t he need not be afraid of writer's
paralysis.

Now a woman's tendency in sewing is to have her chest contracted and
settled down on her stomach, and her head bent forward. Let her stop
even twice a day, lift her chest off her stomach, see that the lifting
of her chest takes her shoulders back, let her head gently fall back,
take a long quiet breath in that attitude, then bring the head up
slowly, take some long quiet breaths like gentle sighs, gradually let
the lungs settle back into their habitual state of breathing, and then
try the exercise again.

If this exercise is repeated three times in succession with quiet care,
its effect will be very evident in the refreshment felt when a woman
begins sewing again.

At the very most it can only take two minutes to go through the whole
exercise and be ready to repeat it.

That will mean six minutes for the three successive times.

Six minutes can easily be made up by the renewed vigor that comes from
the long breath and change of attitude. Stopping for the exercise three
times a day will only take eighteen--or at the most twenty-minutes out
of the day's work and it will put much more than that into the work in
new power.

Third--We must remember that we need not sew in a badly cramped
position. Of course the exercises will help us out of the habitually
cramped attitude, but we cannot expect them to help us so much unless
we make an effort while sewing to be as little cramped as possible.

The exercises give us a new standard of erectness, and that new
standard will make us sensitive to the wrong attitude.

We will constantly notice when our chests get cramped and settled down
on our stomachs and by expanding them and lifting them, even as we sew,
the healthy attitude will get to be second nature.

Fourth--We must sew with our hands and our arms, not with our spines,
the backs of our necks, or our legs. The unnecessary strain she puts
into her sewing makes a woman more tired than anything else. To avoid
this she must get sensitive to the strain, and every time she perceives
it drop it; consciously, with a decided use of her will, until she has
established the habit of working without strain. The gentle raising of
the head to the erect position after the breathing exercise will let
out a great deal of strain, and so make us more sensitive to its return
when we begin to sew, and the more sensitive we get to it the sooner we
can drop it.

I think I hear a woman say,