Heal Your Body

I genuinely don't understand why this book has so many good reviews. It's an ableist waste of a tree and essentially puts the blame on the people who have these conditions.
I can't for the life of me understand how this book was published or why do many people swear by it.
A bit of background, I've been chronically ill for my entire life, as well as physically disabled. This is because of a type of arthritis that I was diagnosed with at 9 months of age.
Autoimmune disease runs in my mother's side of the family, so my mom wasn't surprised when I was born and had health issues.
This book reminded me why I tend to avoid medical self-help books.
We start out the book finding out a little about the author. She claims to have cured her cancer show more with the power of thought. She talks about how she was raped at the age of 5, so it was really no surprise that she had manifested cervical cancer.
Or--and this is just a thought--maybe, Ms. Hay, you being assaulted caused you to develop cervical cancer. Starting intimacy like that at a young age is a risk factor, and since it wasn't consensual, perhaps it wasn't resentment over it that caused the cancer but perhaps the fact that you were so young and someone took advantage of you.
Some of the "probable causes" in this book were also incredibly ableist. Particularly the parts about what could possibly cause birth defects, cancer, cerebral palsy, cystic fibrosis, and muscular dystrophy.
A probable cause for muscular dystrophy is the phrase "It's not worth growing up."
This is essentially blaming people with MD for their own disability. I shouldn't have to explain why this is such a problem.
This book reinforces ableist attitudes towards disabled people, which can include but aren't limited to, believing that we're giving up if we use mobility aids (especially wheelchairs), believing that we aren't trying enough, believing that we aren't better yet because we aren't positive enough.
It's a harmful book with a harmful message.
Positive thoughts don't cure cancer, AIDS/HIV, or rabies. In fact, rabies has no cure if untreated. If it's untreated, it is 100% fatal.
According to this book, cancer could be caused by "deep hurt, long standing resentment, deep secret or grief eating away at the self, carrying hatreds, and thoughts like 'what's the use?'."
I have a family member who passed away from cancer. My uncle ended up developing colon cancer due to having ulcerative colitis. It had nothing to do with his attitude or anything like that. He was a very chill, down to earth man, whom I never saw get upset or even mad. I'm sure he did, but that's just because he was human.
Cerebral palsy could be caused by "a need to unite the family in an action of love."
Cystic fibrosis could possibly be caused by "a thick belief that life won't work for you and thoughts like 'poor me'".
Cystic fibrosis isn't caused by thought. Nor is it healed by positive thought. Let's take, for example, Claire Wineland. She had a YouTube channel and was always spreading positivity. She wasn't afraid of death and always had a positive attitude. She still had cystic fibrosis. But, ultimately, she still passed away from complications of a double lung transplant that she was getting to help her cystic fibrosis. She was always positive, but she still had cystic fibrosis.
And I already went over the probable cause of muscular dystrophy.
I don't see how this book could make anyone with existing medical issues feel better. On the contrary, I feel like this book would only serve to make people feel worse. To make them feel guilty.
It's already very common for a lot of us to feel like burdens to our friends and family. It's also very common for us to feel a lot of guilt regarding our illnesses.
According to this book, I developed arthritis as an infant because I felt unloved, was critical, and had resentment. None of which are true.
My chronic illnesses will not be cured by thought. My bone erosions will not be healed because I decided to feel happiness. My disability will not go away because I choose joy. It will always be there.
This book is nothing but BS, and I will always believe that. I got nothing positive out of reading this book.
I also very well expected it to be bad, like most health self-help books I hesitate to read, for good reason. However, I wasn't expecting it to be as bad as it was.
No, it is not an unborn child's fault they have birth defects or any other condition that appears at birth. It is not a child's fault if they have chronic health issues.
This just places the blame on them, which I also feel could lead to even more mistreatment and abuse of disabled and/or chronically ill children if read by the wrong person.
I wouldn't recommend this book to anyone.
And, if I could, I would rate this 0 stars. show less

I think that this is a very useful little book. Self-harming thoughts create pain, and with this book (or even a web search based on what it says in it, but it’s not like it’s an expensive book), you can decode what self-harming thoughts your body is reacting to. Healing these patterns is, I think, a process, but it’s nice to know where you stand. Makes the world make sense, at least, even if sometimes you still have guck coming up from your past.

Of course, you don’t talk to people about Louise Hay, you know—lol. For most people, (not all, but most), being presented with a different or “opposite” viewpoint or alternative interpretation can be very unsettling. It can even come across as unsafe, or like an attack. (Even show more essentially new age type people can be like this, just like all other groups that betray their values, in one way or another.) This is where I’d think about Byron Katie. Louise gives what Katie would call ‘turnarounds’, alternate interpretations, briefly, suddenly, much like Leo (the actualized.org guy) who in one of his videos bluntly gives maybe two to four alternate interpretations for many many different questions in life, just to prove it can be done. Leo I guess is intentionally blunt—you take this medicine whether it tastes good or not, says Simon Hunt, the hero of “Secrets of a Summer Night”, a penny romance, to the girl—but I think Louise is brief purely for brevity, because it’s less complicated, but it might come across as blunt, you know. Your idea: health problem X is (medico-babble, it’s random), versus the sudden turn-around, it’s your self-harming thought Y (so the power is in you…. eating away at you! 😸). Some people would reject that, obviously, because that’s not what they think. Katie in her book—not primarily about health—talks about slowly getting to a turn-around, though, for example, considering whether your current belief causes you stress, etc. (Apparently in Jewish Talmud debate they have a phrase called ‘truth or peace’, which I think is meant to be one of those unanswerable questions. Which is more important? Does one lead to another? Can you ever have both? Can you ever have only one…. Kinda with scientism you go, Truth, BAM! and there’s an explosion, and you refuse to talk about it after that, and I think there’s a particular kind of laziness in that).

Anyway, it’s been a long time since I couldn’t decide between prosperity and acceptance—I’ve since come to find that acceptance is more important than prosperity, and even the “hard topics” of philosophy and learning are more important than prosperity…. (Partly I think I’m right, beyond a certain point; partly I think people differ.) But this is still a very useful little book, and it can be nice to learn about health and try to attain perfect health instead of passable health (and I think it’s fair to say I have the latter and not the former—I’m not usually sick, so to speak, but that’s not the same as perfect health). And I think it’s fair to say that health, despite often being lumped in together with wealth, is its own special kind of prosperity. “Skin for skin…. A man will give all he has for his own life.” (Job 2:4). (And if babes can speak the truth, so too can powerful and wise spiritual beings with slightly dramatic priority problems, lol.)

N.B. Oh, and I even think this is a better book than “Heal Your Life”, the signature Louise book, because it has much more unity and consistency, even though the longer book has much more information, in fact containing the text of this whole book. I don’t often read books of less than a hundred pages, it feels like they’re too short to compare to the others—but there are exceptions. This book for me is a “practical” book, (if the word has meaning); such books are about certain basic topics about more or less unavoidable things, not uncommonly in a slightly reference-y format, like this very very short reference…. I don’t know. The longer book is more standard intellectual-not-“practical” or reference book, spiritual psychology in general instead of health/practical/general mind-body healing…. But then you have to stop the flow of an “ordinary” book to read something quite different. Something which is really properly I think, its own book, and a better book. Anyway. show less

In Heal your body, Louise Hay write about psychosomatic illness and how you can use your thought processes to affect health in disease. The book begins with Hay’s experiences and how each time she healed herself of major illness and other physical problems. She then lists many common problems and complaints from blackheads and deafness to gangrene and cancer, listing the cause of the illness and the new patterns of thought that will reverse the illness. So, if you have jaundice, it is because you have internal and external prejudice along with unbalanced reason. To cure this, say and believe that “I will have tolerance and compassion and love for all people, myself included.”

I truly believe that the mind can affect how we feel show more and can make many physical illnesses better or worse. In the many books by John E. Sarno on mind-body disorders, he is careful to say that first, medical examinations must be made and physical problems that exist be treated before addressing psychosomatic illness. If there is no physical cause, we treat the mind. And sometimes we treat both the physical and the mental at the same time, taking the reflux medicine and treating the stress and rage that may cause the reflux in the first place. Hay violates this principle by not recommending this very important step, taking chances with the health of her readers.

Even though her advice can be used along with traditional medical treatment, I hesitate to recommend this book because of her disregard for the safety and well being of her readers. Use with extreme caution. show less

Eye-opening and soul-healing. I could not get through this book with a dry eye. There is truth in how we manifest dis-ease in our bodies through our thoughts.

Louise L. Hay, a long-time advocate of healing the body through mental thought patterns, based on the theory of metaphysical causations, says, "We've learned that for every effect in our lives, there's a thought pattern that precedes and maintains it". This 86-page book, in its 72nd+ printing, presents a compelling explanation of the mind-body connection in the first few pages; this is followed by 70 pages of an alphabetical list of ailments/conditions, the probable mental cause for each and a suggested "new thought pattern". The book closes with a section on spinal misalignments and ending comments.

This book is a good quick-reference of many physical conditions and suggestions for improving one's mental processes to help healing, even show more if one is using medications and the services of physicians. show less

Basically a book of Affirmations for any type of illness which is just another power of alternative medicine and control. Interesting health concept and book.

I use this book daily, both in my massage business and my personal life. It has helped me with the connections between mind, body and soul.