[Nerves and Common Sense by Annie Payson Call]@TWC D-Link book
Nerves and Common Sense

CHAPTER VII
5/7

When your head is erect take a long, quiet breath and drop it again.

You can probably drop it and raise it twice in the five minutes.

Later on it should take the whole five minutes to drop it and raise it once and an extra two minutes for the long breath.
When you have dropped your head as far as you can, pause for a full minute without moving at all and feel heavy; then begin at the lower part of your spine and very slowly start to raise it.

Be careful not to hold your breath, and watch to breathe as easily and quietly as you can while your head is moving.
If this exercise hurts the back of your neck or any part of your spine, don't be troubled by it, but go right ahead and you will soon come to where it not only does not hurt, but is very restful.
When you have reached an erect position again stay there quietly--first take long gentle breaths and let them get shorter and shorter until they are a good natural length, then forget your breathing altogether and sit still as if you never had moved, you never were going to move, and you never wanted to move.
This emphasizes the good natural quiet in your brain and so makes you more sensitive to unquiet.
Gradually you will get the habit of catching yourself in states of unnecessary excitement; at such times you cannot go off by yourself and go through the exercises.

You cannot even stop where you are and go through them, but you can recall the impression made on your brain at the time you did them and in that way rule out your excitement and gain the real power that should be in its place.
So little by little the state of excitement becomes as unpleasant as a cloud of dust on a windy day and the quiet is as pleasant as under the trees on top of a hill in the best kind of a June day.
The trouble is so many of us live in a cloud of dust that we do not suspect even the existence of the June day, but if we are fortunate enough once or twice even to get to sneezing from the dust, and so to recognize its unpleasantness, then we want to look carefully to see if there is not a way out of it.
It is then that we can get the beginning of the real quiet which is the normal atmosphere of every human being.
But we must persist for a long time before we can feel established in the quiet itself.


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