Part 8

Various Avenues to Better Health

Some principles and details will be found in various books. There is no space here for more than a few suggestions.

Better Foods and Drinks

Years ago, the late Dr. Forbes Ross told me that, when he was medical superintendent of a certain Asylum, he found that the patients were very violent on Thursday afternoons. On Thursdays, at the mid-day meal, they had Beef-Extract. He forbade this, and at once the Thursday afternoon violence ceased. In my own case, the depression of years ceased when I gave up flesh-foods and meat-extracts more than 23 years ago.

This does not mean that such foods are a cause of non-happiness in all cases. Still less does it mean that they are the sole cause, or even the main cause, in all cases. Many haphazard “vegetarians” have been miserable.

It rather means that some better Diet may be an important factor in Happiness.

The general idea of Diet, for producing or increasing mental and physical Well-Being, which includes Happiness, would surely be to get first such a régime as shall clear out the clogging and depressing or irritating toxins and waste-matters, and shall not add to them, but shall re-build a clean and healthy body and mind by a better Balance of the various Food Elements.

The Drinks, in order to increase the Well-Being and the subsequent Happiness, should be cleansing, and should include the minimum of undesirable elements (whether overstimulating, or narcotic).

There is no need here to explain how Food and Drink affect the mind. We all know some of the depressing effects of “Liver,” Indigestion, Constipation, etc., and the partial dependence of these troubles on the Food and Drinks. But few who have not studied the subject as I have been enabled to do, thanks partly to my work with the leading Clinical Analytical Expert, Mr. C. H. Collings, could guess how some of the most common and respectable errors of Food and Drink--such as excess of starchy and sugary stuff, of fruit, of tea or coffee or cocoa, and so on--can produce non-Health and consequent Non-Happiness, partly by affecting the Brain and the Solar Plexus through tissue-storage of toxins and Toxœmia or an acid and poisoned bloodstream.

There are thousands who imagine that, because most of their “civilised” acquaintances regularly take certain meals as a matter of course, therefore these meals must of necessity be “all right”; not knowing that Nature does not withhold from us her results according to Law--often called her “punishments”--merely because large numbers of other individuals are making similar mistakes! To be orthodox in life is not the same thing as to be immune from the effects of orthodox mistakes.

I could show letter after letter that tells how, beside better Foods and Drinks, simple Water-treatments, and various Exercises have tended to Health and Happiness. There are Exercises (like those in “Economy of Energy,” pp. 79, 83, 86, 87, 90, 94, 97) which help improve the Position of the body, the fulness and the rhythm of the Breathing, the economy of the muscles, by Relaxing and so forth. There are Stretching Exercises, Foot-Exercises, Trunk-Exercises, Athletic Exercises, and so on.

But one or two items must suffice here, as mere examples of how attention to physical acts may influence the state of the mind.

Better Position; Better Breathing; Less Muscular Tension

1. When the heart and lungs and stomach are sunk and sagged down, there is a tendency to mental as well as to physical “depression.” The right Exercises--quite simple and easy--will draw the organs up into their normal place again, and thus will help to remove “the dumps” and bring Happiness.

2. Happiness has its own type of Breathing (as shown by the Pneumograph and the registering cylinder-drum) quite different from the type when there is fear or anger. If we establish as a habit the deepness and fulness and rhythm of the Breathing that goes with Happiness, we are half way towards removing Non-Happiness and getting Happiness itself.

3. When there is anger or restless worry, there is, regularly, some muscular tension. Do away with this, and relax the muscles--the Art can be taught and learnt--and the tendency is for the unsatisfactory feelings themselves to disappear.

A Warning about Stimulants with Re-action

But, in physical “cures,” we often have to distinguish carefully between the temporary effects and the ultimate effects. Too often there is recommended some way which produces almost immediate exhilaration--or at least freedom from the sensation of worry or depression--by driving toxins etc., which had been in the blood and had thus tended towards depression, etc., not out of the body altogether, but only out of the blood and into the tissues, where, as Mr. Collings has been able to prove, they remain stored, to work mischief in the body and blood and mind in the future.

The passing sensations of ease, if not of positive satisfaction, may be brought by such means as a cup of tea or coffee, some aspirin, a smoke, a cold bath, and so on. But this is not an avenue to Happiness. It is, rather, a patch that crosses the avenue to Happiness at one point, and then leaves it again.

We Want the Habit of Happiness

What we want is not the flash of Happiness at heavy expense of future Well-Being and Happiness, but the habit of Happiness. We want to keep happy. We want to sacrifice, if need be, the immediate present for the lasting future. As the author of “The Way of the Servant” says:

“I do ask Renunciation of My children--Renunciation of the less.”

It is not every avenue to Happiness that is unpleasant at the start. But it is quite likely that certain treatments--especially abstinence from or moderation in various stimulants and narcotics--may be, for a time, far from producing any Happiness.

When You are Happy, be Really Happy

It is well known (see “Alison’s History of Europe”) that those who have lived for many years in hot climates are so saturated with warmth that they keep warm for some time after they have come into a cooler climate like ours. Somewhat similarly, whenever we are happy, if we let our whole self--every cell and atom within our body from tip to toe--become saturated with Happiness whenever we feel happy, we should be able to carry on the habit when the conditions seem less satisfactory; we should still feel the glow. But we simply must be and feel happy “with all our mind and with all our soul and with all our strength,” at the happy times. Without feverish excitement, we should thrill throughout with Happiness, and be happy “all over,” as someone was said to smile all over! It is a good phrase.

For why not let all the cells and fibres enjoy themselves with us? Why keep the Happiness--as if we were autocratic and despotic Monarchs, instead of Representatives of a Democratic Community--to ourselves? Why not let the cells all “rejoice with us that rejoice”?

They will repay us a hundredfold in times of trouble and trial. They will then thrust back Happiness to us, as the roots of a plant thrust up stems and leaves and flowers in return for the warmth and light and air and moisture and chemicals that they have absorbed.

If--as Virchow and many others hold--cells have some individuality and some intelligence, will they not respond to our Happiness, at least as much as you and I respond to the Happiness of our Nation and Empire when there is good news and success of the whole of which we form a particle?