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| “Honor the love in your life, not the pain and not the suffering. You can heal your losses and your heart. It doesn’t have to hurt for the rest of your life.”
—Louise Hay
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Dear stuart, Louise loves celebrating her birthdays. Each year, she radiates more and more enthusiasm for life and how much it loves her. In 2011, I watched how she’d burst onto the stage during our I Can Do It Conferences that year and proclaim, “I’m 85 and very alive!”During that time, Louise partnered with Cheryl Richardson to write a book called, You Can Create an Exceptional Life. This was one of Louise’s first ventures to coauthor a book, and she loved it. Louise loved working with Cheryl and it was such a great experience for both of them. They often talked in their workshops about the positive changes that writing this book had on their lives. I’m very excited about the most recent collaboration Louise shared with another Hay House author—David Kessler. This reconnection between Louise and David resulted in one of our most powerful books about grief—You Can Heal Your Heart. Here’s how it happened. We invited David Kessler, who is one of the most well-known experts on grief and loss, to speak at one of our I Can Do It Conferences in Tampa. This was back in 2009. He had just published his first book with us, Visions, Trips and Crowded Rooms about who and what you see before you die. Louise hadn’t seen David in a number of years and was looking forward to reconnecting with him. During the conference, we were screening the film, Doors Opening, about Louise’s Hayride days and her work with people who had AIDS. You may not know this, but David was a familiar friend and advocate at the time. After a heartfelt reunion over lunch where they reminisced about the old days and caught up on their lives, Louise spoke to David about when it’s time for her to pass. Then she said, “David, I want you to be with me when I die.” When I spoke to Louise later that evening, I could see how happy she was about her conversation with David. I was happy, too, knowing that Louise would be in good hands when her time came. This usually isn’t something I like to think about. I’d rather focus on planning for Louise’s next book or her 100th birthday celebration. But as she says, “I’m now 87, healthy as I can be, and I’m living my life fully. I just want to make sure that when the time comes, I live my dying fully.” I know Louise chose well with David. That’s what he does. His mentor was Elisabeth Kübler-Ross—a pioneer in the field of death and dying and also someone who spoke at some of our early Hay House events. David was there with Marianne Williamson when her father had passed. He was with people like Anthony Perkins and Michael Landon when it was their time. Later, when I thought more about Louise’s request, David’s work and my own feelings about loss and death, I had another idea for Louise when we spoke next. “Would you like to write about grief, getting older and how we deal with the passing of our loved ones?” Louise smiled, and I knew we were on our way to something big. We contacted David, set up a lunch and began the journey to publishing You Can Heal Your Heart. Once Louise and David started exploring the many facets of grief, we decided to refine the concept and cover more areas where people experience grief and loss—including loss of a job, loss of a relationship or marriage, loss of a normal life when tragedy hits, loss of a beloved pet, and loss when a loved one passes. Louise and David really like the title of this book because it affirms their purpose for writing it—reaching out to those who are suffering a loss, helping them change their thoughts around that grief, and reminding them to honor the love, rather than the pain. “You can heal your losses and your heart. It doesn’t have to hurt for the rest of your life.” I hope you’ll keep in touch with me on my Facebook page after you read You Can Heal Your Heart. I’d like to hear more about what you've learned in your personal experience. My best wishes Reid Tracy | ||
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Are You Grieving a Past Relationship? by Louise Hay and David Kessler The following is an excerpt from Louise Hay and David Kessler’s new book, You Can Heal Your Heart. Copyright © February 4, 2014 (Hay House). In the movies, when the main character falls in love with someone but the affection isn’t returned, he or she keeps pursuing that unrequited love. And in the end, the target of affection—usually at a big dressed-up public event—realizes that the main character is indeed the one! But in real life, most say, “No thanks,” or “Sorry, you’re not my type.” What is your thinking in that situation? She doesn’t want me, but someday she will. Or perhaps, I will make him love me, or I will get him one day. Can you just accept the truth? Why let your fairy-tale thinking manipulate the situation? This is a moment when you’re struggling and should be grieving. Can you grieve the disappointment fully and be done? Why chase someone who doesn’t want you? Why would you want to bring that kind of neediness into your consciousness? Instead, consider the following affirmations:
The grief you feel at the end of a relationship is sometimes a misperception that things didn’t work out and that your life is going wrong. Of course the loneliness hurts after a relationship ends, but allowing your thinking to focus only on the loneliness will make you even more miserable. Acknowledge it, and be open to more positive thoughts entering your consciousness. Take a look at your grief, and ask yourself, If everything is unfolding as it is supposed to, what else am I feeling? If you can separate yourself from the grief of the relationship, you can drop into a deep inner cavern of an old wound and then finally rid yourself of it. Under the grief, you may discover an abandonment issue that’s repeating itself—perhaps a perceived rejection from a parent when you were young, or a first love that spurned you. The healing of these inner wounds won’t necessarily guarantee that you’ll get your next relationship right. But you may find the clarity to understand that relationships never really go wrong. If you find that ending a relationship is extremely hard, just know that you aren’t alone. Most people know how to begin and end relationships, but rarely learn how to complete them. Every relationship is assigned to you for your healing. Grief after any relationship gives you the window to heal your wounds and begin anew. Each relationship gives you an opportunity to face your fear and anger. But more important, they give you the chance to come closer to authentic healing and true love. Ultimately, relationships, with their mysterious and wonderful forces, are our guides, teaching us all to love and honor one another—as well as ourselves. They may never produce the long-lasting emotional fix we may have hoped for, but in grief, after they end, they remind us that we are not broken or incomplete, and they can deliver us to healing. We let go of our earth-made agendas in loving relationships. We cast aside questions of who will love us and for how long. We transcend all breakups to find a love that is magical and divine, created by a force greater than us, just for us. Many times a relationship doesn’t fit your expectations. It’s so easy to judge that the person or even the relationship is wrong. You say to yourself, That was just a waste of time, but there is no waste in the Universe. If the Universe had sent you an amazingly sweet, loving person, and your consciousness was not ready for it, then that person would simply not have been right for you in that time. The individual in front of you right now—the relationship, the situation—was divinely designed for your healing. When you accept that he or she was the right person for this time in your life, you’ll plant sacred seeds that will heal you in ways you cannot begin to imagine.
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Immersing myself in this book made me feel in a way that I will always remember. It made me feel a wide range of emotions from anger to frustration to sadness to despair to joy to appreciation for the endless miracles that surround us—and it made me feel hope, hope for a far better world. And finally, it made me feel love because the book you are about tofeel is not a story of rage and revenge as one could well understand in the face of such a horrific experience as the one that took place at Sandy Hook Elementary School where Scarlett's little boy Jesse was senselessly murdered. No, this is truly a love story, a story that clearly sends the message that love itself never ends and that it is our destiny as a people to learn and apply this lesson even in the face of circumstances that are beyond comprehension.
I’m going to be 87 next week. I choose to see my life moving in different directions, all of them equally good. Some things are even better now than the way they were in my youth. My younger years were filled with fear; my todays are filled with confidence.
