CHENNAI: Patricia Crane met Louise L Hay, the world-renowned motivational speaker, and best-selling author, 31 years ago, during a one-week intensive workshop on personal growth. And it changed her life!
“I had read other spiritual books, but when I read Louise’s book, You can heal your life, she brought all aspects — the spiritual, emotional, mental and physical — together within me, in a beautiful way,” explains Lousie.
Since then, Patricia started assisting Louise Hay in her workshops and a few years later, partnered with Rick Nichols, whom she met and fell in love with at a church bookstore. “I realised he’s the one. It was a message from God,” smiles Patricia, while Rick laughs.
When G L Sampoorna (a Heal Your Life Teacher Trainer in India for five years), who trained under them, invited the couple to India, they were more than happy to oblige. Training teachers around the world, the couple have noticed a shift in the world’s appreciation of spirituality. “When we first started, people were fairly new to spirituality and personal growth. But now, just by seeing the kind of people who come for our training, we see that there has been a huge shift!” explains Patricia.
They now receive people for training from around 71 countries, the most recent from Saudi Arabia. “So that’s a huge breakthrough for us!”she laughs.The foundation of Lousie L Hay’s spiritual philosophy is to ‘love yourself’, and therefore allow yourself to love others. And as that sounds easier said than done, Louise lays out techniques to do so. “Like understanding your past, mirror work, releasing anger and forgiveness work, gratitude work — this is basically it, in a nutshell” shares Patricia.
It takes a lot of work, every day. For example, walking the labyrinth for a stone ritual. “The idea of a labyrinth is to follow the path that takes you inward, and to discover, perhaps, a piece of yourself you never met before,” Rick explains.
Affirmations are also a big part of this philosophy. Positive, personal present-tense statements about what you would like to create in your life — like health, prosperity, relationships etc. “Affirmations really work. It has worked for us!” Patricia assures.And as clichéd as it may sound, it does start with loving yourself, Rick continues, explaining a mirror exercise. He looks into a handheld mirror and says ‘I love you’, and Patricia and Sampoorna follow. “You condition yourself to love yourself just the way you are, with all your flaws,” he says.
So what keeps them going? “I got into this field of work because I wanted to understand myself, and my life better. And my motivation now, is to continue to spread the beautiful message for people to heal their lives and experience more love, which is required more so now than ever,” says Patricia.
GL Sampoorna has been a Heal Your Life workshop leader for 15 years. She conducts workshops at her newly opened centre in Chennai. For details, call 9840230151