Louise Hay
| Louise L. Hay | |
|---|---|
Louise L. Hay
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| Born |
October 8, 1926 Los Angeles, California, U.S. |
| Occupation | Author, Professional speaker, |
| Nationality | American |
| Genre | Self-help, Motivational |
| Notable works | You Can Heal Your Life (1984) |
| Website | |
| louisehay.com | |
Louise Lynn Hay (born October 8, 1926) is an American motivational author and the founder of Hay House, she has authored several New Thought self-help books, including the 1984 book, You Can Heal Your Life.
Hay recounted her life story in an interview with Mark Oppenheimer of the New York Times in May 2008. In it, Hay stated that she was born in Los Angeles to a poor mother who remarried Louise's violent stepfather, who physically abused her and her mother. According to Hay, when she was about 5, she was raped by a neighbor. At 15, she dropped out of high school without a diploma, became pregnant and, on her 16th birthday, gave up her newborn baby girl for adoption. She then moved to Chicago, where she worked in low-paying jobs. In 1950, she moved on again - to New York. At this point she changed her name and began a career as a fashion model. She achieved success, working for Bill Blass, Oleg Cassini and Pauline Trigère. In 1954, she married the English businessman Andrew Hay; after 14 years of marriage, she felt devastated when he left her for another woman.
Hay said that about this time she found the First Church of Religious Science on 48th Street, which taught her the transformative power of thought. Hay revealed that here she studied the New Thought works of authors like Florence Scovel Shinn, who claimed that positive thinking could change people’s material circumstances, and the Religious Science founder Ernest Holmes, who taught that positive thinking could heal the body.
By Hay's account, in the early 1970s she became a Religious Science practitioner. In this role she led people in spoken affirmations, which she believes would cure their illnesses, and became popular as a workshop leader. She also recalled how she had studied Transcendental Meditation with the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi at the Maharishi International University in Fairfield, Iowa.
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