Self-healing Relaxation Technique: Allow at least about twenty minutes to a half hour for this practice each day, but you should continue for a much longer period if the desire or capacity for it arises. Select a time of day when you can be alone, free from disturbances, and when you are free from emotional reactions to any personal matters other than this need of being cured. It would be useless to treat these instructions in a merely superficial and external way, for then they could be followed and finished in about sixty seconds. There are two prerequisites that must be satisfied for these instructions to be effective. First, the whole of one's mind and feeling should be concentrated on each of their separate parts as unfolded in each sentence. Second, it is essential that you should not leave any part and pass on to the next one before you have fully soaked yourself in and surrendered yourself to it. There must be no haste. (1) Posture: Assume supine posture, lie flat on your back on a couch, completely limp, no tenseness in the body, entirely comfortable, quiet, and relax all muscles from head to foot. Merely lying down is not enough; loosen also the muscles in your lips, eyes, and hands. Close the eyes. (2) Breathing: Concentrate on the rhythm of breathing for a couple of minutes. Give it all your attention for this period until you are so immersed as to become unified with it. While concentrating, make the inhalation and exhalation breaths of equal duration. They should be long deep slow and even, not jerky and not strained. This slowing down of respiration should result in a lessening of tension. (3) Making contact on the physical level: Begin to think of and dwell upon the One Infinite Life-Power, filling all space and pervading the entire universe, existing everywhere, containing and permeating all creatures, all humanity, including one's self. Accept and stress its existence. Next call on its help, then concentrate on the idea of its recuperative power, which develops and sustains every cell of the body from birth, heals its wounds and knits its broken bones, for your own case. (4) Treating the body: Imagine this Power to be flowing into you as a White Light. Mentally draw the current into the body, through the forehead, the palms, and the solar plexus. Lastly, bring it to the diseased part of the body needing healing and concentrate it there. Place a hand lightly over this part and bathe both hands and affected part with the White Light, trying to feel this intensely, for about two minutes. Forget the rest of the body, and hold full intense attention here. Then with the mind's eye, forget the sick part. Become relaxed again, letting the Light immerse in and distribute itself throughout the entire body. (5) Reaching to the soul: Think of the whole body as being a manifestation of Creative Intelligence and as a projection of the higher self. Next regard it as a perfect thought in the World-Mind. Finally forget it entirely. Lift consciousness above the plane of the physical world. Immerse thought in the concept of the higher self alone, forgetting its projected personal self. Next, empty the mind as far as possible of all thoughts and seek inward sacred stillness. (6) Supplementary work: (a) At fixed or odd times during the day he stops the pressure of life and people on himself and learns by repeated recollection to remain consciously relaxed throughout the day, even if it be only for a minute or two.
(b) Whenever possible, take off five minutes every hour for relaxation practice at fixed times.
-- Notebooks Category 10: Healing of the Self > Chapter 2 : The Universal Life Force > # 70
