Louise Hay - The Times of Our Lives: Extraordinary True Stories of Synchronicity, Destiny, Meaning, and Purpose

Over the years, as Ive read the words of the authors whove contributedto this book, Ive often thought, What an incredible collection ofideas, revelations, and inspiration! Ive long wanted to present some ofthe outstanding stories within these works in one place so that you, thereader, can be as entertained, enlightened, and enthralled as Ive been.

So, within these pages, youll find some of the most fascinating trueaccounts youll ever come across. The contributors are from virtually everywalk of life and have gone through a diverse array of experiences thatwill evoke wonder, awe, laughter, tears, amazement... yes, all of theseemotions and more!

Please enjoy this book, and hopefully it will inspire you to be morecognizant of the touching, wondrous, and miraculous occurrences thatare a part of your own life.

But first, Id like to start out by sharing something very personalwith you....

Louise

W ill you tell me a little about your childhood, briefly. This is a request Ive posed to so many people who have sought my help. Its not that I need to hear all the details, but I want to get a general pattern of where theyre coming from. If they have problems now, the patterns that created them began a long time ago.

When I was a little girl of 18 months, I experienced my parents divorcing. I dont remember that as being so bad. What I do remember with horror is when my mother went to work as a live-in domestic and boarded me out. The story goes that I cried nonstop for three weeks. The people taking care of me couldnt handle that, and my mother was forced to take me back and make other arrangements. How she managed as a single parent inspires my admiration today. Then, however, all I knew and cared about was that I wasnt getting all the loving attention I once had.

Ive never been able to determine if my mother loved my stepfather or whether she just married him in order to provide a home for us. But it was not a good move. This man had been brought up in Europe in a heavy Germanic home with much brutality, and hed never learned any other way to manage a family. My mother became pregnant with my sister, and then the 1930s Depression descended upon us, and we found ourselves stuck in a home filled with violence. I was five years old.

To add to the scenario, it was just about this time that a neighbor, an old wino, as I remember it, raped me. The doctors examination is still vivid in my mind, as was the court case in which I was the star witness. The man was sentenced to 15 years in prison. I was told repeatedly, It was your fault, so I spent many years fearing that when he was released hed come and get me for being so terrible as to put him in jail.

Most of my childhood was spent enduring both physical and sexual abuse, with a lot of hard labor thrown in. My self-esteem got lower and lower, and few things seemed to go right for me. I began to express this pattern in the outside world.

There was an incident in the fourth grade that was so typical of what my life was like. We we

So, on this day we were having a party at school, and there was so much cake that, as they were cutting it, some of the kids who could have had cake almost every day were getting two or three pieces. When the teacher finally got around to me (and of course I was last), there was no cake left. Not one piece.