of Religious Science) where, for the first time, she heard "If you change the way you think, you can change your life." This alone set Hay off on the path to becoming one of the foremost self-help gurus of the 21 century. Convinced she had hit upon an important, life altering message, Hay successfully transforms her life through affirmations. With the blessing of her church, she sets up shop as a counselor and sets out to transform the lives of others using the same method. From here Hay, trusting in her message, writes her first book "Heal Your Body" in 1976, self-publishing 5000 copies all sold within 2 years.

When the AIDs crisis hits New York (her town) Hay is requested to talk to a small number of sufferers. The group would quickly expand into the hundreds. From this event, people began to get on the Hay Wagon' and ride the wave of achievement with her. Her most popular book, "You Can Heal You're your Life", published in 1984, made it to the New York times Best Seller' list and contributed greatly to the credibility and acceptance of her simple message: You can change the way you think through the application of repetitious, positive, purposefully constructed affirmations and, if you can change the way you think, you can change your life.

For decades Louisa Hay has lived her message and her life has become a living testimony to the truth and power contained in words. She has not just overcome a series of personal traumatic life experiences but triumphed, going on to become one of the most prolific self-help gurus of the twenty first century.

Is she right? The Buddha would agree: "All that we are is the result of what we have thought" (Buddha).

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