us find that when time is tight, life-affirming disciplines easily get overlooked or skipped. Perhaps there’s little or no time in the morning to think about your dreams, let alone write them down. When life is hectic you may not do a very good job following the nutritional rules that you know are best. And meditation periods—which ideally take fifteen, twenty, or more minutes of quality, stress-free attention—are forgotten or brushed aside.
Wouldn’t it be great if spiritual and psychological benefits could be reaped from even brief investments of time and attention? How might your life be transformed by simple, positive habits that could keep you spiritually connected? Edgar Cayce, one of the most important spiritual philosophers of the twentieth century, had recommendations for exactly how you can do it.
Cayce made his reputation as a healer—a man whose clairvoyant insights and natural remedies earned him fame as one of the founders of the holistic healing movement. But his remarkable prescriptions usually weren’t just herbal tonics, dietary changes, or nontraditional therapies. Frequently Cayce saw that the source of an ailment was a profound stress within the soul—a serious imbalance in lifestyle.
The people who came to him were individuals in the midst of suffering—be it physical, mental, or spiritual. They were dealing with the tensions and uncertainties of life in the Depression years and World War II, surely times of stress at least as great as our own overcharged, hurried era. Cayce offered each individual a program of positive habits that was designed to turn their lives around and get them recentered on what really counts. The same positive habits can work for people today.
The basic strategy of this book is to re-create the best of what Cayce had to say to people who sought a healthy, spiritually centered way of life. It’s a set of twelve positive habit patterns for balanced living—simple methods that take only small investments of time and energy, wisely used. That impact is nothing less than
• renewed vitality,
• a deeper sense of meaning, and
• a stronger connection to our creative Source.
Of course, some would say that all habits work against spiritual development—that the work of soul growth is really all about becoming more conscious, and so anything that is done habitually is counterproductive. But if we look more closely at the nature of personal transformation, we’ll see that there really is a place for constructive, life-affirming “habits.” That means patterns of thinking, feeling, and acting that are done on a regular basis and serve to awaken us.
Here is an outline of twelve positive habits for modern-day, busy people who want to stay spiritually centered. These twelve patterns for living are examined in detail through the chapters of this book.
Positive Habit #1: Start the Day Right
The first minute of our waking day contains a potent opportunity. We set in motion a tone for the day by our mental orientation in those first sixty seconds. This chapter introduces the concept of personality and individuality. Much of the stress and discord in our lives comes from confusing these two sides of ourselves.
This chapter prescribes a direct method to affirm and connect with the individuality in the first minute of the day. In so doing, we make the transition from sleep to wakefulness one in which we’re most likely to have a centered, stress-reduced day ahead.
Positive Habit #2: Three-Minute Meditation
Although more lengthy meditations offer many additional rewards, even meditation sessions as short as three minutes can produce clear, positive results. This chapter describes the basics of how to meditate, along with specific suggestions for how to get the most from mini-meditation periods. Even on the busiest, most hectic day, there’s usually time for a three-minute meditation, and it can have tremendous value.
Positive Habit #3: The Inner Witness: Practicing Self-Observation
Many spiritual philosophies have taught that people in everyday life are oblivious to reality. We are “hypnotized” as some great teachers (such as Plato in the allegory of “The Cave”) have suggested. We are “asleep” as other teachers have claimed. The secret to waking up and becoming creative and vital is to practice the habit of self-observation. A life-changing effect can occur with this simple technique, done three times daily for even a minute at a time.
Self-observation (or “learning to stand aside and watch self go by” as Cayce described the process) is a practiced skill that brings forth a new kind of attention. A remarkable new sense of oneself begins to grow—a way of knowing ourselves that is detached from any problem, crisis, or worry. This method is the habit of occasionally being an inner witness to our own thoughts, emotions, and deeds. With simple instruction this potent habit can be learned and immediately put to work to transform our lives.
Positive Habit #4: The Pace of Life
Each of us can find an ideal pace for life. But establishing that positive habit starts with self-awareness. Observe yourself. Does life feel slow paced with inertia, idleness, or fatigue? Or, on the other hand, does your life feel rushed and tense, maybe with the sense that you’ll never get done all the things you’ve expected of yourself that day? For most of us, there are strong patterns as we slip into one extreme or the other.
With careful attention and right effort we can adopt an optimal pace for living. It allows relaxation and peace. But at the same time we find a way to get things done with right timing.
Positive Habit #5: Balanced Living
Life is a continual tug-of-war between competing opposites within ourselves. The trick is to develop the creative habit for finding the equilibrium point—the place of balance. This chapter explores balance from many perspectives, starting with nutrition. Cayce had a specific formula for a stress-reducing diet with the key being a particular balance between acid-metabolizing foods and alkaline-metabolizing ones.
Another essential ingredient to this positive habit for balance concerns self-interest versus interest-in-the-needs-of-others. Either extreme is sure to be a stress builder in the long run. To create a tension-free life one must find the point of equilibrium between inner growth and service. This chapter examines specific ways in which one can hold on to both sides in this pair of opposite impulses and achieve a healing synthesis.
Positive Habit #6: Self-Assertion and Healthy Will
Many of our stresses come from a simple fact: we don’t understand or make positive use of our free will. Cayce often stated clearly that the right use of will was the pivotal factor in getting one’s life on track. The failure to follow this positive habit is an invitation to an array of disappointments and frustrations.
One special point of emphasis in this chapter is the proper application of self-assertion. In his spiritual advice to troubled, unhappy people, Cayce sometimes advocated increased self-assertion. However, that positive habit wasn’t an invitation to aggressive, self-serving behavior. Its true, life-centering potential depends upon a correct understanding of the quality of the human soul called free will.
Positive Habit #7: Picture Yourself: Using Creative Visualization for Change
The human mind is an extraordinary tool for change, and change is often the key to shaping a spiritually centered life. Anything about ourselves that we want to transform is within our reach if we use the mind skillful. One powerful method is the creative use of visualization. If specific mental imagery
