It would of course be equally harmful to train the guiding power while neglecting entirely flabby, undeveloped muscles.  The only difference is that in the motions for this training and for the perfect co-ordinate use of the muscles, there must be a certain amount of even, muscular development; whereas although the vigorous exercise for the growth of the muscles often helps toward a healthy nervous system, it more often, where the nervous force is misused, exaggerates greatly the tension.

In every case it is equilibrium we are working for, and a one-sided view of physical training is to be deplored and avoided, whether the balance is lost on the side of the nerves or the muscles.

Take a little child early enough, and watch it carefully through a course of natural rhythmic exercises, and there will be no need for the careful training necessary to older people.  But help for us who have gone too far in this tension comes only through patient study.

So far as I can, I will give directions for gaining the true relaxation.  But because written directions are apt to be misunderstood, and so bring discouragement and failure, I will purposely omit all but the most simple means of help; but these I am sure will bring very pleasant effects if followed exactly and with the utmost patience.

The first care should be to realize how far you are from the ability to let go of your muscles when they are not needed; how far you are from the natural state of a cat when she is quiet, or better still from the perfect freedom of a sleeping baby; consequently how impossible it is for you ever to rest thoroughly.  Almost all of us are constantly exerting ourselves to hold our own heads on.  This is easily proved by our inability to let go of them.  The muscles are so well balanced that Nature holds our heads on much more perfectly than we by any possibility can.  So it is with all our muscles; and to teach them better habits we must lie flat on our backs, and try to give our whole weight to the floor or the bed.  The floor is better, for that does not yield in the least to us, and the bed does.  Once on the floor, give way to it as far as possible.  Every day you will become more sensitive to tension, and every day you will be better able to drop it.  While you are flat on your backs, if you can find some one to “prove” your relaxation, so much the better.  Let your friend lift an arm, bending it at the different joints, and then carefully lay it down.  See if you can give its weight entirely to the other person, so that it seems to be no part of you, but as separate as if it were three bags of sand, fastened loosely at the wrist, the elbow, and the shoulder; it will then be full of life without tension.  You will find probably, either that you try to assist in raising the arm in your anxiety to make it heavy, or you will resist so that it is not heavy with its own weight but with I your personal effort.  In some cases the nervous force is so active that the arm reminds one of a lively eel.