You see it is the same with every pain and with every disease.
Nature tends toward health and if we make the disease simply a
reminder to yield--and to yield more deeply--and to put our positive
effort there, we are opening the way for nature to do her best work.
If our entire attention is given to yielding and we give no
attention whatever to the pain, except as a reminder to yield, the
result seems wonderful. It seems wonderful because so few of us have
the habit of giving our entire attention to gaining our real
freedom.
With most of us, the disease or discomfort is positive, and our
effort against it is negative or no effort at all. A negative effort
probably protects us from worse evil, but that is all; it does not
seem to me that it can ever take us ahead, whereas a positive
effort, while sometimes we seem to move upward in very slow stages,
often takes us in great strides out of the enemy's country.
If we have the measles, the whooping cough, scarlet fever--even more
serious diseases--and make the disease negative and our effort to
free ourselves from it positive, the result is one thousand times
worth while. And where the children have the measles and the
whooping cough, and do not know how to help nature, the mothers can
be positive for the children and make their measles and whooping
cough negative. The positive attitude of a mother toward her sick
child puts impatience or despair out of the question.
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