Louise Hay
DATE: August 26, 1986
By Marc Sandalow, SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE
SECTION: NEWS, EDITION: FINAL, Page: 3
A “metaphysical healer” who has emerged as the latest gay cult figure came to San Francisco last night to preach that people can fight AIDS with positive thought.
Louise Hay, a lecturer from Santa Monica, drew a crowd of 700 to meditate and hug at a two-hour “AIDS Healing Service” at Grace Cathedral. In a soothing and reassuring voice. Hay gave the largely gay throng the hopeful message she has delivered on the tapes, books and video cassettes that are selling briskly among optimism-starved homosexuals facing the deadly epidemic.
“Don’t believe the garbage you read in the media . . . because they’re convincing you that AIDS is 100-percent fatal,” Hay said, “and that’s not true.” Hay, who says she defeated terminal cancer eight years ago without medical assistance, did not urge her audience to forsake conventional medicine, suggesting that her “visualization” techniques be used in addition to traditional therapy.
“We don’t guarantee healing,” she said. “I’ve been to too many memorial services.”
Those who attempt her “alternative therapy,” she said, are doing much better than those who do not.
“The most important thing is to love yourself. It’s as simple as looking in the mirror and saying `I love you,’ ” she said.
Noting that drug users, hemophiliacs and homosexuals comprise the highest AIDS risk groups, Hay suggested that the disease may be related to low self-esteem.”
It makes sense in a way that it would happen here first,” she said, referring to the oppression and guilt felt by some homosexuals.
Hay introduced the audience to a member of her weekly seminar in Hollywood, who said he conquered AIDS through “meditation, relaxation and healing imagery.”
“I worked at it real hard and within three months the lesions had disappeared,” said Louie Nassanny, a bodybuilder, who says he is now free of the virus.
Preaching unconditional love as a necessary ingredient for healing, Hays urged members of the audience to “hug everyone you can on the way out.”There seemed to be few cynics in the hugging free-for-all that followed the lecture.”
I was kind of skeptical, but I came here out of curiousity and a feeling like there’s nothing to lose,” said 44-year-old Michael Hill, who learned in February that he suffered from AIDS-Related Conditions, or ARC, a milder form of infection with the AIDS virus.
“This really nothing substantial that (medicine) can do for me,” he said. “This seems like it would really help in the absence of anything else.”
Caption: SantaMonica lecturer Louise Hay spoke to 700 at Grace Cathedral in S.F. last night, saying AIDS may be related to low self-esteem.
Note from Mike Zonta: This event was one of the monthly AIDS Healing Services sponsored by the Metaphysical Alliance. And this is the opening meditation I gave that night:
“Let us remember what we are here for. We are at this moment joining with hundreds, perhaps thousands, of others in this time zone to pray or meditate for people diagnosed with AIDS or AIDS-related conditions. So let us now in our minds, in our imaginations, connect with those hundreds, perhaps thousands, of other people in this time zone. Now let us connect in our minds, in our imaginations, with those thousands of people in the rest of the world who are also joining with us in this daily meditation. Now let us connect with all the people in the world who have been diagnosed with AIDS or AIDS-related conditions throughout this country, Europe, Africa, and the whole world. Remember that we are only imagining a connection in our minds because really we have only imagined a separation from each other in the first place. We know, metaphysically speaking, that there is only one mind. That which we call self or ego is only a concoction of our imaginations. So we have to use what I call reverse imagination in order to understand the truth of our situation. In our concoction of ourselves as being separate entities, separate egos, separate selves, we have created a dis-eased situation. We have placed our trust in our imagined reality, our constructed selves. So whether we have been diagnosed with the disease called AIDS or not, we are all in a state of dis-ease until we use our reverse imagination in order to remember what we have forgotten.
“So let’s do that now. Let us use our reverse imagination to try to remember our real selves. Let us remember here and now our God being. If you don’t remember your God being, or if you never remember having been touched, if you will, by your higher self, your God self, then imagine it now. God doesn’t really have hands or arms except through us, but let us imagine the hand of God. Let us imagine being touched now by the hand of God. Let us imagine being embraced by the arms of God as you would embrace a lover. Let it be a mutual embrace. God is your lover. And you are God’s lover. There is no disease in God’s love of you. There is no disease in your love of God. You and God are one and the same being. The very being of God is the very being of all of us. There are no imagined selves, no imagined diseases. There is only love. There is only God and you in a lover’s embrace.
“So let us imagine now the consummation of our love for God, of God’s love for us. [Pause.] We have just made love with God. And we can do this any time we want to. That’s why we have each other. This is the truth that heals. This is the love that heals. The truth that we are divine. We are God and there is nothing but God. Realization of this fact makes me this moment whole. I am God. I am love. I am this moment at one with all life, with all being. I am well. And so it is.”
–m..z