Louise Hay

Louise Lynn Hay (October 8, 1926 to August 30, 2017) was an American motivational author, professional speaker, and publisher whose work became closely tied to New Thought self-help and the wider New Age movement. She is best known for You Can Heal Your Life, published in 1984, and for founding Hay House publishing that same year. Her writing centered on affirmations, self-love, forgiveness, and the belief that thought could affect the body and material life.

Hay was born Helen Vera Lunney in Los Angeles to Henry John Lunney and Veronica Chwala. In a 2008 interview with Mark Oppenheimer of The New York Times, she described a difficult childhood marked by poverty, a violent stepfather, and sexual assault by a neighbor when she was about five. At 15, she left University High School in Los Angeles without a diploma, became pregnant, and on her 16th birthday gave up her newborn daughter for adoption. She later moved to Chicago and worked low-paying jobs, then moved to New York in 1950, changed her first name, and began a successful career as a fashion model, working for Bill Blass, Oleg Cassini, and Pauline Trigère. In 1954 she married English businessman Andrew Hay; after 14 years, she said she was devastated when he left her for another woman.

Around that period, Hay said she found the First Church of Religious Science on 48th Street, where she was taught the transformative power of thought. She studied New Thought writers including Florence Scovel Shinn, who taught that positive thinking could change material circumstances, and Ernest Holmes, founder of Religious Science, who taught that positive thinking could heal the body. In the early 1970s, Hay became a Religious Science practitioner, leading people in spoken affirmations and becoming a popular workshop leader. She also studied Transcendental Meditation with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi at Maharishi International University in Fairfield, Iowa.

In 1976, Hay wrote and self-published Heal Your Body, first a small pamphlet listing bodily ailments and their “probable” metaphysical causes. It was later expanded into You Can Heal Your Life, published in 1984. Hay said that in 1977 or 1978 she was diagnosed with “incurable” cervical cancer and chose forgiveness, therapy, nutrition, reflexology, and occasional colonic enemas instead of conventional medical treatment. She said she rid herself of the cancer, while also saying that the doctors who could confirm the story had died. Her claims about illness and “mental patterns” brought both wide attention and criticism, including accusations that her approach ruled out physiological causes of disease.

In the mid-1980s, Hay became a prominent figure in the early HIV/AIDS crisis in the United States. Beginning in 1985, she hosted support groups for people living with HIV/AIDS, mostly gay men, in West Hollywood. Known as “Hay Rides,” the meetings grew from a few people in her living room to more than 800 people at a time. In March 1988, after appearances on The Oprah Winfrey Show and The Phil Donahue Show in the same week, You Can Heal Your Life reached The New York Times bestseller list. The book sold more than 50 million copies worldwide in over 30 languages and was made into a movie in 2008, the same year Hay won a Minerva Award at The Women’s Conference.

Hay House grew into a major publisher of books and audio books by more than 130 authors as of 2015, including Deepak Chopra and many books by Wayne Dyer. Hay also founded the Hay Foundation in 1985 to support organizations that improve life for people, animals, and the environment. In 2011, she and Cheryl Richardson released You Can Create An Exceptional Life. Her words still speak to readers who look for steadiness in fear and pain, especially in the form of simple affirmations such as, “Everything is working out for my highest good. Out of this situation only good will come. I am safe.”