was climbing mountains. That was many years ago. He has similar feelings from time to time when overwrought but he knows that they will pass if he relaxes, accepts and floats past them. He has learnt how to live with his nerves.
‘Floating’
To float is just as important as to accept, and it works similar magic. I could say let ‘float’ and not ‘fight’ be your slogan, because it amounts to that.
Let me illustrate more clearly the meaning of float in this regard. A patient had become so afraid of meeting people that she had not entered a shop for months. When asked to make a small purchase she said, ‘I couldn’t go into a shop. I’ve tried, but I can’t. The harder I try, the worse I get. If I force myself, I feel I am paralysed and can’t put one foot in front of the other. So please don’t ask me to go into a shop.’
I told her that she had little hope of succeeding while she tried to force herself in this way. This was the fighting of which I had previously warned her. I explained that she must imagine she was floating into the shop, not fighting her way there. To make this easier, she could imagine she was actually on a cloud, floating through the door. I also explained that she could further help herself by letting any obstructive thought she might have float away out of her head, recognizing that it was no more than a thought and that she need not be bluffed into giving it attention.
When she came back she was overjoyed and said, ‘Don’t stop me. I’m still floating. Do you want me to float for something else?’
Strange, isn’t it, how the use of one simple word could free a mind that had been imprisoned for months? The explanation is simple enough. When you fight you become tense and tension inhibits action. When you think of floating you relax and this helps action. This woman was in such a state of tension that I have seen her nearly reduced to tears when, with shaking hands, she tried to find a car-key in her handbag. After learning to float, one day when on a similar search she said, ‘Sorry if I’m taking your time. The keys can’t be too far away. I’ve just floated past two bills, a lipstick and a purse. I’ll float round a bit longer and find them.’ The shaking hands were almost steady. She was learning to float past tension.
I have seen patients so tensed by continuous fear that they were convinced they could neither walk nor lift their arms to feed themselves. One man afflicted in this way had been bedridden for weeks. After a few conversations with him, I found he was able to understand that the paralysis lay in his thoughts and not in his muscles. He learnt the trick of freeing his muscles by floating past obstructive thoughts. Within a few days he was ‘floating’ the food to his mouth unaided and announced that he was now ready to walk.
This caused a fine stir in the ward. Several doctors, students, and nurses stood by to watch. No sooner had the patient stood up than a nurse, seeing him sway, said hurriedly, ‘Look out – you might fall!’
The patient, describing the event afterwards, said that this suggestion was almost too much, and he nearly crumpled to the floor. However, he heard a voice in the background saying, ‘Float and you can do it. Float past fear,’ and he said, ‘I “floated” down the hospital ward and back, to my own and everyone else’s astonishment.’
Such frightening thoughts as were experienced by these two people can be very persistent, almost obsessive, to a tired mind, and it helps some people to imagine a pathway along which they can let these thoughts escape, float away. (Another use for ‘float’.) For example, one woman thought of them as passing out of the back of her head; another said she let them float away along a channel over her right ear, where the grocer keeps his pencil; yet another thought of them as little balls that she let bounce off her head. This may sound childish to a healthy, resilient mind, capable of directing and discarding thought, but to the exhausted, frightened person it is not childish. Nothing that helps is childish to him and this idea works well.
Masterly Inactivity
Masterly inactivity, a well-known phrase, is another way to describe floating. It means to give up the struggle, to stop holding tensely onto yourself trying to control your fear, trying ‘to do something about it’ while subjecting yourself to constant self-analysis. It means to cease trying to navigate your way out of breakdown by meeting each obstacle as if it were a challenge that must be met before recovery is possible. It means to bypass the struggle, to go around, not over the mountain, to float and let time pass.
The average person, tense with battling, has an innate aversion to practising masterly inactivity and letting to. He vaguely thinks that were he to do this, he would lose control over the last vestige of his will-power and his house of cards would tumble. As one young man said, ‘I feel I must stand on guard. If I were to let go, I’m sure something would snap. It is absolutely necessary for me to keep control and hold myself together.’ When he was obliged to talk to strangers, he would dig his nails into his palms while he tried to control his trembling body and conceal his state of nervous tension. He would watch the clock anxiously, wondering how much longer he could keep up this masquerade without ‘cracking’.
Loosen Your Attitude
It is especially to such tense, controlled, nail-digging people that I say ‘Practise masterly inactivity and let go.’ If your body trembles, let it tremble. Don’t feel obliged to try and stop it. Don’t try to appear normal. Don’t even strive for relaxation. Simply let the thought of relaxation be in your mind, in your attitude towards your body. Loosen your attitude. In other word, don’t be too concerned because you are tense and cannot relax. The very act of being prepared to accept your tenseness relaxes your mind, and relaxation of body gradually follows. You don’t have to strive for relaxation. You have to wait for it. When a patient says ‘I have tried so hard all day to be relaxed,’ surely he has had a day of striving, net relaxation? Let your body find its own level without controlling, directing it. Believe me, if you do this, you will not crack. You will not lose true control of yourself. You will float up to the surface from the depths of despair.
The relief of loosening your tense hold on yourself, of giving up the struggle and recognizing that there is no battle to fight, except of your own making, may bring a calmness you have forgotten existed within you. In your tense effort to control yourself you have been releasing more and more adrenalin and so further exciting your organs to produce the very sensations from which you have been trying to escape.
Float past tension and fear.
Float past unwelcome suggestions.
Float, don’t fight.
Accept and let more time pass.
CHAPTER 7 Cure of Recurring Nervous Attacks
Now let us consider the symptoms of breakdown that may occur in attacks – panic spasms, palpitations, slowly beating heart, ‘missed’ heart-beats, trembling turns, inability to take a deep breath, ‘lump in the throat’, giddiness, nausea and vomiting. Depression and sleeplessness are such an important part of the nervous breakdown caused by problem, sorrow, guilt or disgrace, that in order to save repetition I shall leave their discussion until describing this second type of breakdown.
PANIC SPASMS
As already mentioned, fear can produce a state of constant tension, or it can take the form of intense recurring spasms of panic that start in our ‘middle’, just below the breastbone, and
