Healing Our Hearts
“You Can Heal Your Life”
One of the books I read this summer was “You Can Heal Your Life” by Louise Hay. Hay’s early life was filled with significant loss, disappointment, and abuse. She was raped at the age of five, and sexually abused in her teens. In her early twenties Hay gave birth to a child while she was working as a waitress and ultimately gave the baby up for adoption, never to see her again. Hay subsequently was married for fourteen years, but that marriage ended painfully and involved betrayal. This background and her experiences led Hay to a life as a public speaker and an award-winning author. She took all that life had thrown at her and turned it around into a way to heal herself and help heal others.
Reading Hay’s book reinforced for me all of the skills and strategies we have been learning to live a compassionate life. Hay writes that what we see, what we think, and how we feel about our daily experiences and interactions are totally within our power to determine. We have explored how the typical brain is wired to process our experiences negatively. Our brains default to protective preservation when something unexpected happens or when we approach a situation that is unfamiliar. We worry and our inner voice becomes self-critical and judgmental. These patterns are normalized in our thinking and we are not typically conscious or aware of them. This pattern of thinking often results in a detachment from compassionate practices with ourselves and with others.
Hay believes that living in this negative mindset is harmful to our health. She identifies two mental patterns that contribute to illness: fear and anger. Anger looks like impatience, irritation, frustration, criticism, resentment, jealousy, or bitterness. Hay believes these feelings flow through our veins like poison and can manifest themselves in physical symptoms. Fear could be tension, anxiety, worry, nervousness, doubt, insecurity, or unworthiness. By replacing fear with faith we create healthier bodies. Hay has made connections between every specific ache and pain in the human body with an emotional origin. She suggests replacing the negative feelings with positive inner messaging.
Hay uses the example of breast cysts, lumps or mastitis to illustrate how she believes our emotions and our physical well-being are connected. She believes these physical symptoms represent a refusal to nourish oneself and result from putting everyone else first. Ways these symptoms are brought on could include engaging in over-mothering, overprotection, and overbearing attitudes. Hay goes on to provide ways to ward off these physical manifestations of emotional strain. She suggests replacing these behaviors with a mantra: “I am important. I count. I now care and nourish myself with love and with joy. I allow others to be who they are.” Another physical manifestation of emotional strain that Hay discusses involves difficult sleep patterns such as snoring. She suggests there is a connection between snoring and a stubborn refusal to let go of old patterns of behavior. To treat a snoring problem she suggests this mantra: “I release all feelings that are not loving and joyful. I move from the past into the new bright and vital.”
Hay’s work is another example of the positive impact that can result when we exchange negative, harmful thought processes and behaviors for positive, loving belief statements about ourselves and the world around us. What we think, what we say, and how we feel creates our reality. When we blame others for our negative experiences we are giving away our power to be in control of our thought processes. In our discussions about neuroplasticity we learned that we have the power to change our brain patterns. To embrace that power to change our brain patterns involves mindfulness, one of the core elements of self-compassion. Mindfulness keeps us in the present moment and keeps us aware of any negative thinking our brain may default to. Instead, we approach our challenges and suffering with loving hearts, showing kindness and care for ourselves and for others.
An important element in this process of becoming a more compassionate person is letting go of the past. We tend to replay and ruminate over negative experiences that have happened in the past. Letting go of the what happened yesterday, last year, or ten years ago is the first step in self-forgiveness and practicing compassion for yourself. Trust in the power of self-affirmations. The affirmations you choose should be positive and in the present tense. We know that whatever our brain focuses on increases in importance in our mind. This is why when we focus on problems they start to feel insurmountable.
Writing down your thoughts about these new practices would make a perfect journal entry for this week. And then from there, writing down your mantra(s) each day will help you cement this thinking and that writing will become a reference you can go back to over time.
In closing this week I would leave you with my favorite Louise Hay quote for you to use as your first mantra. It is “In the infinity of life where I am, all is perfect, whole, and complete.”