er
it leaves us.

It would seem absurd to people who do not understand, to say:--

"I have caught cold, I must relax and let it go through me."

But the literal truth is that when we relax, we open the channels of
circulation in our bodies, and so allow the cold to be carried off. In
addition to the relaxing, long, quiet breaths help the circulation
still more, and so help the cold to go off sooner.

In the same way people resist pain and hold on to it; when they are
attacked with severe pain, they at once devote their entire attention
to the sensation of pain, instead of devoting it to the best means of
getting relief. They double themselves up tight, and hold on to the
place that hurts. Then all the nervous force tends toward the sore
place and the tension retards the circulation and makes it difficult
for nature to cure the pain, as she would spontaneously if she were
only allowed to have her own way.

I once knew a little girl who, whenever she hit one elbow, would at
once deliberately rub the other. She said that she had discovered that
it took her mind away from the elbow that hurt, and so stopped its
hurting sooner. The use of a counterirritant is not uncommon with good
physicians, but the counter-irritant only does what is much more
effectually accomplished when the patient uses his will and
intelligence to remove the original irritant by ceasing to resist it.

A man who was troubled with spasmodic contraction of the throat once
went to a doctor in alarm and distress. The doctor told him that, in
any case, nothing worse than fainting could happen to him, and that, if
he fainted away, his throat would be relieved, because the fainting
would relax the muscles of the throat, and the only trouble with it was
contraction. Singularly, it did not seem to occur to the doctor that
the man might be taught to relax his throat by the use of his own will,
instead of having to faint away in order that nature might do it for
him. Nature would be just as ready to help us if we were intelligent,
as when she has to knock us down, in order that she may do for us what
we do not know enough to do for ourselves.

There is no illness that could not be much helped by quiet relaxing on
the part of the patient, so as to allow nature and remedial agencies to
do their work more easily.

That which keeps relief away in the case of the cold, of pain, and of
many illnesses, is the contraction of the nerves and muscles of the
body, w