How To Live Life And Love It
	Exercises For Health <  Previous Contents Next  >

1. Breathing, Bathing and Short, Easy, Profitable Exercises for Health:

Note: (These exercises are given as a stimulant to your capacity, both mental and physical. Mind and body are one. When both body and mind are strong happiness and success usually follow, especially if one adds to them mental and bodily efficiency.)

Correct breathing is one of Nature's most powerful methods of building a powerful body, a perfect body. Let us begin now to breathe correctly and profitably. If these exercises are taken as intended there will not be any strain. The first exercise is this:

Upon arising in the morning first drink two or three glasses of water. The effect will be better if you will take the water just as hot as you can bear to drink it, with the juice of one-half a lemon in it. Then stand erect, or else lie flat on the floor. Exhale completely. Whether standing or lying on floor bend knees slightly. As you exhale contract both the chest and the diaphragm, pushing the latter OUT and DOWN as far as possible without causing strain. Naturally this will extend the abdomen. Then without lifting your chest pull abdomen IN as far as you can. Then without any attempt at correct breathing push abdomen OUT and IN rapidly at least twelve times.

After you have mastered the above exercise for the abdomen and diaphragm, take the next exercise -for not more than two minutes each time. This exercise is: Stand erect, or lie flat on the back. Exhale completely, contracting chest. Then slowly inhale through the nostrils, trying not to allow chest to move. Let the diaphragm push the abdomen down, then hold the breath for three or four seconds. Exhale slowly. Then forget all about abdomen and diaphragm and inhale deeply, letting breath lift chest walls up and out to their fullest capacity. Hold breath a few seconds and exhale all the breath.

If you will practice these two simple exercises each morning for ten days, you will note a great improvement in physical condition and vitality, the head and mind will be clearer and you will have a real zest for work.

No doubt you know that the right kind of bath is a splendid nerve-tonic, as well as a most important point in attaining physical and mental perfection. When bathing for cleanliness the water should be of blood temperature, never hot or cold. After the cleansing bath, fill the wash-basin with cold water. Scoop up two handfuls and apply to the forehead, and rub up and down the face. Dip hands in cold water again and shake off all surplus water, then rub off balance behind the ears. Repeat process on back of neck. These things soothe and strengthen the nerves.

2. A certain way of relief for constipation is this: First, meditate on the perfect and harmonious action of Life. In Nature one does not find either inaction or over-action. Think over how the Life in your body regulates the flow of blood, the action of the muscles, both voluntary and involuntary, and how all of these things are done in perfect harmony. For a regulatory exercise in relieving constipation the following is splendid. First, as soon as you arise in the morning, drink two glasses of hot water. Then stand, or lie on the back on floor.

Breathe deeply. As you inhale extend the abdomen and contract it as you exhale, contracting it all you possibly can. Do this without letting chest rise at all. Do the exercise rapidly, vigorously, always inhaling through the nostrils and exhaling through the mouth. Take about eight seconds for each complete breath. Do this for a minute or two then use another minute to recover normal breathing. A second exercise is recommended; and it is better if taken in connection with the one just given. It is this: Again stand erect or lie on the back, preferably the latter. Draw first the right knee and then the left up to the chest as snug as possible.

Inhale deeply as you put foot down to floor and exhale as you draw knee down to chest. Do this exercise rapidly, vigorously for one minute. After the exercise try to get into the feeling of gratitude that you ARE able to CONSCIOUSLY tune in with the harmonious action of Life. If you keep thinking deeply on the fact that ALL of the qualities of Life must be present anywhere and everywhere that Life is, the feeling of ONE-ness will come and you will enjoy the thrill of it. The very best there is is yours now and the perfect movement is manifesting NOW.

3. How to Retain Youth and to Banish Gray Hairs and Wrinkles if They Offend You:

Think, know, feel, be thankful for the fact that Life as Life has NO age and yet is ageless. Give this fact a little profound thought every day. Soon you will get the deep and abiding awareness of it. In your mind's eye, and in memory, try to recall how you felt about certain things when you were twenty, how you looked then, and acted, and bubbled over with energy. Ask yourself if your point of view about Life in general has changed radically, or if you have simply forgotten how to Live Life and Love it, as you did then. The emotions, the fine understanding, the zest for activity, as you had them in youth have not glided off without leaving a trace in the development of your advancing years.

Try to give yourself a careful going over mentally each day, and LIVE for a while each day the experiences of your youth, bringing them back into your FEELING. Perhaps you say: "Oh, but youth is so foolish!" That may be so; but remember always that it DOES THINGS! Try to weed out and destroy the doubts of your advancing years; try to prune out of yourself, out of your thought and feeling, your tendency towards being over-conservative. Old age is only an OSSIFIED IDEA! Being over-conservative and opposed to progress and change are the things that make one old, and usually impotent. Your youth was all right; LIVE IT AGAIN! Live it in FEELING and keep the feeling bolstered temporarily by making mental pictures of your happy, cocksure self as you were at twenty. SEE your face, figure and hair as they were then.

And each day do the following exercise for the banishment of gray hair. Vigorously RUB the whole scalp, from the nape of the neck up over the crown to the hair-line on the forehead, using Glover's Mange Cure. This liquid is not for dogs only, but is also an excellent tonic and stimulant for human hair. Rub the liquid well into the scalp. The gray hair may fall out for a while after you have done this exercise faithfully for several days but keep it up and new hair will come in with the natural color of the hair of your youth. Yes, mentally go back to twenty and balance its vitality with your present wisdom! KNOW with all of your heart and soul, and all of your emotional self, that Life as Life IS manifesting in you in a particular way in order that it may find new avenues for expressing itself as the JOY of living.

Make an hourly effort to keep in your consciousness your JOYS only. MAKE THEM REGISTER! Deliberately BE HAPPY and your body will respond to it in every way. It will also help, particularly for the ladies, to sit in front of the vanity a half-hour each day, seeing yourself NOT as you are now (if aged) but AS YOU WERE in youth. Do this with deep concentration, deepest feeling, affirming something like this: "I AM Life. I AM YOUTH, eternal YOUTH!" The important thing, however, is to SEE yourself as youth, to FEEL youth, to know that you ARE youth. Soon you will find a decided improvement setting in. Thought IS always creative!

Soon you will look younger; soon you will feel younger; soon you will be younger, not in years of course but years do not make aging. Some are old at twenty-five; others are young at eighty. It is flexibility of mind, a keen enjoyment of living, that make for elasticity of muscle and for youth.

4. A Method of Attracting Money:

Meditate on the RICHES of Life as it really is. All that we can see or think of in Nature shows us only ABUNDANCE. Every growing thing is amply provided for. The grass and tress, and other growing things, do not know poverty. In the soil, in the air, in the sunshine, there is an abundance of nourishment for all. THINK about this great fundamental Truth because it applies to YOU also. Wherever you may be, whatever your station in life may be, the Creator of all Life HAS just as amply provided for you as He has for the grass, the birds, all of Nature. It is not His fault that all do not express or manifest this bounty; people are as poor, or will soon be as rich, as they ACCEPT for themselves in the CONSCIOUSNESS. Everything that your individual nature may require has ALREADY BEEN PROVIDED for you by the Creator. One has only to ACCEPT it, first in consciousness then in fact. Your STEADY RECOGNITION of this fact forms a veritable magnet in the mind which will attract every requirement to you, not as money that will drop in your lap without effort but as ideas, which when ACTED UPON, will yield an abundant harvest.

Try this. Begin right now to take the time, two or three times daily, to focus your thought at the base of the brain: "Spirit of God (Life), I AM GRATEFUL to you for the ABUNDANCE that IS mine now!" Any other good affirmation that may appeal to you, one that you compose for yourself perhaps, will do provided the use of it LIFTS your thought and feeling into CERTAINTY that abundance IS yours now. The more completely you can flood your mind, your CONSCIOUSNESS, with the recognition of Life's abundance, for you as well as for all, the more quickly your thought and feeling will manifest in FORM. Rich ideas will come to you intuitively, particularly if you impress the RICHES that ARE yours NOW upon your mind just before going to sleep. Any good idea if acted upon with wisdom and energy will yield great abundance for any one who apprehends it and works in FAITH towards its fulfillment.

5. The Value of Sleep and a New Method of Inducing It:

Sleep is Nature's restorative for tired tissues and often is found to be the only effective refreshener of the body machine. The exact amount of sleep required varies with different individuals, much depending upon how fatigued a person is when retiring. If one feels the need of relaxation and sleep, and yet cannot easily go to sleep, try the following method, which you may have read in my book, "The Healing Power is Life." It is this: Sit nude on the edge of your bathtub, feet outside the tub. Take a fountain syringe and fill it with water that is blood-warm (NOT hot). Place the end of the tube at nape of neck and let the warm water trickle down your spine until you begin to feel relaxed; then go to bed quickly, comfortable, warm and relaxed.

Another aid towards relaxation (and relaxation, if complete, is sure to induce sleep in a weary person) is this: Lying in bed, on the back, deliberately send the message down to your toes, firmly, "Relax!" Continue sending the message until the toes do spread and relax. Then relax ankles in same manner, also knees, then base of spine, and the spine itself to base of head, also hands and arms. As a rule one will never get this far with the relaxation-exercise; almost invariably one will slip off into deep, restful sleep before having consciously relaxed more than half the body. Upon awakening if you feel recuperated, don't force yourself to remain in bed, whatever the hour.

Get up and do something that you are interested in doing. Be sure the room you sleep in is always well ventilated; almost all people breathe more deeply when sleeping than when awake, unless exercising quite freely. Do not eat a big meal just before retiring.

If you will give this method of inducing sleep a fair trial, you will find it very effective in inducing refreshing sleep that will have a real recuperative value.