My dear friend, Laila, who accompanied me on my healing walks gave me her copy of a favorite book, on the condition that I would read and apply it.

The book was You Can Heal Your Life by Louise Hay with the premise that healing physical illness or injury depends fundamentally on your mental (psychological, emotional, spiritual) processes and patterns. Also, that physical health challenges manifest as a result of poor thinking habits.

In my case, with all my years of failures followed by years of impossibly demanding mom care, I got to the point of screaming my lungs out in the middle of the street, “I can’t stand this anymore.”

What I manifested, according to Hay, was a back injury where I literally could not stand anymore. That made sense to me, but what to do about it?

If I only could forgive myself (a tall order after years of self-abnegation) and love myself enough, then I would be well on my way to healing my malady. A basic methodology for achieving this mental state was the use of affirmation.

I understood the power of affirmations because of the self-destructive thinking patterns I had applied for years. (Yes, I have replaced those negative affirmations with positive statements that I repeat consistently.)

Even so, I found it incredibly difficult to voice the simple affirmation, “I love myself.” I just couldn’t do it, couldn’t believe it. Instead, I repeated, “I love myself enough to heal myself,” speaking one word for each (painful) footfall.

I shortened the phrase to “I love myself to heal myself,” which I repeated every time I walked, for weeks. Eventually there began to be two or three steps where I wasn’t in pain, then twenty or thirty.

I acknowledged those moments of little or no pain with a new affirmation: In this moment, I am healed. That became my mantra for months. I would say it whenever I walked without pain. I would also keep repeating it when the pain resurged, praying for it to subside again.