A Shout out to Louise Hay and John Bradshaw: Pointing me to the Master Healer, Christ

 Two things that have made a profound change in my life are the law of attraction and work with my inner child.

I see the law of attraction as more of a phenomenon more than a doctrine. I feel like I'm still in the experimentation phase with this, and I really am starting to see the power of my thoughts in shaping my life. One thing I've heard said is that you don't have to believe in the law of attraction for it to work. It just works regardless of whether you are working with it deliberately or if you are just letting your thoughts go wild and having it work according to the crazy ups and downs that are swimming around in your brain.

I definitely think our thoughts are powerful...especially f we let the negative ones stay in our head. Which is why I really love the work and dedication of Louise Hay. At a time when I was at a very low point in my life, I made the decision to start listening to her morning meditations every morning:

Best Morning Meditation Guided Meditation and Affirmations

Loving life and having a positive mindset has been a game-changer for my life, and these meditations are so good. Another one is about learning to love yourself. I love that she says that you don't have to think of yourself as a bad person in order to change or repent. You can be a good person and still decide to change. I think this is what President Nelson talks about when he says that repentance can be a joyous process. We can decide to be "a better person", "more of who we truly are", or the way I like to think of it is that we can become what God sees in us as our greatest potential. 

Louise Hay: Learn to Love yourself

The other thing I've been doing, working on healing childhood trauma, has been greatly influenced by John Bradshaw. I found his exercise of writing letters to your inner child in your dominant hand and writing back from my child self with my non-dominant hand really to be a powerful way to give a voice to a child who never had a voice. Healing the Shame that Binds You, one of his best-selling books, really stands out as the book that changed my life. I love that many of his lectures recorded. 

Healing the Shame that Binds You - part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, and part 6

When Jesus says, "suffer the little children to come unto me", I think of doing this inner child healing work. Christ is the ultimate healer, and when we work with our own selves...our own little inner child, we are becoming more like Christ. We can work on ourselves and in this way we are, as it says in Mosiah 3:19, becoming "as a child, submissive, meek, humble, patient...", but we are also, as Paul says, "putting away childish things" (1 Corinthians 13:11). Most of the dysfunction that exists in a family comes from people who have not worked through their toxic shame and therefore are triggered by their partner, their children, etc. and then act out the shame through abuse and addiction. That is what I've witnessed. 

When Jesus was asked who the greatest was in the kingdom of heaven, he pointed to a little child. 

We are every age we've ever been, and our younger selves still exist within us. This is who we must seek after and reclaim. He ultimately heals our wounds, but we have to do the work. I've been proactive about this as well as training my mind to think more positive and happy thoughts and it has changed me. I'm a different person because of it.