We will continue our discussion here about health and illness, moving into specific topics of disease and discomfort. Then we will review some of the fascinating mind-body connections regarding specific body pains or illnesses as taught by author Louise Hay (1926-2017) and discussed in her book You Can Heal Your Life.
Allergies
“Allergies are quite misunderstood by your orthodox healers.
The allergy may be seen to be the rejection upon a deep level of the mind complex of the environment of the mind/body/spirit complex.
Thus the allergy may be seen in its pure form as the mental/emotional distortion of the deeper self.”1
Venereal disease
“Venereal disease is in large part a function of the thought-forms of a distorted nature which are associated with sexual energy blockage.”2
As Louise Hay teaches, catching a venereal disease is related to a mass belief in sexual guilt and the need for punishment. It is brought on by an unconscious desire for public shame due to a belief in guilt in regards to sexual activity. It can also result from a belief in a punishing God, or simply as a rejection of the genitals and a sort of disgust at feeling you are a ‘victim’ to the genitals, as in being driven to perform sexually because of uncontrollable lust, to feed your ego or other similar feelings.
Remember that these feelings of guilt and punishment are usually subconscious and you do not recognize you have them or are bringing them on unless you actively explore your conscious mind and get in touch with your beliefs.
Cancer
“Cancer has become the symbol for the body’s vulnerability in current years — the proof of man’s susceptibility to the body.
It is a disease that people have when they want to die — when they are ashamed to admit that they want to die, because death seems to fly against sane behavior.
In almost all such cases involving cancer, spiritual and psychic growth is being denied, or the individual feels that he or she can no longer grow properly in personal, psychic, terms.
This attempt to grow then activates body mechanisms that result in the overgrowth of certain cells.
The individual insists upon growing or upon death, and forces an artificial situation in which growth itself becomes physically disastrous.
This is because a blockage occurs.
The individual wants to grow in terms of personhood, but is afraid of doing so.
There are always individual variations that must be taken into consideration, but often such a person feels a martyr to his or her sex, imprisoned by it and unable to escape.
This can obviously apply to cancers affecting sexual areas, but is often in the background of any such condition.
Energy is being blocked because of problems that began – in your terms – with sexual questions in puberty.”3
Cervical cancer involves – can involve – distortions of the growth process itself, because of the complicated distortions of belief on the woman’s part. In a way the very pain of caner – of some cancers – often acts through its intensity as a reflection of the person’s belief that life is painful, tormenting. At the same time, the pain is a reminder of feeling and sensation.
You may also observe the thoughts of anger becoming those cells of the physical bodily complex going out of control to become what you call ‘cancer’.
As Louise Hay explains, cancer is related to deep hurt in life and longstanding resentment. It can result from an unchecked deep secret or grief eating away at the self. It can also result from carrying hatreds and grudges throughout life, unable to forgive.
Another cause of cancer is an unconscious belief in humanity being a ‘cancer’ upon the Earth. Many people feel that humanity in general is bad, evil, destructive, greedy, idiotic, sinful…etc., and left alone will destroy all it touches. Its unchecked growth will essentially destroy the world and all the ‘good and innocent’ aspects of nature such as animals, plants and so forth.
Beliefs that people carry about a large nebulous group, such as ‘humanity as a whole’, is the secret belief they hold inside of their own being about themselves.
If someone believes ‘humanity in general’ is a cancer upon the Earth, they are actually saying they believe they are a cancer on the Earth. They believe they are powerless to change and only use, abuse, or make things worse.
Unchecked over a lifetime, this belief can certainly activate the disease of cancer within their own bodies.
This is why it is of the utmost importance to recognize your beliefs and work to heal and transform them if they are destructive.
This is also why it is impossible to have peace of mind if you believe humanity is inherently bad, evil, or destructive.
Humanity is inherently good.
Tumors or growths
“A male with growths of any kind – kidney stones or ulcers, for example – has tendencies he considers feminine, and therefore “dependent,” of which he is ashamed.
In a mock biological ceremony, he gives birth to the extent that he produces within his body material that was not there before.
In ulcers the stomach becomes the womb – bloodied, giving birth to sores – his interpretation of a male’s “grotesque” attempt to express feminine characteristics.”4
Pain
“To a large measure, the sensations of pain are the results of your beliefs, so that even diseases that are indeed accompanied by great pain, need not be.
Much of the pain connected with serious illness and death results because you have no faith in your own continuing reality.
You fight pain because you have not learned to transcend it, or rather to use it.
Certain kinds of pain automatically eject consciousness from the body.
Such pain cannot be verbalized, for it is a mixture of pain and pleasure, a tearing free, and it automatically brings about an almost exhilarating release of consciousness.
Such pain is also very brief.”5
As Louise Hay teaches, pain is a result of feelings of guilt. Guilt always seeks punishment.
Viruses
“In what may seem to you to be an odd analogy I will compare your thoughts with viruses for they are alive, always present, responsive and possess their own kind of mobility. Physically speaking at least thoughts are chemically propelled, and they travel through the universal body as viruses travel through your temporal form.
Thoughts interact with the body and become part of it as viruses do. Some viruses have great therapeutic value. The physical body will often let down its own barriers to these knowing they will counteract certain others that are not beneficial at the time.
So-called harmful viruses are ever-present within the body. You are very rarely vulnerable to any but a small percentage though you carry within you traces of the most deadly of them all of the time. Viruses themselves undergo transformations completely unsuspected by medical men. If one virus disappears and another is found, it is never suspected that the first may have changed into the second; and yet through certain alterations of quite natural character such is the case.
So viruses can be beneficial or deadly according to the condition, state, and needs of the body at any given time. It is known that one disease can often cure another; sometimes, left along, an individual will go from a serious disease through a series of less severe ones that are seemingly unrelated to the original problem.
Now in the context of usual Western learning, and with the introduction of modern drugs, you are in somewhat of a quandary. The body knows how to handle ‘natural’ drugs coming directly from the earth-whether ground or boiled, minced or steamed. A large variety of ‘manufactured’ drugs offer an unfamiliarity to the body’s innate structure, which can lead to strong defense mechanisms. These are often aimed directly against the drug instead of the disease itself. Such a situation means that you must then use another drug to counteract the one just given.
I am not suggesting that you not visit doctors or not take drugs of that nature, as long as you believe in the structure of medical discipline that the Western world has evolved. Your bodies have been conditioned to it through the use of such medications since birth. There are many causalities, but this is still a system that you have chosen, and your ideas still form your reality. No one dies who has not made the decision to do so – and no disease is accepted blindly. Put simply, your thoughts can be regarded as invisible viruses, carriers, sparks setting off reactions not only with the body but the entire physical system as you know it.
Your thoughts are as natural as the cells within your body, and as real. They interact with one another as viruses do. While you are in this reality there is no division between the mental, the spiritual and the physical. If you think there is, then you do not sufficiently understand the spirituality of the flesh or the physical reality of your thought.
There is hardly anything mysterious in the idea that life can kill. On a biological level all death is hidden in life and all life in death.
Viruses are alive, and can be beneficial or detrimental according to other balances in the body. In cancer cells the growth principle runs wild; within creaturehood each of the species has its place, and if one multiplies out of its proper order then all life and the body of the earth itself comes into peril.
Many of your problems result from the fact that you do not accept the responsibility of your own consciousness.
All viruses of any kind are important to the stability of your planetary life. They are a part of the planet’s biological heritage and memory. You cannot eradicate a virus, though at any given time you destroy every member alive of any given strain. They exist in the earth’s memory, to be recreated, as they were before, whenever the need arises.
The same applies of course to any animal or plant considered extinct. Only an objectively tuned consciousness like man’s would imagine that the physical eradication of a species destroyed its existence.
You could not live without viruses, nor could your biological reality as you know it now exist. Viruses appear to be “the bad guys,” and as a rule you think of them separately, as for example the smallpox virus. There are overall affiliations in which viruses take part, however, in which delicate balances are maintained biologically. Each body contains countless viruses that could be deadly at any given time and under certain conditions. These — and I am putting it as simply as possible — take turns being active or inactive within the body, in accordance with the body’s overall condition. Viruses that are “deadly” in certain stages are not in others, and in those later stages they react biologically in quite beneficial ways, adding to the body’s stability by bringing about necessary changes, say, in cellular activities that are helpful at given rates of action. These in turn trigger other cellular changes, again of a beneficial nature.
As an example from another field, consider poisons. Belladonna can be quite deadly, yet small doses of it were known to aid the body in disease conditions. The viruses in the body have a social, cooperative existence. Their effects become deadly only under certain conditions. The viruses must be triggered into destructive activity, and this happens only at a certain point, when the individual involved is actively seeking either death or a crisis situation biologically. The initial contagion in such cases is always emotional and mental. Social conditions are usually involved, so that an individual is, say, at the lower end of a poor social environment, a seeming victim of it, or in a situation where his individual value as a social member is severely weakened.
Now: In the same way that a member of such a society can go [askew], blow his stack, go overboard, commit antisocial acts, so in the same fashion such a person can instead trigger the viruses, wreck their biological social order, so that some of them suddenly become deadly, or run [amok]. So of course the resulting diseases are infectious. To that degree they are social diseases. It is not so much that a virus, say, suddenly turns destructive — though it does — as it is that the entire cooperative structure within which all the viruses are involved becomes insecure and threatened.
Viruses mutate. Such is often the case. It seems quite scientific to believe in inoculations against such dangerous diseases — and certainly, scientifically, inoculations seem to work: People in your time right now are not plagued by smallpox, for example. Some cultures have believed that illnesses were caused by demons. Medicine men, through certain ceremonies, would try to rid the body of the demons — and those methods worked also. The belief system was right and accepted, and it only began to fail when those societies encountered “civilized views.”
If you call the demons “negative beliefs” however, then you have taken strides forward.
People continue to die of diseases. Many of your scientific procedures, including inoculations, of themselves “cause” new diseases. It does not help a patient inoculated against smallpox and polio if [eventually] he dies of cancer as a result of his negative beliefs.
What I have said about viruses applies to all biological life. Viruses are “highly intelligent” — meaning that they react quickly to stimuli. They are responsive to emotional states. They are social. Their scale of life varies considerably, and some can be inactive for centuries, and revive. They have extensive memory patterns, biologically imprinted. Some can multiply in the tens of thousands within seconds. They are in many ways the basis of biological life, but you are aware of them only when they show “a deadly face.”
You are not aware of the inner army of viruses within the body that protect it constantly. Host and virus both need each other, and both are part of the same life cycle.
You think of viruses as physical and of thoughts as mental. You should know that thoughts also have their physical aspects in the body, and that viruses have their mental aspects in the body. At times you have both asked why an ailing body does not simply assert itself and use its healing abilities, throwing off the negative influence of a given set of beliefs and thoughts.
When you think of thoughts as mental and viruses as physical, the question is understandable. It is not just that thoughts influence the body, as of course they do; but each one of them represents a triggering stimulus, bringing about hormonal changes and altering the entire physical situation at any given time.
Your physical body is, as an entity, the fleshed-out version – the physically alive version – of the body of your thoughts. It is not that your thoughts just trigger chemical reactions in the body, but that your thoughts have a chemical reality besides their recognizable mental aspects. I will have to use an analogy. It is as if your thoughts turned into the various appendages of your body. They have an invisible existence within your body as surely as viruses do. Your body is composed not only of the stuff within it that, say, x-rays or autopsies can reveal, but it also involves profound relationships, alliances and affiliations that nowhere physically show. Your thoughts are as physically pertinent to your body as viruses are, as alive and self-propagating, and they themselves form inner affiliations. Their vitality automatically triggers all of the body’s inner responses. When you think thoughts, they are conscious. You think in sentences or paragraphs, or perhaps in images. Those thoughts, as clearly as I can explain, rise from inner components of which you are unaware.
When the thought is thought, it is, say, broken down again to those components. Your thoughts have an emotional basis, also. The smallest cell within your body contributes to that emotional reality, and reacts instantly to your thoughts.
In those terms, thoughts move far quicker of course than viruses. The action of the virus follows the thought. Each thought is registered biologically. Basically when you have an immunity to a disease you have a mental immunity.
You think of viruses as evil, spreading perhaps from country to country to ‘invade’ scores of physical mechanism. Now thoughts are ‘contagious’. You have natural immunity against all thoughts that do not fit in with your own purpose and beliefs, and naturally you are ‘inoculated’ with a wholesome trust and belief in your own thoughts about others. The old idea of voodooism recognized some of these concepts, but complicated and distorted them with fears of evil, psychic invasion, psychic killing, and so forth. You cannot divide mental and physical health, nor can you divide a person’s philosophy from his bodily condition.
There is not an attack. There is an acceptance, and a preparation for certain changes.
A life crisis is formed. The parasite or virus plays its part in setting up such a psychologically-desired position. It is an emotionally-charged position, an immanent crisis. The fact is that when death comes it is wanted; it has been chosen.
Many viruses are vital to physical existence, and in your terms there are gradations of activity, so that only under certain conditions do viruses turn into, say, what you think of as deadly ones. The healthiest body contains within it many so-called deadly viruses in what you may call an inactive form – inactive from your viewpoint, in that they are not causing disease. They are, however, helping to maintain the body’s overall balance. In a way in each body, the species settles upon a known status quo, and yet experiments creatively at many levels with cellular alterations, chromosomal variations, so that of course each body is unique. There are kinds of gradations, say, in the lines and kinds of disease. Certain diseases can actually strengthen the body from a prior weaker state, by calling upon the body’s full defenses. Under certain conditions, some co-called disease states could insure the species survival.
It is very difficult to explain. In a way some disease states help to insure the survival of the species – not by weeding out the sickly but by introducing into large numbers of individuals the conditions needed to stabilize other strains within the species against a sensed greater danger.
At the minute levels – microscopic levels – there are always some biological experiments being carried out, in a creative effort to give the species as much leeway as possible from effective action. Your body is changed biologically by your thoughts.
All biological organisms know that physical life depends upon a constant transformation of consciousness and form. Physically death gives life. This biological knowledge is intimately acknowledged at microscopic levels. Even your cells know that their deaths are necessary for the continuation of your physical form.
Obviously, I am saying that “deadly” viruses do not “think of themselves” as killers, any more than a cat does when it devours a mouse. The mouse may die, and a cell might die as a result of the virus, but the connotations applied to such events are also the results of beliefs.
In the greater sphere of spiritual and biological activity, the viruses are protecting life at their level, and in the capacity given them. In one way or another, they are always invited — again, always invited — in response to that greater rhythm of existence in which physical life is dependent upon constant transformation of consciousness and form.”6
Communicable Viruses & Fear
“Those viruses that you consider communicable do indeed in one way or another represent communications on a biological level.
When a skunk is frightened, it throws off a foul odor indeed, and when people are frightened they react in somewhat the same fashion at times, biologically reacting to stimuli in the environment that they consider alarming.
They throw off a barrage of “foul viruses”—that is, they actually collect and mobilize from within their own bodies viruses that are potentially harmful, biologically trigger these, or activate them, and send them out into the environment in self-protection, to ward off the enemy.
In a fashion this is a kind of biological aggression.
The viruses, however, also represent tensions that the person involved is getting rid of. That is one kind of statement. It is often used in a very strong manner in times of war, or great social upheaval, when people feel frightened.”7
Overweight Conditions and Weight Loss
We will now diverge for a moment to discuss weight loss and overweight conditions. This is not a disease per se, yet it is a condition that many struggle with and it can negatively affect their minds and emotions if they feel they are a victim to their overweight condition. These negative effects can lead to grief, sorrow, anger, bitterness, jealousy, and feelings of worthlessness.
We will address this condition now.
“Imagination and will power are never in conflict.
Your beliefs may conflict, but your imagination will always follow your will power and your conscious thoughts and beliefs.
If this is not apparent to you, then it is because you have not as yet completely examined your beliefs.
Let us take a simple example: You are overweight. You have tried diets to not avail. You tell yourself that you want to lose weight. You follow what I have said so far. You change the belief. You say “Because I believe I am overweight, I am, so I will think of myself at my ideal weight.”
But still you find that you overeat. In your mind’s eye you still see yourself as overweight, imagine the goodies and snacks, and in your terms “give in” to your imagination – and you think that will power is useless and conscious thoughts powerless.
But pretend that you go beyond this point. In sheer desperation you say, “All right, I will examine my beliefs further!”
Now this is a hypothetical case so you may find one of innumerable beliefs.
You may, for instance, find that you believe you are not worthy, and hence should not look attractive. Or that health means physical weight and it is dangerous to be slim.
Or you may find that you feel – and believe that you are – so vulnerable that you need the weight so people will think twice before they shove you around.
In all of these cases the ideas will be conscious.
You have entertained them often and your imagination and emotions are in league with them, and not in conflict.
Let’s look at it with another example. You are overweight. It is s physical fact. It grieves you, but you believe it completely. You begin a round of diets, all based on the idea that you are overweight because you eat too much. Instead, you eat too much because you believe you are overweight.
The physical picture always fits because your belief in being overweight conditions your body to behave in just such a manner.
In the oddest fashion, then, your diets simply reinforce the condition – since you diet because you believe so deeply in your overweight condition.
Until you change your belief, you will continue to utilize your food in the same fashion – and to overeat.
Momentary gains will not last. Your entire behavior pattern operates according to the strong hypnotic suggestions given, and then of course your appearance and experience always reinforce your belief.
You must willingly suspend that belief. You must make a conscious effort to insert a different belief; employ natural hypnosis in this new way.
If you realize your own worth, then that realization in the present can negate any past ideas of unworthiness that may have attracted you to the condition.
The same applies if you are underweight, of course. You can eat a great deal for a while and only gain a few pounds, or find all kinds of excuses for not eating. You can be served the richest diet, yet gain no weight.
You are not underweight because you do not eat enough food, or utilize it properly. Instead, you do not eat enough because you believe that you are underweight.
No amount of food will be sufficient until you alter your belief.
The same procedures given for those who are overweight should be used.
In each case body conditioning is set up through natural hypnosis.
Daily behavior and chemical functioning smoothly follow according to belief.
In any area, great clues can be received simply through paying more attention to the conscious thoughts that you have during the day, for each of them serve as minute suggestions, modifying your behavioral patterns and affecting bodily mechanisms.”8
Louise Hay explains that weight issues can be a result of oversensitivity. They often represent fear and show a need for protection. Fear may be a cover for hidden anger and a resistance to forgive. It can also represent a running away from feelings, insecurity, self-rejection and seeking fulfillment.
Louise Hay – Further Information
Louise Hay provides a detailed list of physical symptoms related to psychological and emotional issues. Of course it is wise to remember that each individual is unique and so these are basic guidelines that may help someone towards the root of their problem. However, they may not be accurate in 100% of the cases.
Nonetheless they provide illuminating paths for each person to follow if they are suffering from a certain condition or ailment and are unable to figure out the root of the issue.
We will only list a few of these issues. A more comprehensive list can be found here: http://alchemyofhealing.com/causes-of-symptoms-according-to-louise-hay/.
- Acne – not accepting the self. Self-loathing; self-hatred
- Addictions – running from the self; fear; not knowing how to love the self
- Alcoholism – feeling of futility; guilt; inadequacy; self-rejection
- Anorexia – Denying the self life; extreme fear; self-hatred and rejection
- Apathy – resistance to feeling; deadening of the self; fear
- Back Pain – fear of money or lack of financial support
- Mid–Back Pain – guilt; stuck in all that stuff back there. “Get off my back!”
- Upper Back Pain – lack of emotional support; feeling unloved; holding back love.
- Bad Breath – Anger and revenge thoughts; experiences backing up
- Bladder Problems – anxiety; holding on to old ideas; fear of letting go; being “pissed off”
- Blood Pressure – High – longstanding emotional problem not solved; Low – lack of love as a child; defeatism.
- Bones – represent the structure of the universe
- Bone marrow – represents deepest beliefs about the self; how you support and care for yourself
- Bone breaks – rebelling against authority
- Burns – anger; burning up; incensed.
- Bursitis – repressed anger; wanting to hit someone.
- Colds – too much going on at once; mental confusion; disorder; small hurts.
- Constipation – incomplete releasing; holding onto garbage of the past; guilt over the past; sometimes stinginess.
- Coughs – a desire to bark at the world; “Listen to me!”
- Cramps – tension; fear; gripping; holding on
- Cuts – punishment for not following your own rules.
- Depression – anger you feel you do not have a right to have; hopelessness.
- Dizziness – flighty; scattered thinking; a refusal to look.
- Ear – represents the capacity to hear – physically, emotionally and spiritually
- Earache – anger; not wanting to hear; too much turmoil; household arguing.
- Eye – represents the capacity to see clearly past, present and future
- Fever – anger; burning up
- Feet – represent our understanding of ourselves, life and others.
- Foot problems – fear of the future and of not stepping forward in life.
- Gallstones – bitterness; hard thoughts; condemning; pride
- Headaches – invalidating the self; self-criticism; fear.
- Heart Attack – squeezing all the joy out of the heart in favor of money or position; feeling alone and scared; “I’m not good enough. I don’t do enough. I’ll never make it.”
- Heartburn – fear, fear, fear; clutching fear
- Hip – carries the body in perfect balance; major thrust in moving forward; fear of going forward in major decisions; nothing to move forward to.
- Influenza – response to mass negativity and beliefs; fear; belief in statistics.
- Insanity – fleeing from the self; escapism; withdrawal; violent separation from life.
- Jaw Problems – anger; resentment; desire for revenge
- Kidney stones – lumps of undissolved anger
- Knee – represents pride and ego; stubborn ego and pride; inability to bend; fear; inflexibility; won’t give in.
- Liver – seat of anger and primitive emotions; chronic complaining; justifying fault-finding to deceive yourself; feeling bad.
- Lung – the ability to take in life; depression; grief; not feeling worthy of living life fully
- Menstrual problems – rejection of one’s femininity; guilt; fear; belief that the genitals are sinful or dirty.
- Neck – represents flexibility; the ability to see what’s back there; refusing to see other sides of a question; stubbornness; inflexibility; unbending stubbornness.
- Nerves – represent communication; receptive reporters
- Nervous breakdown – self-centeredness; jamming the channels of communication.
- Neuralgia – punishment for guilt; anguish over communication
- Sinus problems – irritation to one person, someone close.
- Skin – protects our individuality; anxiety; fear; old, buried things; I am being threatened.
- Stiffness – rigid, stiff thinking
- Stomach – holds nourishment; digest ideas; dread; fear of the new; inability to assimilate the new.
- Throat problems – the inability to speak up for one’s self; swallowed anger; stifled creativity; refusal to change.
More information on Louise Hay’s work9 can be found at her website www.louisehay.com.
- Elkins, Rueckert, McCarty, The Law of One, Session 98.5, http://www.lawofone.info/results.php?s=98
- Elkins, Rueckert, McCarty, The Law of One, Session 83.4, http://www.lawofone.info/results.php?s=83
- Roberts, Jane, The Nature of the Psyche: Its Human Expression, Amber-Allen Publishing, 1979
- ibid.
- ibid.
- Roberts, Jane, The Individual and the Nature of Mass Events, Amber-Allen Publishing, 1981
- Roberts, Jane, Dreams, Evolution and Value Fulfillment, Amber-Allen Publishing, 1986
- Roberts, Jane, The Nature of Personal Reality, Amber-Allen Publishing, 1974
- https://www.louisehay.com/
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