Say your name

"The point of power is always in the present moment." Louise Hay wrote that, and she had earned it.

She grew up poor, left home at fifteen, and in her fifties was diagnosed with cancer. In 1984 she wrote You Can Heal Your Life, started a publishing house that went on to publish half the people in this chamber, and lived to ninety. The book is partly a list, an emotional pattern for every ailment and an affirmation to replace it, and some of that is a stretch. Vault Human says so and keeps the practice underneath, because the practice is the real thing.

Here it is. She had people stand in front of a mirror, look themselves in the eye, and say their own name with the words "I love you." Most people could not do it on the first try. They laughed, or looked away, or got angry, or cried. That flinch is why she is in the first month. The flinch is information about the relationship you have with the person you spend every minute of your life with.

Hay's teaching is that the thoughts you repeat become the beliefs you live inside, and that most of them were installed before you were ten by people who were repeating their own. Her method is to say the new sentence to your own face, daily, until the flinch goes. Self-approval, she said, is a skill, not a mood. You can be out of it the way you can be out of shape, and you get it back the same way: by reps.

Two sentences were the hardest for her clients. "I approve of myself." And "I am willing to change." Both are the whole business of this month.

Most people get through their name fine. It's the second half that comes out like a question. That's useful to know.