You Can Heal Your Life Summary

Emir Zecovic | Posted on June 28, 2018 |

7 min read ⌚

Doctors?

Who needs doctors?

Louise Hay says:

Who Should Read “You Can Heal Your Life”? And Why?

If you believe that your mind and your body are connected and that you have power over your own destiny – then read this book!

It’s one of the earliest to propose this.

And still one of the best.

About Louise Hay

Louise Hay was an American bestselling motivational author, one of the founders of the self-help movement.

Published in 1984, her international bestseller “You Can Heal Your Life” has sold over 50 million copies and has been translated into more than 30 languages.

She died in 2017.

Find out more at https://www.louisehay.com/

“You Can Heal Your Life PDF Summary”

In “Is It True?,” the fourth chapter of her extraordinarily popular 1984 classic “You Can Heal Your Life,” Louise Hay seems to have put down in writing a justification for her book:

I have never understood the importance of having children memorize battle dates. It seems like such a waste of mental energy. Instead, we could teach them important subjects such as How the Mind Works, How to Handle Finances, How to Invest Money for Financial Security, How to be a Parent, How to Create Good Relationships, and How to Create and Maintain Self-Esteem and Self-Worth.

Can you imagine what a whole generation of adults would be like if they had been taught these subjects in school along with their regular curriculum?

In “You Can Heal Your Life” – a seminal work in the field of self-help literature – Hay has attempted to write a book for this new generation of adults, a sort of an alternative curriculum to life and everything else.

The main premise is very simple:

Everything is connected, and you can change your world by sheer mental power – from your body to your well-being to the nature of your very spirit.

Sounds too Secret-like?

That’s because it is!

Hay’s influence on subsequent authors in the genre is immeasurable – after all, her books have sold over 50 million copies – so don’t be too surprised to learn that you are already familiar with some of her ideas.

The gist of them is presented in the introductory chapter, “What I Believe,” which comprises the first part of this book on its own.

Its opening sentence has been quoted so many times that it has become an anthological one:

What we think about ourselves becomes the truth for us.

In other words, we are responsible for everything that is happening to us, since “the thoughts we think and the words we speak create our experiences.”

The root of all problems?

The innermost belief Louise Hay considers the main culprit for everything bad in your life?

A very simple, but, unfortunately, tremendously powerful thought:

I’m not good enough!

According to whose standards?

And to whom?

To make matters worse, this is as true as much as you believe in it.

Literally!

Because it’s a self-fulfilling prophecy: you make yourself not good enough by thinking that you are not. While you are sleeping, walking, talking, or doing any of your obligatory everyday activities – your mind relays this message to the Universe, and the Universe does everything in its power to transform it into reality.

The good news:

You can reverse this!

And Louise Hay provides you with an eight-chapter’ long psychoanalytical session, coupled with preparatory affirmations, relevant exercises and treatments, and a closing mantra.

The mantra always opens with “In the infinity of life where I am, all is perfect, whole, and complete” and concludes with the ever wonderful “All is well in my world.”

This comprises the second part of “You Can Heal Your Life” in which you can learn in detail about the true origin of this problem and what you should do to transcend it and start building your life anew.

Needless to say, the belief that you are not good enough or that you don’t deserve happiness stems from your early childhood years, when you had been inadvertently exposed to this kind of beliefs shared by the adults around you.

For the simple reason that your parents and their friends are actually not too dissimilar to you.

A quick rational check of these traditional beliefs should be enough to tell you how wrong they are: boys do cry, and women can handle money.

And even though they are untrue, these beliefs limit your vistas.

To transcend them, start examining them one by one more regularly and let go of the false ones the minute you realize their inaccuracy.

Next, try shifting your mindset from “I should” to “I could” so that “I should start exercising” transforms into “I can start exercising today.”

Adorn this with another important change: turn the negative affirmations into positive ones.

For example, “I don’t want to be fat” should become “I am slender” and “I don’t want to be lonely” is, from now on, “I am filled with love and affection.”

Much like David Hooper’s “Ask, Believe, Receive” is to Rhonda Byrne’s “The Secret,” the third part of “You Can Heal Your Life” is to the second one of this book.

Namely, a practical step-by-step tutorial teaching you how you can put the ideas just presented to work.

Hay has chosen pretty much the same categories as Hooper, teaching you, in very brief lessons, how you can harmonize all your relationships and how you can be deeply fulfilled by your work, in addition to how you can be more successful and experience more prosperity.

Possibly the most famous chapters of the book are the 14th and the 15th in which Hay postulates her theory that “we create every so-called illness in our body,” since it, our body, “like everything else in life, is a mirror of our inner thoughts and beliefs.”

And she tops her theoretical explanation with a long list in which she states the probable cause for every disease – or, in Hay’s dictionary, dis-ease – and the new thought pattern which should help you cure it.

For example, according to Hay, fever is caused by anger, and it should be countered by the mantra “I am the cool, calm expression of peace and love.”

The cause of heartburn, on the other hand, is clutching fear, and the new thought pattern is the following one: “I breathe freely and fully. I am safe. I trust the process of life.”

Hay concludes her book with a story from personal experience, describing how she cured herself of “incurable” cervical cancer via her methods, an event which proved to her once and for all that pills can’t cure a disease.

Instead:

DIS-EASE CAN BE HEALED IF WE ARE WILLING TO CHANGE THE WAY WE THINK AND BELIEVE AND ACT!

Key Lessons from “You Can Heal Your Life”

1. You Are What You Believe In
2. Forgiveness Means Letting Go of the Past
3. Every Disease Is Actually Dis-Ease

You Are What You Believe In

Louise Hay claims that your mind and your body are connected, in such a way that all of your experiences are actually just a mirror of your innermost beliefs.

That’s why it’s very important that you start thinking positively, reciting encouraging and self-assuring affirmations on a daily basis while transforming all of the “shoulds” in your life to “coulds.”

To paraphrase Paulo Coelho’s “The Alchemist” – do this, and all the universe will conspire in helping you become the person you want to be.

Forgiveness Means Letting Go of the Past

A lot of the problems you experience in your present are actually remnants of the past.

Take Hay, for example!

Supposedly, her violent stepfather Ernest Carl Wanzenreid physically abused her, and a neighbor raped her when she was merely 5 years old!

The result of this?

An incurable cervical cancer, which, in Hay’s opinion, is the direct consequence of “deep hurt” and “longstanding resentment” of a “deep secret or grief eating away at the self.”

The solution is straightforward:

Let go of all the hatred.

The best way to do this is by forgiving those the anger against whom holds you back.

Here’s your mantra:

I lovingly forgive and release all of the past. I choose to fill my world with joy. I love and approve of myself.