Other early branches include Unity Church and the Church of Divine Science. The branch that specifically gave us Louise Hays calls itself Religious Science. The many and varied ramifications of this peculiarly American religious movement make it look more like a forest than a tree, and because this forest has thrived in the suburbs of Christianity, its sheer scope and force is seldom fully recognized. Instead, I want to place Louise Hay within the family tree of religious science. It’s not my purpose here to catalog the immense damage done by “think positive-you can do it” trumpery Barbara Ehrenreich already did that job, and did it brilliantly, in 2009’s Bright-sided. Hay included this list in her 1984 breakout book, You Can Heal Your Life, which ultimately sold more than 35 million copies after her work with AIDS patients in LA-including the notorious Hayrides-won her celebrity via the Oprah and Donahue shows. Although no medical professional could ever be found to corroborate her story, she maintained all her life that she had cured her own cervical cancer, which she attributed to excess anger on account of childhood sexual abuse, by forgiving herself.īased on this whopper, Hay went on to compile her famous list of ailments and their probable sources in wrong attitudes so that others could likewise triumph over their mortal foes. If you have Alzheimer’s, that’s probably because you refuse to “accept life as it is.” If you have leprosy, it’s because of your “inability to handle life at all.” Anorectal bleeding? That must be your “anger and frustration” talking. Hay had what every successful fraudster needs, which is the capacity to lie boldly and never turn back. Without a Louise Hay-and I suppose without an Oprah Winfrey-there would be no Rhonda Byrne ( The Secret-30 million copies and counting). For example, the practice of writing out and reciting a set of sunny “affirmations,” in the expectation that doing so will somehow transform your life, owes its ubiquity to Louise Hay. In a perceptive 2008 profile for the New York Times Magazine, Mark Oppenheimer wrote that we all “live in Louise Hay’s world,” though we may not know it. Wayne Dyer, Suze Orman, Tavis Smiley, Deepak Chopra, and Marianne Williamson: all of these were first published under the Hay House imprint. Out of respect for friends and lovers among those frightened young men, I never said what I thought then and still think now: i.e., what a load of cruel bullshit she peddles to people who deserve better.ĪIDS made Louise Hay fabulously rich, in part because she was her own publisher and later the publisher of other “name it and claim it” types who likewise rose to wealth and fame thanks in part to the Hay touch. The news of Louise Hay’s death took me right back to the mid-1980s and the worst of the AIDS crisis, when her books and tapes were everywhere in the homes and hospital rooms of the sick and dying.
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