by Louise Hay
As with everything else, first we must become aware in order to make changes. In the same way that we do our mental housecleaning so that we can change, we are doing the same thing with Mother Earth.
We are beginning to see our earth as a whole, living, breathing organism, an entity, a being unto itself. It breathes. It has a heartbeat. It takes care of its children. It provides everything here that we could possibly need. It’s totally balanced. If you spend a day in the forest or somewhere in nature, you can see how all the systems on the planet work perfectly. It’s set up to live out its existence in absolute, perfect equilibrium and harmony.
So here we are, great mankind who knows so much, and we are doing our very best to destroy the planet by disrupting this balance and harmony. Our greed gets in the way to an enormous extent. We think we know best, and through ignorance and greed we are destroying the living, breathing organism of which we are a part. If we destroy earth, where are we going to live?
I know that when I talk to people about caring more for the planet, they become overwhelmed by the problems we are encountering now. It seems that just one person doing something will not affect anything in the entire scheme of things. But that is not so. If everyone did a little it would wind up being a lot. You may not be able to see the effects right in front of you, but believe me, Mother Earth feels it collectively.
We have a little table set up to sell books at my aids support group. Recently we ran out of bags to put products in, so I thought I would start saving the bags I received when I was out shopping. At first, I thought, “Oh, you won’t have that many bags by the end of the week,” but boy, was I mistaken! I had bags coming out of my ears! One of my workers experienced the same thing. He said he had no idea how many bags a week he used until he started saving them. And when you put that in terms of Mother Earth, that’s quite a few trees we’re cutting down just to use for one or two hours, because we usually end up throwing the bags away. If you don’t believe me, just try it for one week: save all the bags you receive and just be aware of how many you use.
Now I have a cloth shopping bag that I use and if I am shopping and have forgotten to bring it, I ask for a big bag and as I shop at other stores, I put my merchandise in one bag instead of collecting several. No one has ever looked at me twice for doing it. It just seems so sensible.
In Europe they have been using cloth shopping bags for a long time. A friend of mine from England visited and loved to go shopping at the supermarkets here because he wanted to carry the paper bags home. He thought they were very American and very chic. It may be a cute tradition, but the truth is we have to start thinking globally and consider the effects that these little traditions have on our environment.
American’s particularly have a thing about the packaging of products. When I was in Mexico a few years ago, I visited a traditional market place and was fascinated by the unvarnished fruits and vegetables that were laid out. They certainly weren’t as pretty as the ones we have in the states, but they looked natural and healthy to me, however some of the people I was with thought they looked terrible and unappealing.
In another part of the market there were open bins with powdered spices in it. Again it fascinated me because all the bins next to each other looked so bright and colorful. My friends said that they would never buy any spices from an open bin like that and I asked, “Why?” They said because it wasn’t clean. When I asked why again, the answer came back that it was because it wasn’t in a package. I had to laugh. Where did they think the spices were before they were put in a package? We have become so used to having things presented to us in a certain way that it’s hard to accept it if we don’t have all the frills and pretty packaging attached to it.
Let’s be willing to see where we can make small adjustments for the sake of the environment. Even if all you do is buy a cloth shopping bag, or turn the water tap off while you brush your teeth, you have contributed a great deal by doing it.
At my office, we conserve as much as possible. There’s a maintenance man in our building who picks up our recyclable copy paper every week and takes it to the recycling plant. We reuse padded envelopes. We use recycled paper in our books whenever possible, even though it costs a little more. Sometimes, it isn’t possible to get, but we always ask for it anyway as we realize that if we continue to ask for it, eventually enough printers will have it available. It works that way in all areas of conservation. By creating a demand for something, we can help heal the planet in different ways as a collective power.
At home I am an organic gardener and make compost for the garden. Every piece of used vegetation goes into that compost pile. Not a lettuce leaf nor a leaf from a tree leaves my property. I believe in returning to the land what is taken away. I have a few friends who even save their vegetable trimmings for me. They put them into a bag in the freezer and when they visit they put their collection into my compost bin. What goes in as trash, comes out as rich earth filled with nourishment for plants. Because of my recycling practices, my garden produces lavishly for all my needs and is beautiful too.
Eat Nourishing Foods
Our planet is designed to give us every single thing we need to take care of ourselves. It has all the food we need. If we eat the foods of the planet, we’re going to be healthy because it is part of the natural design. However, we, in our great intelligence, have designed foods such as Twinkles, and we wonder why our health isn’t so good. A lot of us give lip service to diets. We say, “Yes, we know,” as we reach for one sugar-filled treat after another. Two generations ago when Betty Crocker or Clarence Birdseye or whomever, came out with the first convenience-type food, we said, “Oh, isn’t this wonderful!” Then came another and another and another, until generations later, there are people in this country who have never tasted real food. Everything is canned, processed, frozen, chemicalized, and, ultimately, micro waved.
I recently read that the young people in the military today do not have the healthy immune systems that youths had 20 years ago. If we don’t give our body natural foods, which it needs to build and repair itself, how can we expect it to last a lifetime? Add to this: drugs, cigarettes, and alcohol abuse, a dose of self-hatred, and you have the perfect climate for disease to flourish.
I had a very interesting experience recently. I took something called a “Responsible Driver’s Course.” It was filled with people over 55 years of age who were there ostensibly to get 3 to 10 percent off their auto insurance. I really found it fascinating that we spent the whole morning talking about illness—all the illnesses we could look forward to as we grow older. We talked about diseases of the eyes and everything that could go wrong with our ears and our hearts. When lunchtime came, 90 percent of these same people ran across the street to the nearest fast-food restaurant.
I thought to myself, we still don’t get it, do we? One thousand people a day die from smoking. That’s 365,000 people a year. I understand that over 500,000 people die from cancer each year. A million people die from heart attacks every year. A million people! Knowing this, why do we still run out to fast-food restaurants and pay so little attention to our bodies?
Healing Ourselves and Our Planet
Part of the catalyst for this transitional period is the crisis of aids. The aids crisis is showing how unloving and prejudiced we are toward one another. We treat people with aids with such little compassion. One of the things that I would really like to see happen on this planet, and I want to help create this, is a world where it is safe for us to love each other.
When we were little, we wanted to be loved for who we were, even if we were too skinny or too fat, too ugly, or too shy. We come to this planet to learn unconditional love—first to have it for ourselves, and then to give the same unconditional love to other people. We need to get rid of this idea of them and us. There is no them and us; there is only us. There are no groups that are expendable or less than.
Every one of us has a list of those people over there. We can’t really be spiritua
l as long as there is one person over there. Many of us grew up in families where prejudice was normal and natural. This group or that group was not good enough. In order to make ourselves feel better, we would put the other group down. However, as long as we are saying that someone else isn’t good enough, what we’re really reflecting is that we’re not good enough. Remember, we’re all mirrors of each other.
I remember when I was invited to The Oprah Winfrey Show. I appeared on TV with five people with aids who were doing quite well. The six of us had met the evening before for dinner, and it was such an incredibly powerful gathering. When we sat down to have dinner, the energy was extraordinary. I started to cry because this was something I had been striving for for several years—to get a positive message out to the American public that there is hope. These people were healing themselves, and it wasn’t easy. The medical community told them that they were going to die. They had to experiment with many different methods by trial and error, and they were willing to expand and go beyond their own limitations.
We taped the next day, and it was a beautiful show. I was pleased that women with aids were also represented on the show. I wanted Middle America to open their hearts and to realize that aids doesn’t affect a group that they don’t care about. It affects everybody. When I came out, Oprah said to me off-camera, “Louise, Louise, Louise,” and came up to me and gave me a big hug.
I believe we relayed the message of hope that day. I’ve heard Dr. Bernie Siegel say that there is someone who has healed his or herself of every form of cancer. So there is always hope, and hope gives us possibilities. There is something to work towards instead of throwing up our hands and saying there’s nothing that can be done.
The aids virus is just doing its thing—being what it is. It breaks my heart to realize that there will be more and more heterosexual people who are going to die from aids because the government and the medical profession are not moving fast enough. As long as aids is perceived as a “gay” disease, it will not receive the attention it urgently needs, so how many “straight” people will have to die before it’s considered a legitimate illness?
I think the faster we all put away our prejudices and work for a positive solution to this crisis, the faster the whole planet will heal. However, we can’t heal the planet if we allow people to suffer. To me, aids is very much a part of the pollution of the planet. Do you realize that dolphins off the coast of California are dying of immune deficiency diseases? I don’t believe it’s because of their sexual practices. We’ve been polluting our lands so that a lot of the vegetation is unfit to eat. We are killing the fish in our waters. We are polluting our air, so now there is acid rain and a hole in the ozone layer. And we continue polluting our bodies.
Aids is a terrible, terrible disease, yet the numbers of people who are dying from aids are far fewer than those who are dying from cancer, smoking, and heart disease. We search for ever-more potent poisons to kill the diseases we create, yet we don’t want to change our lifestyles and diets. We either want some drug to suppress our illness, or we want to surgically remove it, rather than heal it. The more we suppress, the more that problems manifest in other ways. It’s even more incredible to learn that medicine and surgery only take care of 10 percent of all disease. That’s right. Even with all the money we spend on chemicals, radiation, and surgery, they only help 10 percent of our diseases!
I read an article that said that the diseases in the next century will be caused by new strains of bacteria that will affect our weakened immune systems. These bacteria strains have begun to mutate, so that the drugs we have now will have no effect upon them. Obviously, the more we build up our immune systems, the quicker we are going to heal ourselves and the planet. And I’m not only referring to our physical immune systems; I mean our mental and emotional immune systems as well.
To me, healing and curing bring about two different results. I think healing needs to be a team effort. If you expect your doctor to fix you, he or she may take care of the symptoms; however, that doesn’t heal the problem. Healing is making yourself whole. To be healed, you must be a part of the team, you and your doctor or health care professional. There are many holistic M.D.'s who not only treat you physically, but who see you as a whole person.
We have been living with erroneous belief systems, not only individual ones, but societal ones as well. There are people who say that earaches run in their family. Others believe that when they go out in the rain, they catch cold, or they get three colds every winter. Or, when someone catches a cold in the office, everyone gets a cold because it’s contagious. “Contagious” is an idea, and the idea is contagious.
A lot of people talk about disease being hereditary. I don’t think that’s necessarily so. I think that what we pick up are the mental patterns of our parents. Children are very aware. They begin to imitate their parents, even their illnesses. If a father tightens his colon every time he feels angry, the child picks up on that. It’s no wonder that when the father gets colitis years later, the child get colitis, too. Everyone knows that cancer is not contagious, yet why does it run in families? Because the patterns of resentment run in families. Resentment builds and builds until finally there is cancer.
We must allow ourselves to be aware of everything so that we can make conscious, intelligent choices. Some things may horrify us (which is part of the awakening process), but then we can do something about them. Everything in the Universe from child abuse and aids, to the homeless situation and starvation, needs our love. A tiny child who is loved and appreciated will become a strong, self-assured adult. The planet, which has everything here for us and all of life, if we allow it to be itself, will take care of us always. Let’s not think about our past limitations.
Let’s open ourselves to the potential of this incredible decade. We can make these final 10 years of the century a time of healing. We have the Power within us to clean up—clean our bodies, our emotions, and all the various messes we have made. We can look around and see what needs care. The way each of us chooses to live will have a tremendous impact on our future and on our world.
For the Highest Good of All
You can take this time to apply your personal growth methods to the entire planet. If you just do things for the planet and not for yourself, then you’re not in balance. If you only work for yourself and stop there, then that’s not balanced either.
So let’s see how we can begin to balance ourselves and the environment. We know that our thoughts shape and create our lives. We don’t always live the philosophy totally; nonetheless, we’ve accepted the basic premise. If we want to change our immediate world, we must change our thinking. If we want to change the greater world around us, we need to change our thinking about it, not viewing it as them and us.
If all the effort you put out in complaining about what’s wrong with the world is applied to positive affirmations and visualizations of the world, you could begin to turn things around. Remember, every time you use your mind, you are connecting to like-minded people. If you inflict judgment, criticism, and prejudice on others, you are connecting to all the other people who are doing the same. However, if you are meditating, visualizing peace, loving yourself, and loving the planet, you are connecting with these kinds of people. You could be at home, bed-ridden, and still help to heal the planet by the way you use your mind—by practicing inner peace. I heard Robert Schuller of the United Nations once say, “The human species needs to know that we deserve to have peace. “ How true those words are.
If we can make our young people aware of what is happening in the world and give them options as to what they can do about it, then we can really begin to see a shift in consciousness. Teaching our children early about conservation efforts is one way to reassure them that important work is being done. Even though some adults still won’t take responsibility for what is going on in the world around them, we can assure our children that more and more people throughout the world are becoming aware of the long-term effects of gl
obal pollution and are striving to change the situation. Becoming involved as a family in an ecological foundation such as Greenpeace or Earth-save is wonderful, as it is never too soon to impress upon children that we all have to accept responsibility for the good of our planet.
I recommend that you read John Robbins’ book, Diet For A New America. I find it so interesting that John Robbins, heir to the Baskin-Robbins ice cream business, is doing his best to help create a holistic and peaceful planet. It’s wonderful to know that some of the children of people who exploit the health of the nation turn around and do things to help the planet.
Volunteer groups are also helping to take over where the government is falling short. If the government won’t help heal our environment, we can’t sit around and wait. We have to get together on a grass roots level and take care of it. We can all do our part. Start to find out where you can help. Volunteer where you can. Give one hour a month if you can’t do anything else.
We are definitely on the cutting edge of the forces that are going to help heal this planet. We are at a point right now where we can all go down the tubes or we can heal the planet. It isn’t up to them, it’s up to us, individually and collectively.
I see more opportunities for a blending of the scientific technologies of the past and the future with the spiritual truths of yesterday, today, and tomorrow. It is time that these elements come together. By understanding that acts of violence come from a person who is a traumatized child, we could combine our knowledge and technologies to help them change. We don’t perpetuate violence by starting wars or throwing people in prisons and forgetting them. Instead, we encourage self-awareness, self-esteem, and self-love. The tools for transformation are available; we just have to use them.