Louise Hay
Bestselling self-help author who claimed to have cured her own cancer through positive thinking
LOUISE HAY, who has died aged 90, was the doyenne of the modern self-help industry; claiming to have cured herself of cancer in the 1970s through the power of positive thinking, she promulgated the same technique as a means of dealing with every affliction from bereavement to bunions in a series of bestselling books, and founded a publishing empire worth several million dollars.
The key to her philosophy was the idea that every illness could be linked to a specific emotional deficiency, and that everybody has the power to improve their own health by cleansing themselves of negative emotions. Venereal disease, for example, can only be contracted by those who suffer from sexual guilt: “It comes from a feeling, often subconscious, that it is not right to express ourselves sexually.”
“We create every illness in our body … Releasing resentment will dissolve even cancer,” she declared in her first full-length book, You Can Heal Your Life (1984). Strokes were caused by “insecurity, lack of self-expression, not being allowed to cry,” osteoporosis by “feeling there is no support left in life,” and haemorrhoids by “fear of deadlines”; one made oneself better by frequent repetition, preferably in front of a mirror, of affirming mantras such as “I release all that is unlike love and joy in my mind” or “There is time and space for everything I want to do.”
Louise Hay declared that she simply “channelled” her medical expertise as she wrote rather than carried out research, but her books, perhaps because they chimed with the American fetish for personal responsibility, were hugely popular. You Can Heal Your Life has sold 50 million copies worldwide, making it one of the biggest sellers of all time.
Among her celebrity admirers were the Body Shop founder Anita Roddick, who quoted her in a guide to setting up small businesses, and the Spice Girl Geri Halliwell, who claimed that her success was due to having taken Louise Hay’s advice to write out a “cosmic shopping list”, setting out the goals she wanted to achieve in life.
To her detractors Louise Hay was somebody who conned the gullible with New Age mumbo-jumbo; more seriously, members of the medical profession frequently expressed concern that people might use her books as a substitute for conventional healthcare, or blame themselves if they failed to cure their own illnesses through affirmative thinking. John
Diamond, the author of C: Because
Cowards Get Cancer Too, declared that the idea that people died prematurely “because there was too much negativity surrounding them is a filthy suggestion”.
Louise Hay always insisted that her readers should consult their doctors in addition to following her advice; when a Daily Telegraph interviewer suggested that this meant she had limited faith in her own techniques, she responded: “Not at all. I just don’t think other people would necessarily give it 100 per cent, the way I did.” Whatever the truth of her claims to have beaten cancer, she had some claim to be a genuine inspiration in the way she came to terms with the traumas of her early life.
She was born on October 8 1926, probably out of wedlock, into a poor family in Los Angeles; her birth name was Helen. After her mother remarried she was beaten and sexually abused by her stepfather, and raped by a neighbour when she was five. She dropped out of high school and became pregnant at 15, giving the baby girl up for adoption.
She worked at various menial jobs in Chicago before moving to New York and working as a fashion model, changing her name to Louise. In 1954 she married Andrew Hay, an English businessman, and enjoyed a blissful life in high society until he left her after 14 years of marriage for the socialite Sharman Douglas.
In the early 1970s she agreed to accompany a friend to a meeting at the First Church of Religious Science in Manhattan; the friend did not turn up, but Louise Hay was fascinated by what she heard and began to study the New Thought teachings of the movement’s founder, Ernest Holmes. She became a “minister” of the Church, holding meetings in which she proclaimed the power of the mind over the body, and studied with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi in Iowa.
In her version of the story, she regarded a diagnosis of vaginal cancer as an “opportunity to prove to myself that what I was teaching worked”. She told her doctors to wait six months before starting conventional treatment, and, deciding that the location of her cancer was attributable to resentment of those who had assaulted her in her youth, she“began to have compassion for their pain and the blame slowly began to dissolve”. With the help of a therapist she “expressed all the old, bottled-up anger by beating pillows and howling with rage” and a nutritionist detoxified her body; she was unsurprised when doctors told her the cancer had gone.
With money from her divorce settlement she self-published a pamphlet,
Heal Your Body, which she expanded into the book You
Can Heal Your Life in 1984. It made little impact until 1988, when it entered the bestseller lists after she appeared on the Phil Donahue and Oprah Winfrey television talk shows to discuss her work with HIV and Aids patients.
In 1985 she had begun to hold spiritual counselling sessions for small groups of Aids sufferers at her home in Los Angeles, and soon the weekly “Hay Rides”, as the events were christened, were being held in large venues, attracting huge numbers of attendees to partake in affirmative chanting, meditation, singing, and physical healing techniques such as Reiki.
Although some doctors complained that she sowed false hopes of recovery among the seriously ill, others admitted that she helped to alleviate much suffering, and her early adoption of the cause at a time when Aids patients were stigmatised – she often presided at the funerals of sufferers because, as she pointed out, “religions wouldn’t touch them” – was certainly admirable. In 1988 she received an award from the Aids Hospice Foundation alongside Elizabeth Taylor, and remained a heroine of America’s gay communities.
She ran Hay House, her publishing company, somewhat amateurishly until she took on an accountant, Reid Tracy, who became her business partner and transformed it into a behemoth of New Age publishing, with Deepak Chopra, Wayne Dyer and even the Dalai Lama among its authors, and an immensely profitable sideline in meditation tapes, uplifting desk calendars and colouring books.
Latterly she founded the I Can Do It! conferences, which saw Hay House authors tour America and Britain dispensing the gospel of self-love; she brushed off criticism that the frenetic revivalist atmosphere of these events and their emphasis on identifying the causes of unhappiness had encouraged some attendees to invent false memories of abuse. In 1986 she founded the Hay Foundation, which gives aid to people in difficult circumstances.
Interviewing her for The Daily Telegraph in 2007, Judith Woods described her as “an 80-year-old vision, with golden sugar-spun hair, and a pert, Disney-princess nose she certainly wasn’t born with” who “looks like Joan Rivers’s prettier younger sister”, and pointed out that her penchant for plastic surgery was hard to reconcile with her exhortations to women to love their bodies.
Among her many other books were A Garden of Thoughts: My Affirmation Journal (1989), Living Perfect Love: Empowering Rituals for Women (1996), a self-help book for children, I Think, I Am! (2008) and You Can Heal Your Heart: Finding Peace After a Break-up, Divorce or Death (2014).
Louise Hay enjoyed some romances after her divorce but no enduring relationships. She lived in a penthouse near San Diego – “feng shuied to perfection”, according to one interviewer – and drove a Rolls-royce for some years, but otherwise lived modestly. Her hobbies were painting and gardening, and she remained fit and healthy into old age, rising at 5.30am for a daily walk.
Louise Hay, born October 8 1926, died August 30 2017