On Sunday I met Louise Hay. For anyone unfamiliar with this true gem of a human, she’s the author of You Can Heal Your Life, which has sold more than 50 million copies! And she owns Hay House, which publishes the Big Gurus (Deepak Chopra, Wayne Dyer, Doreen Virtue etc).
I’ll be writing more about the very particular lesson she taught me, soon, for Sunday Life. It caught me off guard and I got very teary because her lesson spoke straight to my struggle right now. She knew this and sat with me for an hour, smiling at me as I tried my usual tricks for explaining myself away (words, words, words!).
But in the meantime I thought I’d share some other little insights I gleaned. Because she shared many. Today I read her new book You Can Create An Exceptional Life, which goes into detail about how she runs her life.
Louise is about to turn 85. She healed herself of cancer many years ago and has gone on to live an extraordinary life. She’s as upright and fit as a 40-year-old. Slim, tall, a vibrant, natural face and a playful energy. She’d just got off an international flight and has been presenting and signing books for days. And yet she said she felt great. So her tips ‘n tricks for a well life are worth sharing:
1. Eat protein and vegetables. We sat and she ate breakfast. This is what she ate: peppermint tea, scrambled eggs, 3 sausages and some prunes. She ate the prunes with the sausage. Nice. As a rule, she follows the Westin A Price diet (as do I). Not strictly (ditto). So no sugar or gluten, limited grains, plenty of natural fats and a lot of veggies. Like me (via my Integrative Nutrition studies) she’s tried many different eating approaches and has settled on WAP principles.
2. You don’t need things. When she sat down I got rid of the clutter on the table. “We need less stuff,” she said, in a broad way. “Less clothes…I go shopping and I think, I don’t need this!” I instantly wanted to hug her. It’s been reported that while she’s a very wealthy woman, she lives minimally. She drives a Smart Car. And grows her own veggies.
3. Don’t worry whether you can do it…. Louise believes life brought her what she needed, as she needed it. “Life handed me AIDS,” she says referring to the fact she rose to fame from her work with AIDs victims in the 80s. “I’m just fascinated. How did this happen to me?” She’s learned to trust that life steers things. She’s a conduit. I find this wonderfully comforting. And intuitively right.
4. Learn about other people’s childhoods. You heal yourself when you forgive. And you forgive by imagining the “other” as a child and finding out what life was like for them as a kid. She researched her parents childhoods to forgive them for her violent childhood.
5. Answer the phone and open the mail. She says this a bit. And what she means is, don’t look for outcomes or success. Simply go about your day, doing your job and watch what happens next. Don’t fret. She also says the right things come slowly. Indeed!
6. The first hour of your day is crucial. She starts by thanking her bed for the sleep (!), stretches, has tea, then goes back to bed to read. Because she likes it. She even made a great bedhead so she can be at the best angle to read.
7. And some thyroid advice: “Look in the mirror and ask (your sick thyroid), ‘how can I love you back to life’?” As soon as she said this, I didn’t understand, but I certainly felt, it to make sense. Thyroid problems she said, after she sat quietly in thought for a bit, are all about creativity being blocked. She then explained that many women feel torn up by the pressure to be all things. And their creative self gets blocked.
I was truly touched by Louise’s care and humility. She’s a true healer, walks her talk, and her energy was clean and bright. On this journey I’ve been on chatting to different self-helpers, this is not as common as you might like to believe. Trust me.
Have you read Louise Hay’s stuff? Been touched by it?
