_Positive and Negative Effort_ DID you ever have the grip?
If you ever have you may know how truly it is named and how it does actually grip you so that it seems as if there were nothing else in the world at the time--it appears to entirely possess you.

As the Irishman says, the grip is "the disease that lasts fur a week and it takes yer six weeks ter get over it." That is because it has possessed you so thoroughly that it must be routed out of every little fiber in your body before you are yourself again, and there are hidden corners where it lurks and hides, and it often has to be actually pulled out of them.

Now it has been already recognized that if we relax and do not resist a severe cold it leaves us open so that our natural circulation carries away the cold much more quickly than if we allowed ourselves to be full of resistance to the discomfort and the consequent physical contraction that impeded the circulation and holds the cold in our system.
My point is this--that it is comparatively easy to relax out of a cold.
We can do it with only a negative effort, but to relax so that nature in her steady and unswerving tendency toward health can lift us out of the grip is quite another matter.

When we feel ourselves entirely in the power of such a monster as that is at its worst, it is only by a very strong and positive effort of the will that we can yield so that nature can guide us into health, and we do not need the six weeks of getting well.
In order to gain this positive sense of yielding away from the disease rather than of letting it hold us, we must do what seems at the time the impossible--we must refuse to give our attention to the pain or discomfort and insist upon giving our attention entirely to yielding out of the contractions which the painful discomforts cause.

In other words, we must give up resisting the grip.