Louise Hay
on Tavis Smiley
original airdate March 25, 2008
 Louise Hay is known as one of the founders of the
self-help movement. Her first book, Heal Your Body, was published
in '76 and has been translated into 25 languages. You Can Heal Your Life,
in its 95th print, is still on The New York Times best sellers list
and has been made into a movie. A former model, she helms Hay House, a
publishing company she started in her living room and that's sold more than
10 million books and tapes. Hay also established two nonprofits that support
many diverse organizations.
Louise Hay
Tavis: I am both pleased and honored to welcome Louise Hay
to this program, the founder of Hay House publishers and is also a
best-selling author in her own right with books that include "You Can
Heal Your Life." That book is available in paperback now and has sold,
get this, more than 30 million copies around the world. A DVD based on the
book is also available now and I am pleased to say welcome to the program,
Louise Hay.
Louise Hay: Well thank you very much.
Tavis: It's an honor to have you here.
Hay: It's an honor to be here.
Tavis: It's funny; my producer, Neil, and I were just
comparing notes before we walked on the set. We list who our upcoming guests
are, and I don't know that I have received as much communiqué as I have about
any upcoming guest as I have about the fact that Louise Hay is coming on. I
think part of it has to do with the fact that you don't do a lot of this.
People don't get a chance to really see you in an interview setting.
Hay: Well, that's true, that's true - I'm retired. I'm 81,
and having fun - lots of fun.
Tavis: (Laughs) One, you don't look 81, and two, I know
better than that. You are really not retired. You still work awfully hard.
Hay: Well, I decided this is going to be the best decade
of my entire life so far.
Tavis: What makes you say that this is going to be the
best decade?
Hay: Because it is. I just feel it. Life has wonderful
things in store for me.
Tavis: How is it that you live a life - and this question
may sound a little strange, but a lot of folk don't have this experience,
where they live a life where they can declare that the decade in front of them
will be better than their biggest hits.
Hay: We can all do that. We just have to make a choice. We
have to decide what it's going to be.
Tavis: Why so few conversations like this for you? You
mentioned earlier you retired, but again, you but you don't do a lot of this.
Why make yourself not more accessible?
Hay: I just do what life brings to me at the moment. I
know life has a lot of things in store for me in the future and will bring to
me, like my movie and like being here. Life brings it to me.
Tavis: Just brings it to you, yeah. You are regarded as
really one of the founders -
Hay: I was one of the early crazy ones. (Laughter) Well
that's why I had to do my own book, because I knew nobody would publish it in
those days.
Tavis: You say that facetiously. I wasn't going to call
you one of the crazy ones. I was going to be a little bit nicer and say that
you have been given credit for being one of the founders of what is now a
multibillion dollar self-help industry.
Hay: Absolutely.
Tavis: How did you -
Hay: When I wrote my first book there was no self-help
section in the bookstores, and now it's the fastest growing one in all the
bookstores.
Tavis: You're 81, as you mentioned now, so you've been at
this for a long time.
Hay: Quite a while.
Tavis: How did that happen for you? What created this?
Hay: Well, it unfolded. One day I heard somebody say,
"If you're willing to change your thinking, you can change your
life." And I thought, really? Really? Is that possible? So I started to
explore, and I came upon a book very early in my career by Frances Scovel Shin
called "The Game of Life and How to Play It."
It was written in 1926, which was the year I was born, and I identified
with her very much because she was very strong and affirmative and she was
into affirmations, and that meant a lot to me, that book, at the time. And I
kept studying and learning, and as I learned I would teach other people. I'm a
big-mouth.
Tavis: When you say that you were one of the early crazy
ones, I know what you meant by that. Talk to me about how, back then, this
burgeoning industry was in fact regarded as a bit crazy, a bit out of touch.
Hay: Well, it wasn't a burgeoning industry at the time, it
was just a few teachers saying things, and I was one of the early ones saying
that if you're willing to change your thinking, you can change your life, your
thoughts, create your reality. And nobody understood that at the time, but it
was something that I understood very quickly.
So I started to study more and more and more and change my own life. My own
life became much better. I started to get what I call the green lights and the
parking places - the little things first. And the more I studied and the more
I practiced and the more I was willing to forgive and to appreciate life and
to have a lot of gratitude, the more my life changed for the better.
Tavis: What do you make of the fact that what you've just
suggested now seems in our contemporary world so commonplace? Back to the
point earlier, it's a multibillion industry now. Everybody believes if you can
change your thoughts, you can change your life.
Hay: Well, not everybody.
Tavis: Well, not literally everybody, but a whole lot of
people do.
Hay: A whole lot of people do.
Tavis: As evidenced again by the size of the self-help
section in any bookstore you walk into now. The question I want to get to,
though, Louise, is what you think changed in the world that we live or what
changed inside of us that made it not crazy, but indeed rather commonplace?
Hay: Yes, well, we learned that it was true. And I think
that people started to practice and do simple little things that made their
life - improved the quality of their lives, as I call it. Some people use this
to get things, but it's no good getting things if you don't change your
consciousness, because things don't make you happy. Only for a very short
period of time.
But when you can be at peace with life, when you can enjoy who you are,
when you can feel safe, when you can feel just calm and easy, that's very
wonderful. It's worth more than money.
Tavis: Take me back to the early part of your journey. One
of the things about your being so chronologically gifted - (laughter).
Hay: Yes?
Tavis: Yeah, one of the things about that is that we often
forget how you actually got started. Take me back to your youth and the
travails, and the situation that you found yourself in.
Hay: Yes, my life was wonderful until 18 months, and then
everything hit the fan. And I had a very strong, brutal childhood. I had
sexual abuse; I had a lot of heavy things when I was very young. And so I grew
up to be a person who didn't believe in myself and thought I was no good,
thought I was worthless, and also having a lot of resentment. And not
realizing what I was thinking or what I was doing or how it was affecting my
life.
Tavis: Not that you, obviously, were the only person to
endure that kind of maltreatment back then, but again, it's much more
commonplace now for personalities to talk about those kind of experiences in
books, on TV, in speeches.
Hay: See, when we grew up we felt there was something
wrong with us and we felt ashamed of it. That was why it happened, we were
bad. But now we're realizing that we weren't. We just were in circumstances,
and we needed to come out of them or we found a way to have an opportunity to
come out of those circumstances.
Tavis: So because it is so, again, commonplace now for
personalities of your stature to talk about these kinds of issues, what was it
like then when you decided to come out and talk about these things publicly?
Hay: Oh, well, see, it didn't matter to me because I had
been so ingrained as a child that I was no good and wrong, there was no shame
or anything. It was just this is what happened and this is where I am and this
is what I'm doing.
Tavis: But choosing to share that with the world in the
pages of a book, though, that's a pretty bold statement.
Hay: Well the thing was, I was teaching workshops at the
time and I said to myself, if I could just put this workshop on paper, I could
help more people. Little did I know how many millions more people, but I did.
I took a little time off and I put the workshop into book form, and I had no
idea that life would take it where it has taken it. Life said, "This book
must go out."
Tavis: What do you make of the fact that given how this
particular book, "You Can Heal Your Life," after all these years, 30
million copies sold around the world, clearly it's resonating with a lot of
people. What does that say to you about the pain that so many people are
enduring privately?
Hay: Well it's true. We all have pain of one sort or
another, even those who had very wonderful lives. We all carry some sort of
pain. But it's wonderful when we can find out that we're not wrong, we're not
bad, we are good enough, we're worthy of opening our life and having a better
life, and we can - we can all see life in a different way. We can start to
look in a different way.
Tavis: Is there a conflict for you between this notion? I
don't want to put too much terminology on it, I don't want to color it too
much, but is there conflict for you, Louise, in believing that if you think
it, if you dream it, if you call it down, you can make it happen, is there a
conflict between believing that and believing that there is a god who sits
high and looks low and really does have everything under his control? I'm
trying to get at whether or not it's really in his control or is it in our
control?
Hay: Well I think of life as a boomerang: what you give
out, you're going to get back, just like every time you throw a boomerang out,
it's going to come right back at you. And so what we believe about ourselves
and about life is going to become true for us.
Now, if you want to put God into the equation, that's wonderful. But I
don't see God as an old man sitting on a cloud watching my genitals. I do not
see that version of God. I see a force, I see an energy, I call it the
universe.
Tavis: I want to go back to the beginning again, the
beginning of your success. How did that particular train of thought, that
school of thought, how did that (unintelligible) to you? In other words, how
did people take you to saying that then, in a world, in a country, that has as
our credo "In God We Trust?"
Hay: Well, not everybody believes that. See, I never use
the word god, and it was very interesting because as a child, I had absolutely
no religious background at all. No upbringing. So I had nothing to unlearn.
And when I discovered or accepted that there was a universal power and an
energy, that made sense to me. So when I talk, I very seldom use the word god.
Tavis: How did that, when you first started, and how does
that now resonate or not resonate when you don't so often use the word god?
Hay: I don't think about it. I really don't think about
it. If somebody wants - I say you can talk about God, you can talk about
energy, the universe, whatever you want to.
Tavis: What is it in your doing this for so many years and
your study here and your training people around the world, what is it that
keeps most of us stuck in the places that we are in? What is it that, if I can
put it this way, keeps us most of us living in places where we block those
blessings coming into our lives?
Hay: Because we don't believe we deserve them. We think
we're not good enough. If you ask somebody what they want - what is it you
really want? What they usually say to you is well, I don't want this, and they
give you a whole list of what they don't want. They don't think about what it
is they do want.
But if you tell the universe what you don't want, then how can the universe
bring good things to you? Because the list, what you're giving out is not
wrong - remember, it's that boomerang.
Tavis: Other than Tavis writing a list of things that he
wants, are there things in my life I have to do beyond that to call those
things down? The reason why I say that is because any person, good or bad,
good or evil, could put together a list of things that he or she wants, but if
you live a life of, as my grandmother would say, if you live a life of
devilment -
Hay: Well then you're going to get devilment back, because
that's the boomerang.
Tavis: That's what I want to get at.
Hay: Remember. But I think that you can change that if
you're willing to change some of your beliefs. What is it you believe about
yourself that's not uplifting? And also, it's also who do you need to forgive?
We all have people we need to forgive, and that doesn't mean to condone poor
behavior, but it's to release us from the bondage from what somebody has done
to us.
Tavis: So forgiveness for you then, in terms of healing
oneself, is sacrosanct? It has to be?
Hay: I think it's important. I think a lot of people will
do affirmations and say, "Oh, well, nothing's happening, nothing's
happening." And well, there's two things. One, how many times do you do
the affirmations, and how many times do you do the grunge thinking that so
many people are into most of the day? And the other thing is, who do you need
to forgive? Because often we have this little thing here we're going to hold
onto and we're not going to let go, but that doesn't help us in any way.
Tavis: It's not lost to me that we have just commemorated,
as opposed to celebrating, commemorated the fifth anniversary of the invasion
of Iraq.
Hay: Oh, yes.
Tavis: I see the disgust on your face already.
Hay: Yes, yes, yes, yes.
Tavis: I raise that because it's at least clear to me that
we live in a world that in many ways is more gripped by fear now than when you
started. Talk to me about trying to navigate healing ourselves, living better
lives, in a world that is so gripped, again, so frozen by fear?
Hay: Well, we can only live in our own little world. We
can only live here, really. You can be frightened of all that out there, but
you're living here. And what sort of thoughts are you having in your own
world? See, I don't believe that we have to be in fear. I really don't.
One of the things that I'd like to teach people, when there's a problem -
and we all have problems, not all of us can deal with the world and war, but
we can deal with our own problems - when a problem comes up, one of the best
things to say is, "All is well, everything is working out from my highest
good, and out of this situation, this so-called problem, only good will come,
and I am safe."
And you know, this is something that's very powerful. All is well;
everything is working out for my highest good. Out of this experience, only
good will come, and I am safe. And what that does, it quiets your mind down -
or my mind down - long enough for the universe to find a solution for the
so-called problem.
Tavis: But what about the person watching right now who is
saying, "Louise Hay, I love you and I'm glad to hear you say that, but
Louise, with all due respect, right now in my life, you don't know - all is
not well. Everything is not working out for my good. I do not feel safe right
now. No matter how many times I say that, all is not well in my life right
now."
Hay: If you say it enough times, it will become so. It
really will, because you will be changing your thinking. If I have a real
problem, I will babble that incessantly for innumerable times, because I know
it will change the atmosphere around me. It'll change what I'm giving out.
Yes, it's true that to start with that may be a terrible problem and you can't
do anything about it right now.
But as you start to know that you are safe and you're in a universe that
loves you? How many times a day to do people say, "The universe loves me,
really loves me. And I'm so grateful and I'm so appreciative of life."
And if you're a person that does that a lot, your life has to get better. It
has to. Life will find little miraculous ways to bring good into your life.
Tavis: What about those persons then - I'm still with you
now -
Hay: Yeah, yeah, I know.
Tavis: But what about those persons -
Hay: I'm with you.
Tavis: All right, so we're together then. That's a good
thing.
Hay: Yes. (Laughs)
Tavis: What about those persons watching right now who
through no fault of their own - we talked a moment ago about this being the
fifth anniversary of the Iraq invasion. We also have been in a huge
conversation, although not really - we've been talking about talking about
race, given what Mr. Obama had to say recently.
But I think now, Louise, of persons who because of the color of their skin,
in some instances because of their gender, because of their sexual
orientation, because of poverty, who through fault of their own find
themselves in places where again, no matter how many times they tell
themselves that, to your earlier point, they live in a universe that does
treat them differently because of those things. So when you call this down, I
can call it down all day, it doesn't change what color I am, it doesn't change
my impoverished state, it doesn't change -
Hay: No, but it'll change your belief about yourself, and
when your belief about yourself changes, the way the universe reacts to you
will change. I know I'm not Black, but I grew up, when I came out into the
world, I had terrible, terrible feelings about myself, and I brought awful
experiences to me. But when I learned different things, when I learned to use
my mind for me instead of against me, it made a big difference.
Now I am not a salesperson. I don't try to force anyone to believe this.
I'm a teacher. And if people want to come, I will give them ideas - lots of
ideas - about things that they can do to help improve the quality of their
lives. And I think it belongs everywhere. I've had people take my work into
prisons. And I'm not saying everybody changes. No matter where you go, not
everybody's going to change.
But if you can change a percentage, if you can get a percentage of people
in any group to start seeing life in a different way and to open their
consciousness, then you started something. You've really started a good
process, because if two people get, it you're going to get a third and the
next thing you know you have a bunch of people who have been willing to change
their consciousness and they're changing their life. And if that's the way
it's going to be, you can't say, "Oh, we're going to fix
everything." And I think the war in Iraq is terrible. I think it's just
awful.
Tavis: Let me - full disclosure here, I have an imprint,
as you well know, called "Smiley Books," that's distributed by Hay
House, and I thank you and Reid for that. And every time I get a chance to
talk to you or see you or sit down for dinner with you, there are two things
that always strike me, and I've never even said this to you, so now I confess
this on national television.
One, I'm always amazed, and I think the viewer gets this now, at how
positive you always are. Your outlook is always positive, and I get my
batteries charged by just being in your space. So you're always positive,
number one, overwhelmingly, abundantly positive. But the second thing is, and
you didn't know this, but there was an occasion where we were sitting down for
dinner and for a couple of reasons, even though I'm younger than you, I was
struggling with this notion at that very moment of getting older.
Something had just happened to me, and I was struggling with this notion of
getting older. You sit here now at 81, and you are as happy now as ever.
Hay: Oh, yes.
Tavis: Talk to me and everybody watching about the joy for
you of aging - the joy of getting older.
Hay: Well, no, it's the joy of living in the moment. If
I'm living in this moment - you ask me what I did yesterday, I have to look it
up. (Laughter) Or I say to my secretary, "Bring me the book, what did I
do yesterday?" Because I am here now, and if I want to know what I'm
going to do tomorrow, I have to look it up in the book. I'm here, so it
doesn't matter what age I am. I'm right here. And I'm enjoying this now.
Tavis: I like that.
Hay: Yes. (Laughter) Tomorrow's going to come and do what
it does. But we're going to be here.
Tavis: So it's really that simple for you?
Hay: Well for me it is. I take good care of myself, I
exercise well, I eat well, and I'm very grateful for life. I have a lot of
gratitude. I say "Thank you" a lot, just out there. "Oh, thank
you, that was so great." And it's my attitude towards life that makes a
big difference.
Tavis: To that point of simplicity, how much of the mess
that we deal with, you think, we deal with because we don't make things simple
enough in our lives?
Hay: Well, simplicity helps. We make life extraordinarily
complicated. We make this big soap opera, and it's really very simple. All is
well.
Tavis: Everything's working for my good.
Hay: Everything's working for my highest good out of this
experience, only good will come.
Tavis: And I am safe.
Hay: And I am safe. Safety is important. It helps you
relax.
Tavis: A lot of people, though, in the world that we live,
don't feel safe in this country and around the world.
Hay: I know. I know that. I know. But if we can get little
pockets of safety, they will grow.
Tavis: Talk to me in the time I have left about this
burgeoning, blossoming, ever-growing company called Hay House that you had no
idea would ever start when you did your first book self-published. How did
this Hay House empire come to be?
Hay: Well it didn't start as an empire, it started as one
little book that I wrote, and I didn't believe the big boys would publish it
or print it, or they'd change it if they tried to. So I printed it myself, and
then I did another little book, and then I did a tape. And then one day I
printed somebody else's book, and that's when you become a publisher. But it
all started very, very small - very small.
Tavis: Has the mission over the years changed from when
you first started?
Hay: To help people, it's always been that. I have never
said, "If I do this, I will make money." I've said, "How can I
help more people?" And I've discovered that you cannot stop the money
when you come from that space. And in the early days, I was working with
people with AIDS. I was one of the first people who said, "I don't think
you have to die, and I don't think you're bad. Let's see what we can do if we
take a positive approach."
And I wound up on Oprah. And of course Oprah opens big doors for you, so I
was on the "New York Times" bestseller list for 14 weeks. This was
20 years ago, and that started Hay House getting bigger and bigger. Now I'm
back on Oprah and the "New York Times" bestseller list, and I'm now
the 19th. The "New York Times" added the 14 weeks I was on 20 years
ago to where I am now, and it's the same book. (Laughter) How many people can
have the same book 20 years later go back on the bestseller list?
Tavis: Well I can tell you this, if not for the rest of
us, certainly for Louise Hay, everything is working out for her highest good.
Hay: Damn right. (Laughter)
Tavis: And that's why I love her. This book, now out in
paperback, the international bestseller, more than 30 million copies sold,
"You Can Heal Your Life," by Louise Hay. Also available now on DVD.
"You Can Heal Your Life."
Hay: Yes, that's the movie.
Tavis: The movie, exactly. I'm honored to have you here,
good to see you.
Hay: Thank you, thank you very much
Tavis: Take care of yourself.
Hay: You too.
Here's the link to PBS.org for more information:
http://www.pbs.org/kcet/tavissmiley/archive/200803/20080325_hay.html
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