Saturday, May 15, 2010

Experience Your Good Now!


Louise Hay's new book Experience Your Good Now will be out on Tuesday, May 18th, and with it a CD that lets Louise talk to readers with reinforcement of her philosophy and encouragement for maintaining a positive outlook every day. Hay House was kind enough to send me a copy of the book and CD to review.

I've been a fan of Louise Hay and her publications since I first listened to her book You Can Heal Your Life on tape about a decade ago. I have to admit that at first I was skeptical that just saying positive statements could change anything more than my mindset, and even that would take some doing--more than just saying something that I wanted to be true. I had been taking antidepressants and contemplating divorce for several years, and it seemed to me that it was the act of believing lot of fairy tale hype about love and the American dream that had set me up for the let down I was experiencing. So did I want to believe in this positive affirmation philosophy as the answer to my life's problems? This was before the success of The Secret and before I knew anything about the Law of Attraction or Napoleon Hill's Think and Grow Rich.

It's not a new idea to believe in and focus on what we want. In fact Louise often quotes biblical texts that make reference to the fact that everything we need is provided for us--Matthew 21:22, "And all things you ask in prayer, believing, you will receive," and Mark 11:24 "Therefore I say to you, whatever things you ask when you pray, believe that you receive them, and you will have them."This is the key, Louise says -- believing you already have what you want, what you are asking for, saying it with love in the present tense (e.g. "My income is constantly increasing" or "I always work in harmonious surroundings.").

To some people, this approach seems a bit too "woo-woo" to even take seriously. Why say things "with love"? But Louise's Hay House colleague, scientist Gregg Braden, supports the notion of emotional expression of what we want as a key to changing our circumstances, and at the very least, our health. He cites experiments that show that the heart produces much more electrical and magnetic energy than the brain does, and that if thoughts are energy capable of changing the web of energy around us, emotions are even more likely to do so. The human heart, he says, is designed to change the electrical and magnetic field far beyond the space around us, which can thereby change atomic makeup. What Gregg talks about provides the scientific basis for what Louise has been saying for decades--that our feelings can rearrange the essence of the world around us so that the world reflects the reality of those feelings.

What convinces me to take Louise seriously is her own story of being an incest survivor who carried a burden of low self-esteem for years, and a cancer survivor who, after having worked with AIDS patients in the 1980s to improve their health through positive affirmations, found herself faced with her own health problems and the opportunity to practice what she was preaching. Gregg Braden also experienced a similar serious health issue and healing which he credits with the use of positive emotional focus in addition to medical care. Louise's positive outlook, her beauty, self-confidence, and warm way of communicating with others is a testament to the fact that she has not succumbed to what could have been a negative outlook based on unpleasant experiences in her life.

While this book re-states much of what Louise Hay's New York Times best seller You Can Heal Your Life touches on, she brings in affirmations that address negative thoughts about aging and death, which is new to her repertoire and good to see addressed. Much of our culture ignores those two realities and many people suffer silently in denial, fear or uncertainty.

I really like the CD and the idea of hearing Louise's soothing voice and encouragement and her own personal experience. Even though I am cognizant of these principles and believe they have worked in my own life, I fall into the usual negative self-talk and thinking and forget to use these precepts. Experience Your Good Now was a good reminder to me in facing whatever challenges are in my life now to make those changes in my thoughts and feelings. It is a small, easy-to-read book and the CD lets me keep my mindset where I want it to be.

With the publication of this book, Hay House is also offering a chance to win a spot on an "I Can Do It! At Sea" Caribbean cruise in January 2011 to spend a week with some favorite Hay House authors. Click on the above link or go to www.experienceyourgoodnow.com to enter. Share it with your friends online and get more chances to win. People who enter the contest also receive several free downloads from Hay House and a coupon discounting the purchase of a Hay House publication.

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