carried no conviction to my mind, whatever influence was exerted was
that of another person's thought or feeling silently projected on to my
unconscious mind, into my nervous system as it were, as we sat still
together. I believed from the start in the POSSIBILITY of such action,
for I knew the power of the mind to shape, helping or hindering, the
body's nerve-activities, and I thought telepathy probable, although
unproved, but I had no belief in it as more than a possibility, and no
strong conviction nor any mystic or religious faith connected with my
thought of it that might have brought imagination strongly into play.

"I sat quietly with the healer for half an hour each day, at first with
no result; then, after ten days or so, I became quite suddenly and
swiftly conscious of a tide of new energy rising within me, a sense of
power to pass beyond old halting-places, of power to break the bounds
that, though often tried before, had long been veritable walls about my
life, too high to climb. I began to read and walk as I had not done
for years, and the change was sudden, marked, and unmistakable. This
tide seemed to mount for some weeks, three or four perhaps, when,
summer having come, I came away, taking the treatment up again a few
months later. The lift I got proved permanent, and left me slowly
gaining ground instead of losing, it but with this lift the influence
seemed in a way to have spent itself, and, though my confidence in the
reality of the power had gained immensely from this first experience,
and should have helped me to make further gain in health and strength
if my belief in it had been the potent factor there, I never after this
got any result at all as striking or as clearly marked as this which
came when I made trial of it first, with little faith and doubtful
expectation. It is difficult to put all the evidence in such a matter
into words, to gather up into a distinct statement all that one bases
one's conclusions on, but I have always felt that I had abundant
evidence to justify (to myself, at least) the conclusion that I came to
then, and since have held to, that the physical change which came at
that time was, first, the result of a change wrought within me by a
change of mental state; and secondly, that that change of mental state
was not, save in a very secondary way, brought about through the
influence of an excited imagination, or a CONSCIOUSLY received
suggestion of an hypnotic sort. La