hello this is Louise Hay and today I want to share with you a secret if you really want to be responsible for your life then you've got to be responsible for your words the things we say are extensions of our thoughts now what is the first thing that you say to yourself in the morning when you wake up and the second thing and the third thing most people say more or less the same thing all the time in the morning how does that start your day is that a positive way to start your day or
is it grumbling and complaining because if you Grumble and complain and moan and that's the sort of day you're going to have you're setting yourself up for it what's the last thought you think at night before you go to bed so you're shaping your future and are they power thoughts or are they poverty thoughts remember poverty is not just the lack of money it can be the lack of anything in your life any part of your life that is not flowing freely so your normal way of thinking are you really into poverty thoughts or you
are you into Power thoughts I remember when I first heard that I could change my life if I was willing to change my thinking and that was quite a revolutionary idea idea this was in New York City when I first discovered the Church of religious science science of mind they were the very first people that told me that and even though I didn't understand what they meant it sort of rang a bell it it touched what I call the inner ding within me you know that place of intuition I've learned to follow that because when
that Ding goes yes even if it sounds very crazy I know that it's right for me so this idea was right for me it struck a chord in me something said yes they're right and then I began the adventure of learning how to change my thinking I read a lot of books I took a lot of classes and I explored everything I could and I really delved into science of mind at the time because I found it really wonderful and I grasped a few Concepts and I started to think and talk a little bit differently
and I no longer was complaining quite so much I was a great complainer and I was great into self-pity in those days that was one of my things that I just loved I didn't know that all it was doing was creating more experiences for me to pity myself over but then I didn't know in those days remember no matter where you are in life no matter what you've contributed to creating no matter what's happening you're always doing the best you can with the understanding and awareness and knowledge that you have and when you know more
you'll do it differently so never ever please berate yourself for where you were or even where you are you know say to yourself you're doing the best you can so let's find out what's the best way to do it because if all you do is tell yourself that you're stupid then you stay stuck you need loving support if you want to make changes I started to watch some of what I said and I became aware of my self-criticism and I tried to stop it and I began to babble affirmations without quite knowing what they meant
and a few small changes began to take place and I started doing with the easy ones of course I got the green lights in the parking places I thought I knew it all and I very soon became very cocky and arrogant and dogmatic in my beliefs and feeling I knew all the answers but it was my way of feeling safe in this new area that I was moving through because you know when you start to move away from some of your rigid old beliefs especially if you've been into control forever in order to feel safe
it's very scary to move out and start trusting an affirmation I mean this is you know a thought that's going through your mind and you're trusting it to change your life that's a very scary thing to do so I was grasping on to things and yet it was a beginning it was a beginning for me and I still had a long way to go and like most of us I didn't find the pathway always easy and smooth because just babbling affirmations didn't always work and I couldn't understand why what was I doing wrong was this
one more example of me not being good enough but my growing understanding enabled me to start the Forgiveness process you know if you're walking down the street and somebody bumps into you and you whip around you're very angry how dare they do that and then you see that the person is blind the understanding that you have instantly dissolves that anger and I think that when we can really begin to understand the childhood of the people who have done us wrong it enables us to go almost Beyond forgiveness and into understanding so that we can open
the doors to our own heart you see people who have problems loving themselves are always people who are not willing to forgive because non forgiveness shuts that door and when you forgive and when you let go not only does a huge weight drop over off your shoulders but the doorway to your own self-love opens up people will say oh such a load is dropped off well of course because you've been carrying this burden forever now I'm not saying that we're condoning poor Behavior because we're not we don't want to be in bondage ourself it is
something that perhaps happened a long long time ago as my forgiveness of them grew so did my willingness to forgive myself forgiveness of ourselves is enormously important see many of us grow up and we began hating our inner child for having had those experiences and we do the same thing to our inner child that they did to us we just continue it and that's very sad because when we were children and other people may have been mistreating us we didn't have options but when we grow up and we are mistreating our own inner child that's
very sad and very very tragic and as I forgave myself I began to trust myself to take care of me when we don't trust trust life or when we don't trust other people it's really because we don't trust ourselves we don't trust ourselves to take care of ourselves in a situation so we say I'll never fall in love again because I won't I don't want to get hurt or I will never let this happen but what we're really saying is I don't trust you enough to take good care of me so I'm going to stay
away from everything but I began to trust myself enough to take care of me and I found it easier and easier to love myself and my body was healing and most of all my heart was healing most of all my heart was healing you know as Dr Harrison says in that wonderful book love your disease forgiveness of both the self and the parents or dropping the past which is what you're doing cures more illness than antibiotics ever will and he also says it takes a lot to stop children from loving their parents but when they
do it takes even more for them to forgive and therapy usually revolves around the willingness to forgive when we won't forgive when we won't let go what we're really doing is binding ourselves to the past and when you're stuck in the past you cannot live in present time and if you cannot live in present time how are you going to create a glorious future because this stuff from the past just bounces over and creates more future stuff Dr Harrison with love your disease and Bernie seagull with love medicine and miracles are both marvelous people I
quote them a lot because they're medical doctors who are into the spiritual way of looking at life and truly understand the connection of Body Mind and Spirit and it's interesting now I also discovered mirror work and I did daily sessions in front of the mirror 5 or 10 minutes or 20 minutes in the morning is wonderful and you get better results if you can be consistent all day long I thanked myself before I went to sleep I thanked myself for what I had done during the day and knowing that I had done the best I
could and I affirmed that the healing process was taking place in my body while I slept and that I'd awakened in the morning bright and refreshed and feeling good in the morning I'd awaken and I'd thank everything I could think of including myself and my body and I'd know and affirm that this day would be a joy and a delight and that I was willing to learn and to grow and to change and I learned also that I could make changes without seeing myself as a bad person too many of us we have to be
wrong or bad in order to make a change that's why we criticize ourselves so much we think it's going to make a change but it doesn't when we can come from loving acceptance then the changes come much easier and we make a change because we want to improve the quality of our life not because we're a bad person who has to be better and it's a different way of looking at it and when the doctor said I no longer had cancer in my body I knew I'd made deep internal changes you can't do inner work
on yourself without improving the quality of our life and that's what it's all about really we improve the quality of our life we make peace with ourselves on an inner level and we learn to love and accept who we are and then life seems to flow much much nicer so what did this experience teach me personally that I really had the power to change my life if I was willing to change my thinking and as I worked with people I really began to listen to what they said I really began to hear the words not
just get the general drift and after 10 minutes with with a new client I could tell exactly why they had a problem because I could hear the words they were speaking I could see how they were talking and I knew that was contributing to their problem and if they were talking and thinking that way what was their selft talk like it must be more and more of the same negative programming poverty thinking as I call it and I really understood the saying that the the subconscious mind has no sense of humor this is important for
us to know because you cannot make a joke about yourself and just think it doesn't mean anything if it's a put down joke your subconscious mind accepts it as true your subconscious mind or the universe whatever you however you want to call it accepts everything you say as Truth for you and it creates according to your beliefs it's like God always says yes we have been given this infinite power of choice and the universe backs up everything and if you want to believe that you're a failure and nobody loves you and that you'll never amount
to anything and life is difficult and you'll never have what you want the universe loves you enough to give you what you declare you have unlimited choice and if you choose these poverty Concepts and beliefs then it's assumed that that's what you want and that's what you'll get and will continue to get until you're willing to change your thoughts and make other choices we're never stuck because we can always think another thought billions and billions of thoughts to choose from I remember when I used to work with clients privately I would hear them arguing so
much for their limitations they would always want me to know that they were stuck because this or this or this or whatever but you know if we believe that we're stuck if we accept that we're stuck then we are stuck we get to be stuck because our belief is being fulfilled and you know the way we say things and how they we say them can be as simple as getting up in the morning and looking outside and seeing the rain and saying it's a lousy day or it's a wet day it's totally different approach and
yet the rain is still there the rain isn't going to make it any different it's how you approach it so notice how happy joyous people usually have very nice lives and notice how lonely unhappy poor ill people often talk how do they have a tendency to talk what words do they use and what have they accepted as the truth for themselves how do they describe themselves how do they describe their work their lives their relationships what do they look forward to what have they accepted as Truth for them and please don't run around telling perfect
strangers that they're ruining their lives and don't do it with your friends or family either because it's not going to be appreciated but use this information to begin to make connections that you can apply to yourself because it's your life you want to change are you willing to change your life by changing your thinking because even on the smallest level if you change your thinking and the way you talk your experiences are going to change are you willing to change yourself talk into positive affirmations now remember remember an affirmation is really anything we say or
think a lot of what we normally say and think is quite negative and it doesn't create good experiences for ourselves we have to retrain our thinking and speaking into positive patterns if we're going to get good results when we talk about doing affirmations we really mean to make a positive statement about something we want to eliminate from our Liv life or something we want to create in our lives and too often we say things like I don't want this in my life anymore but that doesn't give us a clear picture we don't State clearly what
we do want you know just say I I don't want to be sick anymore doesn't give your subconscious mind a clear picture of the health you'd really like you've got to realize that your spoken word is very very powerful if you say I hate this job it doesn't give you a wonderful new job even if you get a new job you'll probably hate it soon because that's what you're saying about it so you need to clearly declare your desires in a very positive way think for a moment what is it you really want right now
what is it you want today in your life and then say to yourself I accept for myself whatever that is now do you really believe you really deserve to have it or what thoughts inside of you would you have to change in order to deserve it if you really believe on some level that you're not good enough for that life never works for you or everybody else gets but not you then you're not going to be able to get what you want see what would be the first thought that you would need to think to
begin to create this new thing thing what would be the building block the foundation that you would stand on what would be the sort of thing you would need to know for yourself to believe to accept well a good one would be I love myself I am worthy I deserve I am allowed to be fulfilled things that are positive things that you can believe at the very basis of what you're saying so that you can build on that and then do your affirmations on top of that to create what you want if you really believe
that your thoughts create your world you're going to be very careful what you think and what you say and you're going to shake your thoughts to create what you want and remember also though that when you first say an affirmation it may not seem to be true because remember affirmations are like planting seed seeds in the ground and when you plant a seed in the ground that's what you have you don't have a full grown plant you have a little seed that has to germinate which means it breaks its shell and then the first little
roots go down into the soil and get some nourishment and only at that point does that first Little Chute come up and it's the same thing with affirmations it takes some time you know to go from a seed to a full grown plant and it takes some time from that first declaration to the final demonstration we need to be patient with the growing season I like to think sometimes of doing treatment work or affirmations it's like going to the cosmic kitchen you know if you go to a restaurant and the waiter or waitress comes and
takes your order and they go into the kitchen and you don't run in with them to see how it's going to be prepared and when it's going to be prepared and how fast it's going to be out you sit and you do what you do you either have a drink or a cup of coffee or you drink your water or your tea or you talk to your friend or you eat your rolls of butter and you assume that that's going to come out well I think it's the same thing once we begin to do affirmations
or treatment work we've put it into what I like to think of as the cosmic kitchen and the great chef is working on it so you go on with your life and you know that it's being taken care of and if the issue comes up in your mind you can say that's being taken care of it's on order it's happening now you know if if you're in a restaurant and they bring the wrong order order out or it's not what you ordered and you have self-esteem you'll send it back if not you'll eat it you
also have a right to do that with the cosmic kitchen if you don't get exactly what you wanted then say no that's not quite it this is what I want but perhaps you weren't clear in your ordering what if you've been on the pathway and doing the work for some time does that mean you have nothing else to learn are you really going to sit on your laurels and just rest or do you realize that this inner work is a lifetime occupation and that once you start it you really never stop or you can hit
plateaus and you can take vacations but basically it's a lifetime work so you want to look at your life really check it out what works and what doesn't work now are all departments in your life the way you want them are you healthy are you happy are you prosperous are you creatively fulfilled do you feel safe do you feel secure what areas do you need to work on is there more work to do how do you need to change your thinking in certain areas see are you really aware of what you're currently saying and how
you're saying it a lot of us aren't too aware of that [Music]