Louise Hay

American author and founder of Hay House publishing, one of the most influential figures in the modern self-help and mind-body-spirit movement. Born in 1926, abused as a child and given up for adoption, she built a life as a model, then a Religious Science minister, before publishing You Can Heal Your Life in 1984 — a book that has sold over fifty million copies in thirty languages. Her conviction that thoughts and beliefs shape physical health, that affirmations can rewrite the inner narrative, and that self-love is the foundation of every other healing made her the matriarch of contemporary affirmation-based spirituality. She died in 2017 at the age of ninety, leaving Hay House (publisher of Wayne Dyer, Esther Hicks, Doreen Virtue, and many others) as her enduring legacy.