Out of the work I was doing, I was inspired to put together the little book "Heal Your Body", which began as a simple list of metaphysical causations for physical illnesses in the body. I began to lecture and travel and hold small classes.
Then one day I was diagnosed with cervical cancer. With my background of being raped at five and having been a battered child, it was no wonder I manifested cancer in the Vaginal area.
Like anyone else who's just been told they have cancer, I went into total panic. Yet because of all my work with clients, I knew that mental healing worked, and here I was being given a chance to prove it to myself. After all, I'd written the book on mental patterns, and I knew that cancer was a dis-ease of deep resentment that has been held for a long time until it literally eats away at the body. I had been refusing to be willing to dissolve all the anger and resentment at “them” over my childhood. There was no time to waste; I had a lot of work to do.
The word incurable, which is so frightening to so many people, means to me that this particular condition cannot be cured by any outer means and that we must go within to find a cure. If I had an operation to get rid of the cancer and didn't clear the mental pattern that created it, then the doctors would just keep cutting Louise until there was no more Louise to cut. I didn't like that idea.
If I had the operation to remove the cancerous growth and also cleared the mental pattern that was causing the cancer, then it wouldn't return. If cancer or any other illness returns, I don't believe that it's because they didn't “get it all out”, but rather that the patient has made no mental change. He or she just re-creates the same illness, perhaps in a different part of the body.
I also believed that if I could clear the mental pattern that created this cancer, then I wouldn't even need the operation. So I bargained for time, and the doctors grudgingly gave me three months when I said I didn't have the money.
I immediately took responsibility for my own healing. I read and investigated everything I could find on alternative ways to assist my healing process. I went to several health-food stores and bought every book they had on the subject of cancer. I went to the library and did more reading. I checked out foot reflexology and colon therapy and thought they would both be beneficial to me. I seemed to be led to exactly the right people. After reading about foot reflexology, I wanted to find a practitioner. I attended a lecture, and while I usually sat in the front row, this night I was compelled to sit in the back. Within a minute, a man came and sat beside me--and guess what? He was a foot reflexologist who made house calls. He came to my home three times a week for two months and was a great help.
I knew I also had to love myself a great deal more than I had been. There had been little love expressed in my childhood, and no one had made it okay for me to feel good about myself. I had adopted “their” attitudes of continually picking on and criticizing me, which had become second nature.
I'd come to the realization through my work with the church that it was okay and even essential for me to love and approve of myself. Yet I kept putting it off--much like the diet you'll always start tomorrow. But I could no longer postpone it. At first it was very difficult for me to do things like stand in front of a mirror and say things like, “Louise, I love you. I really love you.” However, as I persisted, I found that several situations came up in my life where in the past I would have berated myself, and now, because of the mirror exercise and other work, I wasn't doing so. I was making some progress.
I knew I had to clear the patterns of resentment that I'd been holding since childhood. It was imperative for me to let go of the blame.
Yes, I'd had a very difficult childhood with a lot of abuse--mental, physical, and sexual. But that was many years ago, and it was no excuse for the way I was treating myself now. I was literally eating my body with cancerous growth because I hadn't forgiven. It was time for me to go beyond the incidents themselves and to begin to understand what types of experiences could have created people who would treat a child that way.
With the help of a good therapist, I expressed all the old, bottled-up anger by beating pillows and howling with rage. This made me feel cleaner. Then I began to piece together the scraps of stories my parents had told me about their own childhoods. I started to see a larger picture of their lives. With my growing understanding, and from an adult viewpoint, I began to feel compassion for their pain, and the blame slowly began to dissolve.
In addition, I hunted for a good nutritionist to help me cleanse and detoxify my body from all the junky foods I'd eaten over the years. I learned that junky foods accumulate and create a toxic body. Junky thoughts accumulate and create toxic conditions in the mind. I was given a very strict diet with lots of green vegetables and not much else. I even had colonics three times a week for the first month.
I did not have an operation; however, as a result of all the thorough mental and physical cleansing, six months after my diagnosis I was able to get the medical profession to agree with what I already knew--that I no longer had even a trace of cancer! Now I was able to affirm from personal experience that dis-ease can be healed if we are willing to change the way we think, believe, and act!
Sometimes what seems to be a tragedy turns out to become the greatest good in our lives. I learned so much from that experience, and I came to value life in a new way. I began to look at what was really important to me,
Anger, resentment, unhealthy sexual experiences, junk food - all factors Louise identified as possible causes of the dis-ease in her body which led to cancer.
Her little blue book "Heal Your Life" is an essential addition to anyone's bookshelf. She has also made a CD on "Cancer: Discover Your Amazing Healing Power". She recommends you listen to it every day for 30 days.
Find Louise L Hay's books and CDs
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