Perfect health depends upon a balance of the trinity
ruling a body - physical, mental, emotional. You cannot run a healthy mind when
you have a physical deficit. The mind governs, but the condition of the body
also affects the mind.
You must recognize that harmful thought patterns – fear,
hatred, anxiety, over sensitivity - originate in brain-cell starvation and
bodily fatigue. Positive thinking is utterly impossible in a mind physically
under par to a serious extent. If you think that food does not influence your
husband’s frame of mind, try showing him that new dress before dinner! Now that
you have learned your bitter lesson about food and disposition, you had better
show him that next new hat after dinner.
Alternatively, take the husband, whom the doctor has put
on a reducing diet. Feed him a low-calorie salad-and-fruit dinner, and a few
hours later he will throw caution to the wind in favour of a Dagwood sandwich
dripping with calories. A clean steak, liver, or lamb chop or other protein
foods will keep your dieting husband from raiding the icebox much more than any
nagging on your part.
By making certain that you eat a diet to maintain the proper
chemical balance in your body, you restore your functional balance and check
the effects of stress upon your system. Often, by relieving some of the
physical tensions caused by hidden hunger, you can soften the inner climate in
which you must do your thinking. It is much easier to enlist your conscious if
it is not preoccupied with being hungry.
Stomachs constantly harassed with inferior, inadequate, and
indigestible meals become touchy. So does a brain that is constantly
undernourished. The brain in a tired, undernourished, and ill-cared-for body is
most assuredly going to be the brain with the greatest amount of irritability.
An abused, undernourished, harassed body generally houses a
mind incapable of optimum thinking and reasoning power. As the central power
station of the body, the brain must be kept in top physical condition through
natural means so its mental activities can be controlled. Unhealthy thought
habits have a pretty hard time dwelling in a contented body.
One of the reasons that man has advanced so much further
than animals is that there is very little thinking brain in animals. The basis
for their nervous control is undoubtedly autonomic or automatic. Animals
breathe, digest food, perform muscular movements without thinking, and show
basic emotional responses - including rage. Like humans, the animal wants to
destroy anything threatening his security. The thinking portion of your brain
is your cerebrum. As in animals, the basic human emotion is fear. However,
pragmatic man learns to overcome this with correct diet and positive thinking.
Hate, anxiety, and guilt are the emotions causing physical
illness if the thinking brain is not allowed to keep the house in order.
Positive thinking restores the criteria of normalcy out of neurotic
tendencies-freeing you of physical symptoms, letting you progress unhampered by
mental conflict, and giving you a satisfactory working capacity.
The positive thinker is able to love someone besides
himself. Do not confuse love with sex.
Sex is love which loves to be loved, and is a subject which desires to possess
the from anything which would hurt itself. It becomes incapable of
understanding sacrifice; Pride and sex are psychologically inseparable.
Love can be shown in all relationships - man and wife,
father and daughter, mother and son. It is self-surrender because of the
nobility of the person loved. Love and humility are inseparable.
The most important factor in your personal health,
happiness, and effectiveness depends on whether you can love and are loved more
than you hate. When you love, you give. But when you hate, you can only deprive
someone of happiness. In addition, happiness is the only thing you can give
without having.
We must learn to love. We must learn it repeatedly and over
again each day. In addition, we must teach it every day- in everything we do,
in every contact with our fellow man .The destroying power of hate, which no
one meant to teach us, comes of itself. It is true that if we say “I love you,”
It may be received with doubt, for there are times when it is hard to believe.
However, say “I hate you,” and the one spoken to believes it
instantly finally. A thousand times afterward you can say ”I love you” to that
person – and mean it every time- but it still does not change the fact that
once you said ”I hate you, ”and meant that, too. Hate can leave a mark on the
surface that love had worn so smooth with its eternal caresses. Love must be
learned, and learned repeatedly; there is no end to it.
Because of it healing
effects on your mind. In addition, body, it must be learned and relearned. Hate
needs no instruction but waits only to be provoked - and, when it is provoked,
rips you apart. Do you want that? Is hating worth the price you must pay?
I think not – or do you, really. Hatred expressed hurts
those about you; hatred repressed creates nervousness and symptoms that can
simulate almost any physical disease.
Did you ever realize how much of your conversation – and
your thinking –is taken up with harrowing tales about your annoyances, your
relatives’ annoyances and tragedies, and all the annoyances that go with living
with living with an average husband or wife, or having in a cleaning woman, or going to work, or doing
your shopping, or what not?
Many persons get themselves more and more neurotic by
constantly indulging in what is often called “post –mortems”; long detailed
descriptions, many times retold, of unpleasantness, family rows, slights, and sorrows. How much
better it would be for all of us if we would always “talk happy, “and so far as
possible avoid unpleasant topics. What good does it do to keep constantly going
back over the stories of unhappiness?
Drain your mind of the worries, the resentments, irritations,
guilt reactions, and annoyances that have collected during the day just as
thoroughly as you pull the stopper in the sink.
Then you can refill it with refreshing thoughts of emotional
maturity such as these: You are going to free yourself from fears, anxieties,
and tensions.
You find greater satisfaction in giving than in receiving. You
will contribute to the improvement of your home, your community, your nation, and
your world. You seek give-and-take relationships to form. You profit from your
mistakes and successes. You use your leisure time creatively.
Recognize hate for the destructive emotional force that it
is. Love is the constructive psychological force of a positive mind. Love
resurrects people who have lost life while they live. It is the force that
gives new hope, joy, vitality, and invincibility. Those of you who truly want a
powerful new lease on life will find it possible through love and a positive
mind.
