“My willingness to forgive begins my healing process. I allow the love from my own heart to wash through me cleansing and healing every part of my body. I know I am worth healing.”
“There is a rhythm and flow to life and I am part of it. Life supports me and brings me only good and positive experiences.”
“The point of power is always in the present moment. The past is over and done and has no power over me. I am in charge. I am safe and I am free.”
It is somewhere mid 2018 and I am lying in the grass in my garden letting the words of Louise Hay wash over me, as I relax and unwind. This is my “affirmation time”, my “reprogramming time” and I take it as seriously as I take every other aspect of my healing journey. There are years we remember for what they have given us, and there are years we remember for what they have taught us. 2018 was a big teacher for me. It grew me in a lot of ways I didn’t expect, showing me the world was more detailed and complex than I had imagined. I have a folder titled “healing” in Photos on my laptop filled with pictures of me juicing celery, reading nutrition and wellness books, running, teaching, and doing all manner of wholesome activities, most of which took place in 2018. I remember a version of me that was proud of that year, of what I had changed, of what I had accomplished. I remember fondly thinking that it would be the beginning of the rest of my life. Now, when I look back on 2018 and the time that followed it, I wonder if in fact it had just laid the groundwork for what would become my undoing.
Discovering a philosophy or a paradigm that radically shifts your life is not something you can predict or sign up for. Like first love, it startles you completely, sweeping you up in its enchanting song, making you forget parts of yourself and forcing you to reassess all that you had previously known to be true. For me that philosophy, or first “love”, came in the form of a book that a friend lent me towards the end of University called “You Can Heal Your Life”. The author was a woman named Louise Hay, a speaker and new age guru who was big in the 90s and who had apparently made a huge name for herself in self-help. At the time I mostly just read fiction, so I wasn’t familiar with either the book or the author, and thus had no expectations of any kind going into it. I definitely was not anticipating a shift in perspective or an awakening of any sort. In fact, I recall thinking that the book title was kind of cheesy and the cover really outdated. And yet, I still decided to read it in order to honour my friend and her recommendation. It did not take long for me to realize that what I held in my hand was much more profound than I could have foreseen, and that it would have a lasting, transformative, effect on me.
YCHYL is set up kind of like a therapy session, wherein, using Hay’s theories and guided by the author, you identify your problem, analyze where it stems from, and begin to solve it step by step. Each chapter starts with an affirmation that is meant to put you in the frame of mind of abundance (In the infinity of life where I am all is perfect whole and complete…), followed by a deep look into a particular thematic relevant to the philosophy, and accompanied by practical advice and exercises, such as: “if you believe it, it seems true” (wherein you learn that whatever you send about mentally or verbally comes back in like form) and “ each moment is a new beginning” (wherein you learn that the point of power is always in the present moment). It is a very hands-on self-help book, perhaps one of the first of its kind. The core belief behind YCHYL is that we are each responsible for our own experiences. In Hay’s doctrine, our thoughts and beliefs about life create our experiences. If we think positive thoughts, we will have positive experiences, if we think negative thoughts then that is the reality we will bring about. Basically, what we give out, we receive. Thus, by learning to change our thoughts, we can begin to change our futures, so to speak. Depending on what school of thought you abide by, this either goes without saying for you, (manifestation, anyone?) or deeply challenges your perception of God. For me, this philosophy was like the piece of the puzzle I felt like I had always been missing. Reading it for the first time, was like finally understanding how the universe works.
If you know me, you know that I am no stranger to the world of energy and metaphysics. I almost studied Philosophy in University and spent the better part of my adolescence being schooled in the workings of Reiki, Homeopathy, and EFT. I always believed that there was “more” out there, more than what they were teaching us in school, more than mainstream media covered (for sure), generally a certain degree of “the Unseen”. But reading YCHYL was the first time I became aware that I could also be a part of that more. That, all alone, I could begin to change the course of my life (with no help from gurus, shamans, doctors or sheikhs). Through Hay’s guidance I learned about the power of the subconscious mind and our ingrained belief patterns and began to examine my life and my experiences through the lens of shoulds and coulds that I had absorbed/developed for myself. My aim for following this prescription manual, embarrassed as I am to admit this now, was mostly a physical one. I had been suffering from migraines for years and had tried everything under the sun to get rid of them, except look to myself as being the source of the problem. When I came across the “body” chapter of the book, a list of diseases and their probable mental causes extracted from Hay’s Heal Your Body, I immediately resonated with the premise and began following her treatment method of reciting certain affirmations to release the belief at fault. Thus, my migraines became translated to a “dislike of being driven” or “resisting the flow of life” and I took to repeating the affirmation “I relax into the flow of life and let life provide all that I need easily and comfortably. Life is for me,” as often as I could to begin healing them. I remember a point in time in which I’d scrawled encouraging affirmations in lipstick on my mirror and covered my room with post-its of whatever I was working on “releasing” that week. I can’t say that it really helped, but it felt like I was shifting something.
YCHYL opened up a whole world of self-help and therapeutics for me. Up until that point I had had a pretty basic and traditional belief in God and how He manifests. I believed God was good, I believed in prayer, I believed we must open our hearts to others (especially if they are in need), I believed in some parts of my religion (but not all of them). I did not believe that there was any kind of universal order as to who gets what and why some people end up with more opportunities and amenities than others. A divine one, maybe, but not some kind of energetic one that we can all access. I can’t remember if I believed in fate. After YCHYL I began asking more pointed questions. I discovered Oprah, Joe Dispenza, Abraham Hicks and a bunch of other writers, speakers, and modern day “spiritualists” who talked a lot about this phenomenon of connecting to a universal power (whatever you may call it) in order to access your divine truth and the life that came with it and how we are all interconnected and stuff (I’m obviously paraphrasing this part, but loosely they all come back to something like this). I took a homeopathy course (or did the foundation year of one to be more precise). I began meditating more seriously. I read up on nutrition, herbs, and Ayurveda. I prayed, more consistently. I only ate organic. I journaled and attempted to meet my “shadow self”. I volunteered. Basically, I did everything I could think of or had come across to discover myself and what I was here to do or how I could best live my brief time on this earth, in order to honour the gift that God had given me [1]. I think I was searching for answers as to what the “right” path in life is, or how I was “supposed” to be living.
I can’t deny that the more I read and listened the more confused I became. Was my way to a more holistic, fulfilled, “divine” version of myself through meditation and prayer or was it through healthy eating and clean living and working with the cycles of nature? Was I supposed to be visualizing and affirming or going to zikr and saying awrad? Did I need to be tracking my cycle and getting in touch with the Divine Feminine? If God was the authority, and God was showing me all of these different ways and paths, did that mean that there was no “one” path? And if so, how then was I to know which one was “right” for me? After all of this, might it not really matter if I had a shower filter?
For some of you reading this, these questions and concerns may seem really trivial or even funny. First world problems, or whatever. But for me, at the time, it felt urgent that I figure this out. It felt like every new piece of knowledge was a gift and that if I didn’t implement it right away, I was somehow ungrateful or negligent. I was finally getting to closer to figuring out what we are here for and I wanted an answer pronto. Additionally, In the background, I was also developing some minor health inconveniences (severe gut problems, hormonal issues, horrific cystic acne) that made the decision on where to direct my energy seem of even more importance. If I wanted to be like those actualized wholesome ‘made it’ individuals, I needed to find my way. Now.
After I got sick[2], though, I became completely disillusioned with everything I had learned and discovered through my reading and research. I had never dedicated more of my life to being present, sending out good energy, working on my body, mind, and soul, and yet somehow, I had still wound up in the hospital clinging to the last dredges of life, not really wanting to make it through. Louise Hay (and co.) had failed me. There wasn’t some kind of magical link to a universal power that makes your life wondrous and easy. Your heart does not always tell you what is happening. You can affirm and forgive and let go as much as you want to, but that doesn’t mean it is going to happen for you (you can also do the complete opposite and give up and tel3ani el donia and still get “saved”). And worst of all, you can eat healthy, recharge, exercise, meditate, whatever the fuck, and still get sick. There is no secret formula or universal law to life.
For the longest time I was bitter. I didn’t understand what I had done wrong. If God had led me down this path, how had He also let it fail me so miserably? If I was “supposed” to discover this inner world and what we can “supposedly” accomplish mentally and physically, how had things gone so wrong for me? What was real about all of this, and what wasn’t? I have tried—so many times I’ve lost count—to reconstruct the happenings that led to my falling sick and I just could not get Louise Hay’s voice out of my mind “what you give out, you receive”. Had I given this out? Was that the energy I was sending out? Was there a part of me that wanted to be unwell? Was it all my fault?
I would be lying if I said there wasn’t a small part of me that still believes I could have handled things better. That I should have been more grounded and less superstitious. That I could somehow have avoided all of this. But I think I’m coming to the conclusion that things just happen. Wildfires devour whole villages. Seemingly healthy people get cancer. Children die of unexpected asthma attacks. Regular broads catch common-ass viruses that inflame the myelin sheath that leads to their brain. What matters, I believe, is how you deal with it. No, I’m not trying to be inspirational here, I am trying to be real: if you give things too much meaning, you lose yourself. Let it serve as a lesson, but don’t let it eat you up.
Even though I thought I would, I have not discarded all of Louise Hay’s teachings. I still believe that what you think matters and that it is important to be aware of your thoughts. I don’t think your thoughts are sending out secret vibrations out into the universe for bad or good stuff to happen to you. I still like to remind myself that the present moment can always be a moment of change. I don’t think that you can magically undo all of your trauma through talk therapy and affirmations and get your eyesight back (siehe You Can Heal Your Life page 45). I still believe that working on yourself is the best way to change outside circumstances…but I no longer believe that’s the only way.
If you are also lost in all you are hearing or all you are reading, my only words of wisdom are “have faith”. I don’t necessarily think it will all make sense at some point and I’m not so dumb as to tell you to just “trust your gut” (because your gut can sometimes be really quiet). But, I do think that at some point, in some way, maybe not always (but sometimes), something will click for you. And those are the moments that you have to hold on to, remember, and repeat.
In recent days I have been doing more yoga than I have in years and something about coming back to the body has helped me a lot with my remaining existential questions. Giving the mind something to focus on, putting my attention on breathing, pushing through, feels somehow a mini version of what life is like: pressure but make it controllable. It’s also something you I grasp on to. I don’t know, maybe different things work for us at different moments in your life. Maybe confusion is a part of the game. If you have any insights on healing your life, please feel free to share. I’m still figuring it out.
Half-confusedly yours,
Girl With One Earring
[1] Disclaimer: I do not want to give the false impression that all of these therapies, sciences, and practices are equally important/true, equally strong, or equally valuable. These are just some of the ones I got into in that time period.
[2] Read previous blog entries for more details, especially “gut feelings”.
