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• Ms. Hay's official site
• You Can Heal Your Life
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Full Interview. (23:10)
 

Tavis: I am both pleased and honored to welcome Louise Hay to this program, the founder of Hay House publishers and is also a best-selling author in her own right with books that include "You Can Heal Your Life." That book is available in paperback now and has sold, get this, more than 30 million copies around the world. A DVD based on the book is also available now and I am pleased to say welcome to the program, Louise Hay.

Louise Hay: Well thank you very much.

Tavis: It's an honor to have you here.

Hay: It's an honor to be here.

Tavis: It's funny; my producer, Neil, and I were just comparing notes before we walked on the set. We list who our upcoming guests are, and I don't know that I have received as much communiqué as I have about any upcoming guest as I have about the fact that Louise Hay is coming on. I think part of it has to do with the fact that you don't do a lot of this. People don't get a chance to really see you in an interview setting.

Hay: Well, that's true, that's true - I'm retired. I'm 81, and having fun - lots of fun.

Tavis: (Laughs) One, you don't look 81, and two, I know better than that. You are really not retired. You still work awfully hard.

Hay: Well, I decided this is going to be the best decade of my entire life so far.

Tavis: What makes you say that this is going to be the best decade?

Hay: Because it is. I just feel it. Life has wonderful things in store for me.

Tavis: How is it that you live a life - and this question may sound a little strange, but a lot of folk don't have this experience, where they live a life where they can declare that the decade in front of them will be better than their biggest hits.

Hay: We can all do that. We just have to make a choice. We have to decide what it's going to be.

Tavis: Why so few conversations like this for you? You mentioned earlier you retired, but again, you but you don't do a lot of this. Why make yourself not more accessible?

Hay: I just do what life brings to me at the moment. I know life has a lot of things in store for me in the future and will bring to me, like my movie and like being here. Life brings it to me.

Tavis: Just brings it to you, yeah. You are regarded as really one of the founders -

Hay: I was one of the early crazy ones. (Laughter) Well that's why I had to do my own book, because I knew nobody would publish it in those days.

Tavis: You say that facetiously. I wasn't going to call you one of the crazy ones. I was going to be a little bit nicer and say that you have been given credit for being one of the founders of what is now a multibillion dollar self-help industry.

Hay: Absolutely.

Tavis: How did you -

Hay: When I wrote my first book there was no self-help section in the bookstores, and now it's the fastest growing one in all the bookstores.

Tavis: You're 81, as you mentioned now, so you've been at this for a long time.

Hay: Quite a while.

Tavis: How did that happen for you? What created this?

Hay: Well, it unfolded. One day I heard somebody say, "If you're willing to change your thinking, you can change your life." And I thought, really? Really? Is that possible? So I started to explore, and I came upon a book very early in my career by Frances Scovel Shin called "The Game of Life and How to Play It."

It was written in 1926, which was the year I was born, and I identified with her very much because she was very strong and affirmative and she was into affirmations, and that meant a lot to me, that book, at the time. And I kept studying and learning, and as I learned I would teach other people. I'm a big-mouth.

Tavis: When you say that you were one of the early crazy ones, I know what you meant by that. Talk to me about how, back then, this burgeoning industry was in fact regarded as a bit crazy, a bit out of touch.

Hay: Well, it wasn't a burgeoning industry at the time, it was just a few teachers saying things, and I was one of the early ones saying that if you're willing to change your thinking, you can change your life, your thoughts, create your reality. And nobody understood that at the time, but it was something that I understood very quickly.

So I started to study more and more and more and change my own life. My own life became much better. I started to get what I call the green lights and the parking places - the little things first. And the more I studied and the more I practiced and the more I was willing to forgive and to appreciate life and to have a lot of gratitude, the more my life changed for the better.

Tavis: What do you make of the fact that what you've just suggested now seems in our contemporary world so commonplace? Back to the point earlier, it's a multibillion industry now. Everybody believes if you can change your thoughts, you can change your life.

Hay: Well, not everybody.

Tavis: Well, not literally everybody, but a whole lot of people do.

Hay: A whole lot of people do.

Tavis: As evidenced again by the size of the self-help section in any bookstore you walk into now. The question I want to get to, though, Louise, is what you think changed in the world that we live or what changed inside of us that made it not crazy, but indeed rather commonplace?

Hay: Yes, well, we learned that it was true. And I think that people started to practice and do simple little things that made their life - improved the quality of their lives, as I call it. Some people use this to get things, but it's no good getting things if you don't change your consciousness, because things don't make you happy. Only for a very short period of time.

But when you can be at peace with life, when you can enjoy who you are, when you can feel safe, when you can feel just calm and easy, that's very wonderful. It's worth more than money.

Tavis: Take me back to the early part of your journey. One of the things about your being so chronologically gifted - (laughter).

Hay: Yes?

Tavis: Yeah, one of the things about that is that we often forget how you actually got started. Take me back to your youth and the travails, and the situation that you found yourself in.

Hay: Yes, my life was wonderful until 18 months, and then everything hit the fan. And I had a very strong, brutal childhood. I had sexual abuse; I had a lot of heavy things when I was very young. And so I grew up to be a person who didn't believe in myself and thought I was no good, thought I was worthless, and also having a lot of resentment. And not realizing what I was thinking or what I was doing or how it was affecting my life.

Tavis: Not that you, obviously, were the only person to endure that kind of maltreatment back then, but again, it's much more commonplace now for personalities to talk about those kind of experiences in books, on TV, in speeches.

Hay: See, when we grew up we felt there was something wrong with us and we felt ashamed of it. That was why it happened, we were bad. But now we're realizing that we weren't. We just were in circumstances, and we needed to come out of them or we found a way to have an opportunity to come out of those circumstances.

Tavis: So because it is so, again, commonplace now for personalities of your stature to talk about these kinds of issues, what was it like then when you decided to come out and talk about these things publicly?

Hay: Oh, well, see, it didn't matter to me because I had been so ingrained as a child that I was no good and wrong, there was no shame or anything. It was just this is what happened and this is where I am and this is what I'm doing.

Tavis: But choosing to share that with the world in the pages of a book, though, that's a pretty bold statement.

Hay: Well the thing was, I was teaching workshops at the time and I said to myself, if I could just put this workshop on paper, I could help more people. Little did I know how many millions more people, but I did. I took a little time off and I put the workshop into book form, and I had no idea that life would take it where it has taken it. Life said, "This book must go out."

Tavis: What do you make of the fact that given how this particular book, "You Can Heal Your Life," after all these years, 30 million copies sold around the world, clearly it's resonating with a lot of people. What does that say to you about the pain that so many people are enduring privately?

Hay: Well it's true. We all have pain of one sort or another, even those who had very wonderful lives. We all carry some sort of pain. But it's wonderful when we can find out that we're not wrong, we're not bad, we are good enough, we're worthy of opening our life and having a better life, and we can - we can all see life in a different way. We can start to look in a different way.

Tavis: Is there a conflict for you between this notion? I don't want to put too much terminology on it, I don't want to color it too much, but is there conflict for you, Louise, in believing that if you think it, if you dream it, if you call it down, you can make it happen, is there a conflict between believing that and believing that there is a god who sits high and looks low and really does have everything under his control? I'm trying to get at whether or not it's really in his control or is it in our control?

Hay: Well I think of life as a boomerang: what you give out, you're going to get back, just like every time you throw a boomerang out, it's going to come right back at you. And so what we believe about ourselves and about life is going to become true for us.

Now, if you want to put God into the equation, that's wonderful. But I don't see God as an old man sitting on a cloud watching my genitals. I do not see that version of God. I see a force, I see an energy, I call it the universe.

Tavis: I want to go back to the beginning again, the beginning of your success. How did that particular train of thought, that school of thought, how did that (unintelligible) to you? In other words, how did people take you to saying that then, in a world, in a country, that has as our credo "In God We Trust?"

Hay: Well, not everybody believes that. See, I never use the word god, and it was very interesting because as a child, I had absolutely no religious background at all. No upbringing. So I had nothing to unlearn. And when I discovered or accepted that there was a universal power and an energy, that made sense to me. So when I talk, I very seldom use the word god.

Tavis: How did that, when you first started, and how does that now resonate or not resonate when you don't so often use the word god?

Hay: I don't think about it. I really don't think about it. If somebody wants - I say you can talk about God, you can talk about energy, the universe, whatever you want to.

Tavis: What is it in your doing this for so many years and your study here and your training people around the world, what is it that keeps most of us stuck in the places that we are in? What is it that, if I can put it this way, keeps us most of us living in places where we block those blessings coming into our lives?

Hay: Because we don't believe we deserve them. We think we're not good enough. If you ask somebody what they want - what is it you really want? What they usually say to you is well, I don't want this, and they give you a whole list of what they don't want. They don't think about what it is they do want.

But if you tell the universe what you don't want, then how can the universe bring good things to you? Because the list, what you're giving out is not wrong - remember, it's that boomerang.

Tavis: Other than Tavis writing a list of things that he wants, are there things in my life I have to do beyond that to call those things down? The reason why I say that is because any person, good or bad, good or evil, could put together a list of things that he or she wants, but if you live a life of, as my grandmother would say, if you live a life of devilment -

Hay: Well then you're going to get devilment back, because that's the boomerang.

Tavis: That's what I want to get at.

Hay: Remember. But I think that you can change that if you're willing to change some of your beliefs. What is it you believe about yourself that's not uplifting? And also, it's also who do you need to forgive? We all have people we need to forgive, and that doesn't mean to condone poor behavior, but it's to release us from the bondage from what somebody has done to us.

Tavis: So forgiveness for you then, in terms of healing oneself, is sacrosanct? It has to be?

Hay: I think it's important. I think a lot of people will do affirmations and say, "Oh, well, nothing's happening, nothing's happening." And well, there's two things. One, how many times do you do the affirmations, and how many times do you do the grunge thinking that so many people are into most of the day? And the other thing is, who do you need to forgive? Because often we have this little thing here we're going to hold onto and we're not going to let go, but that doesn't help us in any way.

Tavis: It's not lost to me that we have just commemorated, as opposed to celebrating, commemorated the fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq.

Hay: Oh, yes.

Tavis: I see the disgust on your face already.

Hay: Yes, yes, yes, yes.

Tavis: I raise that because it's at least clear to me that we live in a world that in many ways is more gripped by fear now than when you started. Talk to me about trying to navigate healing ourselves, living better lives, in a world that is so gripped, again, so frozen by fear?

Hay: Well, we can only live in our own little world. We can only live here, really. You can be frightened of all that out there, but you're living here. And what sort of thoughts are you having in your own world? See, I don't believe that we have to be in fear. I really don't.

One of the things that I'd like to teach people, when there's a problem - and we all have problems, not all of us can deal with the world and war, but we can deal with our own problems - when a problem comes up, one of the best things to say is, "All is well, everything is working out from my highest good, and out of this situation, this so-called problem, only good will come, and I am safe."

And you know, this is something that's very powerful. All is well; everything is working out for my highest good. Out of this experience, only good will come, and I am safe. And what that does, it quiets your mind down - or my mind down - long enough for the universe to find a solution for the so-called problem.

Tavis: But what about the person watching right now who is saying, "Louise Hay, I love you and I'm glad to hear you say that, but Louise, with all due respect, right now in my life, you don't know - all is not well. Everything is not working out for my good. I do not feel safe right now. No matter how many times I say that, all is not well in my life right now."

Hay: If you say it enough times, it will become so. It really will, because you will be changing your thinking. If I have a real problem, I will babble that incessantly for innumerable times, because I know it will change the atmosphere around me. It'll change what I'm giving out. Yes, it's true that to start with that may be a terrible problem and you can't do anything about it right now.

But as you start to know that you are safe and you're in a universe that loves you? How many times a day to do people say, "The universe loves me, really loves me. And I'm so grateful and I'm so appreciative of life." And if you're a person that does that a lot, your life has to get better. It has to. Life will find little miraculous ways to bring good into your life.

Tavis: What about those persons then - I'm still with you now -

Hay: Yeah, yeah, I know.

Tavis: But what about those persons -

Hay: I'm with you.

Tavis: All right, so we're together then. That's a good thing.

Hay: Yes. (Laughs)

Tavis: What about those persons watching right now who through no fault of their own - we talked a moment ago about this being the fifth anniversary of the Iraq invasion. We also have been in a huge conversation, although not really - we've been talking about talking about race, given what Mr. Obama had to say recently.

But I think now, Louise, of persons who because of the color of their skin, in some instances because of their gender, because of their sexual orientation, because of poverty, who through fault of their own find themselves in places where again, no matter how many times they tell themselves that, to your earlier point, they live in a universe that does treat them differently because of those things. So when you call this down, I can call it down all day, it doesn't change what color I am, it doesn't change my impoverished state, it doesn't change -

Hay: No, but it'll change your belief about yourself, and when your belief about yourself changes, the way the universe reacts to you will change. I know I'm not Black, but I grew up, when I came out into the world, I had terrible, terrible feelings about myself, and I brought awful experiences to me. But when I learned different things, when I learned to use my mind for me instead of against me, it made a big difference.

Now I am not a salesperson. I don't try to force anyone to believe this. I'm a teacher. And if people want to come, I will give them ideas - lots of ideas - about things that they can do to help improve the quality of their lives. And I think it belongs everywhere. I've had people take my work into prisons. And I'm not saying everybody changes. No matter where you go, not everybody's going to change.

But if you can change a percentage, if you can get a percentage of people in any group to start seeing life in a different way and to open their consciousness, then you started something. You've really started a good process, because if two people get, it you're going to get a third and the next thing you know you have a bunch of people who have been willing to change their consciousness and they're changing their life. And if that's the way it's going to be, you can't say, "Oh, we're going to fix everything." And I think the war in Iraq is terrible. I think it's just awful.

Tavis: Let me - full disclosure here, I have an imprint, as you well know, called "Smiley Books," that's distributed by Hay House, and I thank you and Reid for that. And every time I get a chance to talk to you or see you or sit down for dinner with you, there are two things that always strike me, and I've never even said this to you, so now I confess this on national television.

One, I'm always amazed, and I think the viewer gets this now, at how positive you always are. Your outlook is always positive, and I get my batteries charged by just being in your space. So you're always positive, number one, overwhelmingly, abundantly positive. But the second thing is, and you didn't know this, but there was an occasion where we were sitting down for dinner and for a couple of reasons, even though I'm younger than you, I was struggling with this notion at that very moment of getting older.

Something had just happened to me, and I was struggling with this notion of getting older. You sit here now at 81, and you are as happy now as ever.

Hay: Oh, yes.

Tavis: Talk to me and everybody watching about the joy for you of aging - the joy of getting older.

Hay: Well, no, it's the joy of living in the moment. If I'm living in this moment - you ask me what I did yesterday, I have to look it up. (Laughter) Or I say to my secretary, "Bring me the book, what did I do yesterday?" Because I am here now, and if I want to know what I'm going to do tomorrow, I have to look it up in the book. I'm here, so it doesn't matter what age I am. I'm right here. And I'm enjoying this now.

Tavis: I like that.

Hay: Yes. (Laughter) Tomorrow's going to come and do what it does. But we're going to be here.

Tavis: So it's really that simple for you?

Hay: Well for me it is. I take good care of myself, I exercise well, I eat well, and I'm very grateful for life. I have a lot of gratitude. I say "Thank you" a lot, just out there. "Oh, thank you, that was so great." And it's my attitude towards life that makes a big difference.

Tavis: To that point of simplicity, how much of the mess that we deal with, you think, we deal with because we don't make things simple enough in our lives?

Hay: Well, simplicity helps. We make life extraordinarily complicated. We make this big soap opera, and it's really very simple. All is well.

Tavis: Everything's working for my good.

Hay: Everything's working for my highest good out of this experience, only good will come.

Tavis: And I am safe.

Hay: And I am safe. Safety is important. It helps you relax.

Tavis: A lot of people, though, in the world that we live, don't feel safe in this country and around the world.

Hay: I know. I know that. I know. But if we can get little pockets of safety, they will grow.

Tavis: Talk to me in the time I have left about this burgeoning, blossoming, ever-growing company called Hay House that you had no idea would ever start when you did your first book self-published. How did this Hay House empire come to be?

Hay: Well it didn't start as an empire, it started as one little book that I wrote, and I didn't believe the big boys would publish it or print it, or they'd change it if they tried to. So I printed it myself, and then I did another little book, and then I did a tape. And then one day I printed somebody else's book, and that's when you become a publisher. But it all started very, very small - very small.

Tavis: Has the mission over the years changed from when you first started?

Hay: To help people, it's always been that. I have never said, "If I do this, I will make money." I've said, "How can I help more people?" And I've discovered that you cannot stop the money when you come from that space. And in the early days, I was working with people with AIDS. I was one of the first people who said, "I don't think you have to die, and I don't think you're bad. Let's see what we can do if we take a positive approach."

And I wound up on Oprah. And of course Oprah opens big doors for you, so I was on the "New York Times" bestseller list for 14 weeks. This was 20 years ago, and that started Hay House getting bigger and bigger. Now I'm back on Oprah and the "New York Times" bestseller list, and I'm now the 19th. The "New York Times" added the 14 weeks I was on 20 years ago to where I am now, and it's the same book. (Laughter) How many people can have the same book 20 years later go back on the bestseller list?

Tavis: Well I can tell you this, if not for the rest of us, certainly for Louise Hay, everything is working out for her highest good.

Hay: Damn right. (Laughter)

Tavis: And that's why I love her. This book, now out in paperback, the international bestseller, more than 30 million copies sold, "You Can Heal Your Life," by Louise Hay. Also available now on DVD. "You Can Heal Your Life."

Hay: Yes, that's the movie.

Tavis: The movie, exactly. I'm honored to have you here, good to see you.

Hay: Thank you, thank you very much

Tavis: Take care of yourself.

Hay: You too.