8.4 /10 1 Votes
4.2/5 Barnes & Noble Publication date January 1, 1984 ISBN 0937611352 Country United States of America | 4.1/5 Goodreads Language English Originally published 1 January 1984 Publisher Hay House Preceded by Heal Your Body | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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Subject Self-help, spirituality Followed by A Garden of Thoughts: My Affirmation Journal Similar Louise Hay books, Self-help books, Psychology books | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
You Can Heal Your Life is 1984 self-help and new thought book by Louisa L. Hay. It was the second book by the author, after Heal your Body which she wrote at age 60. After Hay appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show and Donahue in the same week in March 1988, the book landed on the New York Times Best Seller list and by 2008 over 35 million copies worldwide had been sold, in over in 30 languages. The book was also instrumental in the success of her publishing company, Hay House Inc. Today, due to the book she is "one of the best-selling authors in history", and one of largest selling women authors, after J. K. Rowling, Danielle Steel and Barbara Cartland.
Contents
Premise
The key premise of the book is that because the mind and body are connected, illnesses of the body somehow have their root causes in emotional and spiritual aspects of the mind and its beliefs and thought processes. While modern medicine concerns itself with eliminating symptoms of disease in the body, using tools such as chemotherapy and other pharmaceutical drugs and various surgical techniques, Hay's approach is to identify and work to resolve what she perceives as the mental root causes of disease. Hay believes that the causes of "dis-ease" include stress and unhealthy thought patterns and beliefs about oneself, and postulates that the most fundamental way to affect positive change in the body is to change the way we think, using tools such as "mirror work" and affirmations. At the end of book, a separate section lists numerous illnesses and various emotional thought patterns that Hay believes causes them; this was derived from Hay's earlier book, Heal Your Body, which had its origins in a pamphlet she published in 1979.
The film
In 2007, the book was adapted into a documentary film of the same name, with screenplay written by Gay Hendricks and directed by Michael A. Goorjian.