A healing life: Louise Hay to appear in Encinitas to introduce DVD about career

By: GARY WARTH - Staff Writer | Thursday, January 3, 2008 8:16 PM PST ∞

Writer and publisher Louise Hay has been inspiring people to believe in themselves for decades. In a new DVD about her life, the founder of Carlsbad-based Hay House Inc. reveals how she came to believe in herself.

"I had a strong belief, and when you have a strong belief, you can do anything," Hay said in the DVD, "You Can Heal Your Life."

Hay was talking about her battle with cancer, which she said she believes was related to childhood sexual abuse, another trauma she openly discusses in the documentary.

At 82, Hay has retired from day-to-day management of the publishing company she founded in 1984 and makes few public appearances. Only two are scheduled this year, with one at 7 p.m. Jan. 11 at the Seaside Center for Spiritual Living in Encinitas. She also is scheduled to appear Jan. 9 at the Unity Center in San Diego.

In Encinitas, Hay is scheduled to attend a 6 p.m. reception before introducing "You Can Heal Your Life," which will be shown that evening.

Much of the film features Hay and others speaking about the self-healing abilities she said are possible.

"Most of us have learned to view our thoughts as a reflection of the outside world, a reflection of what's happening to us, but what if that's not how the universe works?" she says in the documentary. "What if with every thought you think, you're actually creating your universe?"

Using herself as an example, Hay told of how her parents divorced when she was 18 months old. Hay described her mother's new husband as "a brutalizer" who for the next 10 years made her life miserable.

"There was a lot of physical abuse and sexual abuse," she said in the documentary.

Hay said she was raped as a child by a neighbor, who was sentenced to 16 years for the crime, and beaten and raped by her stepfather. She left home at 15, became pregnant and found a couple to raise the child, then persuaded her mother to leave her husband. Hay later moved to Chicago and then to New York, where she worked as showroom model and was married for 18 years to "an upper-class Englishman." After her divorce, Hay said, she felt like a failure who could not do anything right.

"About five years later I discovered the Church of Religious Science, which is where I heard if you change your thinking, you can change your life," she said. "I was a high-school dropout who never studied anything, and suddenly I became fascinated with this thing."

After three years of study, Hay became a licensed practitioner within the church, meaning she could teach others. She kept a log of her clients, and at a friend's suggestion, she self-published it as the 12-page "Heal Your Body: The Mental Causes for Physical Illnesses and the Metaphysical Ways to Overcome Them" in 1976.

"I really believed that the big boys, as we called them, would not publish the book, and if they did they probably would want to change it, because my ideas at that time were very radical," she said. "Your thinking can change your life, and I wanted to say it the way I wanted to say it, and I didn't want a word of it changed. So I printed it myself."

Hay printed 5,000 books and sent free copies and order forms to churches. Two years later, she had sold them all.

In the 1970s, Hay said she was diagnosed with vaginal cancer and was healed in part because of a regimen that included self-affirmations. In the documentary, Hay said "one of the mental causes of cancer is deep resentment that is held very strong until it literally eats away at your body."

"I said to myself, 'You're being given an opportunity to practice what you're teaching,'" she said. "'You're telling people that they can heal anything if you're willing to do the work, and now it's your turn.'"

Hay started her publishing company from her Santa Monica home, which she shared with her mother. Her second book was selling poorly before Hay was featured on Phil Donahue and Oprah Winfrey's TV shows for her work with the Hay Ride, a weekly meeting for AIDS patients that had grown from a living room gathering to 800 people.

Her book went from obscurity to 13 weeks on the best-seller list.

"It's never been the same since," she said. "Life just exploded out, and the rest is history."

As of 2007, "You Can Heal Your Life" has sold more than 35 million copies and been published in 29 languages. Hay House publishes about 350 books and 300 audiotapes by more than 200 authors and is one of the fastest-growing self-help publishers in the world.

"To me, I think enlightenment is letting go of all the things that are not benefiting us in life or are barriers to us in life," she said about her philosophy. "What you think and what you believe is what will come true for you. Your thoughts create your life. It's that simple."

Contact staff writer Gary Warth at (760) 740-5410 or gwarth@nctimes.com.

Who: Louise Hay, author and Hay House Inc. founder

Where: Seaside Center for Spiritual Living, 1613 Lake Drive, Encinitas

When: 7 p.m. Jan. 11

Cost: $15 in advance, $20 day of event. $50 for reserved seat and 6 p.m. reception with Hay

Tickets available online at wahzee.com, soulscapeonline.com or at Charmed on Cedros in Solana Beach.

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