Louise Hay, AIDS advocate who became leading voice of the New Age movement, dies at 90

Louise Hay, a self-help guru and AIDS advocate whose book, “You Can Heal Your Life,” preached the power of love and affirmation, sold tens of millions of copies and made her a leading voice of the New Age movement in the 1980s, died – or “transitioned” – on Aug. 30 at her home in San Diego, California. She was 90.

Hay House, the publishing company she founded in 1987, confirmed her death but did not disclose the cause.
Described in a 2008 New York Times profile as “the queen of the New Age,” Hay was a child-abuse victim who had dropped out of high school, given a baby up for adoption, worked as a model and divorced an international-trade expert by the time she discovered “the power of positive thinking” in her 40s.

She read the works of Norman Vincent Peale and early 20th-century mystics, attended the Church of Religious Science in Manhattan, New York, and studied with Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, the onetime guru to the Beatles, at his “Vedic city” in Iowa.

Eventually, she developed a belief system based on the idea that medical maladies are inextricably linked with negative thoughts. Alzheimer’s disease, she wrote in her “little blue book,” the 1976 pamphlet “Heal Your Body,” was caused by “a desire to leave the planet.” Leprosy, she said, was related to an “inability to handle life at all.”

Louise Hay, AIDS advocate who became leading voice of the New Age movement, dies at 90