Part 5

As with experience all feeling of conscious effort passes, he will have a sense of letting go, the muscles will of their own accord relax, the quiet mind will come, especially if a pleasant thought be held steadily before it, the insomniast will stretch and yawn, take instinctively if he be in bed the sleep position, and pass off into a dreamless sleep which will indeed knit up “the ravell’d sleave of care,” and make him ready for a day of effective thinking and efficient action.

FOOTNOTES

The Heart of Good Health.

THE EMMANUEL METHOD

When sleeplessness can be directly traced to mental causes, the Emmanuel treatment, if experiments made both in Boston and Northampton are to be trusted, is as surely a specific as quinine for malaria. If in any instance medical diagnosis can find no physical reason for the sleeplessness, Emmanuel treatment is at once in order.

The sufferer is admitted to the Rector’s study. The very atmosphere encourages frank speaking. Concealment of any fact or circumstance which bears upon the case is prejudicial to improvement. I have once after three treatments refused again to see a patient who had failed to give me her whole confidence, until she was willing to speak out with greater freedom. The physical habits are invariably considered and corrected whenever there is need. Deep breathing is prescribed. Dr. Learned’s method is sometimes suggested, and always Dr. Noble’s. Drugs are from the first withheld. Tea, coffee, and all other stimulants which act directly on the brain are banished from the evening meal. The sufferer is encouraged as the bedtime hour draws near to give himself to such interests as scatter the cares and worries and obsessions which are then wont to gather like a cloud around the patient’s head.

For some a social evening is suggested, provided it be not too exciting. For others the theatre, the symphony, or other form of public entertainment serves the same purpose. For perhaps a larger number, especially the preacher, or the teacher, or the literary worker, a magazine, a novel with no miserable modern problem in it, or a standard history will in a half-hour let down the mind to the sleep level. I know one man who found Parkman’s histories a soporific boon; another whom Green’s longer History of the English People led on each night to wholesome sleep; another, the head of a large sanitarium, who sometimes saves himself from sleeplessness by reading after he has gone to bed as dull a book as he can find, and recommends the same plan with some profit to his patients.

FAITH REQUIRED IN GOD AND MAN

The main reliance, however, in the Emmanuel treatment is on faith, reinforced first by hetero-suggestion and then by patient and persistent auto-suggestion. The man who would be permanently free from insomnia must be an optimist. He must have a philosophy of life wholesome enough to keep him buoyant, cheerful, and serene amid all the changes and the chances of this mortal life. With the Persian he may hold that “He’s a Good Fellow, and ’twill all be well;” with Socrates that “To the good man no evil thing can happen;” or with St. Paul that “All things work together for good to them that love the Lord.”

Whatever language he may use in the formulation of his life philosophy, he must believe with all his heart and soul that life in spite of all appearances is worth living, that there is love and goodness at the heart of things, that the word God, whatever be its content, does stand for a concept indispensable in our everyday existence, and that there is somewhere, everywhere, One who, by a paradox as strange as it is true, is both the centre and circumference of all that has been, is, and ever is to be—The Absolute and Unconditioned wherever we may chance to be in time or space. “If I climb up into heaven, Thou art there: if I go down to hell, Thou art there also. If I take the wings of the morning: and remain in the uttermost parts of the sea; even there also shall Thy hand lead me: and Thy right hand shall hold me.”

A man who wants that serenity of mind on which the soundest sleep invariably depends must get right and keep right with God, whether he defines Him in the terms of Persia, Greece, or Christianity.

But this is not enough. A man must be right also with his fellow-men. He must love his neighbour as he loves his God. “He that loveth not his brother whom he hath seen, how can he love God whom he hath not seen?” He must have more than a languid interest in his brother. He must wish him better than well. He must have done forever with sharp practice, hard bargaining, ungracious criticism, and that subtle disloyalty which often through sheer cowardice stands mute while slander wags its tongue or envy shoots its Parthian arrows back as it retreats.

With the spirit’s eye he must see even in the poorest and the meanest of his fellows some charm which others have not found. He must with the Christ insight pierce to the heart of the roughest boulder that was ever hewn from the hard mountain-side of seamy human nature and let loose the imbedded angel always there and always struggling to be free. No man has any right to sleep, in fact to any of God’s better gifts, who goes through life with slanting eye and lowering brow sullenly protesting to himself:

As I walked by myself, I talked to myself, And thus myself did say to me: Look to thyself, And take care of thyself, For nobody cares for thee.

FOOTNOTES

Psalm cxxxix., 7-9.

THE SPECIFIC TREATMENT

When the insomniast is ready to pay this double price of love to God and love to man for the peace that passeth understanding and that also bringeth sleep, he is ready for Emmanuel treatment. Seated in the Morris chair before the smouldering fire with curtains drawn, he is taught to relax his muscles, the cortical layer of the brain is quieted by soothing suggestions, and then standing behind the chair the Emmanuel worker begins the treatment somewhat thus in a low monotone:

You are now relaxed in body and quieted in mind. You are to let your thoughts languidly follow mine expressed in words. Do not offer any mental opposition. I shall say nothing which your mind will not instinctively accept and cherish.

Fix your thoughts on God. Think of Him not alone as the All-Father but also as the Universal Mind in which your mind exists exactly as each individual thought floats in your mind. Think of Him not merely as your Heavenly Father but also as the Universal Spirit on which your soul depends for every breath of spiritual life, just as your body is dependent for its every breath of physical existence on the air you breathe. Believe that in this larger, higher, truer sense, “In Him we live and move and have our being.”

Now Universal Mind or Universal Spirit is wholesomeness and love, harmony and power. Realise that when your soul breathes in the atmosphere in which it lives it breathes in wholesomeness and love, harmony and power. But it is possible, in the exercise of the free will with which you are in the nature of the case endowed, to fill up the soul with morbidness and selfishness, disunity and weakness, so that there is no room in it for God’s wholesomeness and love, His harmony and power.

If thou couldst empty all thyself of self, Like to a shell dishabited, Then might He find thee on the Ocean shelf, And say, “This is not dead,” And fill thee with Himself instead. But thou art all replete with very Thou, And hast such shrewd activity, That, when He comes, He says: “This is enow Unto itself—’t were better let it be: It is so small and full, there is no room for Me.”

You do not sleep because you are “all replete with very Thou.” You have filled up your soul with thoughts of self, or thoughts of others from the point of view of self. You have worried when you should have cast your care on Him; “for He careth for you.” You have yielded to all sorts of foolish fears, forgetful that “perfect love casteth out fear.” You have been self-centred, though God Himself was so far centred out of self that “He gave His only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in Him should not perish, but have everlasting life.”

In the silence of this quiet hour put your worries and your fears away and swing your centre out of self. Open wide the windows of your soul and let the Spirit in of wholesomeness and love, of harmony and power. Believe the Spirit will come in. Interpret in the terms of Spirit those veracious words of Revelation: “Behold, I stand at the door, and knock; if any man hear my voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with me.”

Wait for the incoming Spirit. Wait in faith and confidence. Remember that “They that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; they shall walk, and not faint.”

With your mind filled with the Spirit of wholesomeness and love, of harmony and power, it will be at rest; it will know the peace that passeth understanding. All nerve-strain will go. Sleep will come to-night. Sleep will come to-morrow night. Sleep will come every night. Sound sleep, re-creating sleep so long denied you, will be yours at last. The day will never know again its feverish inquietude. Work will have its zest, and play its joy. The silent night will lose its morbid fancies and its horrid nightmares, and you will each morning wake with the song upon your lips:

The dark hath many dear avails: The dark distils divinest dews; The dark is rich with nightingales, With dreams, and with the heavenly muse.

You have done with sleeplessness forever. You go out from this room beneath the rooftree of God’s sanctuary, a new creature in Christ Jesus. Claim your new privilege in Jesus’ name. Act henceforth on the comforting assurance that you are to go to sleep as soon as you have gone to bed, and sleep the whole night through.