life responds. Cayce often prescribed visualization as a powerful tool for the reduction of stress and for the promotion of healing. This chapter will explore specific ways to practice creative imagery, as well as outline things to avoid when making use of this potent method.
Positive Habit #8: Tolerance: The Magic Ingredient in Human Relationships
Many of us find that the single most difficult aspect of living is human relations. If we could solve the riddle of getting along with people, the ideal of a spiritually centered life would be within reach.
In describing a positive habit to transform our relationships, Cayce pointed to one attitude above all others as the key: tolerance. In essence, tolerance is the face of love. It is the way that we give other people the freedom to be themselves, while at the same time deepening relationships through caring. This chapter takes a careful look at what tolerance really is (and what it is not). Practical hints point the way toward making this attitude the natural and immediate habit in every one of our relationships.
Positive Habit #9: The Sixth Sense in Sleep
Much of what knocks us off center is our confusion and the need for reliable answers. People who came to Cayce for advice were often tension-filled because of their inability to get solutions to everyday problems. Those tensions and stresses sometimes became an even bigger problem in and of themselves, leading to a host of physical ailments. But Cayce encouraged the development of a positive habit to tap into one’s own innate ability to get reliable answers, especially through a so-called sixth sense that lives (usually unconsciously) within us all.
Each night as we fall asleep, our minds shift gears and begin to make use of the sixth sense. This additional perceptual ability is highly intuitive. It can tune-in to other people and operate telepathically. It can perceive likely events of the future. In addition, this sixth sense can tap creative wisdom and resources of one’s own higher self. One direct way in which we experience this extended sense is in our dreams; but it is active all night long and isn’t confined just to dreaming. This chapter will describe how the sixth sense works and give instructions for simple ways to become more alert to the valuable information it can provide daily.
Positive Habit #10: Keeping Daily Rhythms
In a world that often seems fast-paced and hectic, what can we do if we want to maintain healthy, balanced lives? What can counteract the many influences that throw us off kilter, disorient us, and drain our energies? Often it’s the unpredictability of life that exhausts us. Things happen that weren’t part of what we expected. Too easily a day can become disjointed, and we can end up feeling as if circumstances are in control, instead of our being in control of them. The positive habit of creating a daily rhythm can begin to make a big difference.
Rhythms are a close cousin to cycles. Both involve the regular occurrence of certain influences or activities. They are dependable, positive patterns in life. They remind us that we live in an orderly universe.
This chapter will focus on a daily rhythm that Cayce frequently prescribed: “After breakfast work awhile, after lunch rest awhile, and after dinner walk a mile.” The reader will be invited to adapt that formula to his or her own lifestyle, then make a commitment to that rhythm as a lifecentering pattern.
Positive Habit #11: The Three-Step Body Tuneup
Here’s a positive habit from Cayce that focuses directly on health practices which promise to transform us. These three simple methods take only a few minutes a day and minimal effort, but they have led to big changes for many people. First is adequate intake of water. Second is an easy head-and-neck exercise that helps reduce the tension and stress that we store in our neck and shoulders. Third is an exercise in attentive eating for one meal per day. Taken together as a three-step body tuneup, this positive habit is Cayce’s most easily applicable set of physical recommendations for reestablishing a centered life.
Positive Habit #12: Wrapping Up the Day: Bedtime Imaginative Recall
Just as Positive Habit #1 dealt creatively with the first waking moments of each day, Positive Habit #12 focuses on the final two or three minutes. The positive habit is to go back through the events of the day and observe in one’s imagination the impact of one’s deeds, words, and thoughts. Properly done, this review is completed with a spirit of objective love rather than with any sense of guilt or criticism. By consciously taking note of the lessons learned and the intentions left unfulfilled, we are likely to find a deeper and more restful sleep. And we may also find ourselves better equipped to meet the challenges of the new day.
Exploring these twelve positive habits of spiritually centered people is actually an adventure that can be undertaken in any order. Each chapter of the book—each positive habit—is presented in a stand-alone fashion and you can feel free to read the chapters in whatever order appeals to you. The key, though, is to apply the ideas. The habit works only if you’ll put attention and energy into letting it work its magic on you.
Positive Habit #1
Start the Day Right
Starting off on the right foot. Making a good first impression. Getting out of bed on the right side. Our language is full of expressions that convey the same message: the way we begin something has a big impact.
In fact, the first sixty seconds of your day may be the most important. In those initial moments you set in motion patterns that will subtly shape your experiences for many hours to come. That start-up programming can be conscious and purposeful, or—as it usually occurs for most people—it can be automatic and haphazard. The difference has a lot to do with whether or not your day unfolds as a centered and healthy one. In fact, here’s the very best place to start creating a spiritually centered life.
Waking up in the morning is a turning point. You move from the realm of sleep and dreams back into your familiar world of busy activity and responsibility. And the way you go through that turning point—the way you make that transition—may be much more influential than you realize.
Waking up in the morning is a crossroads. Something special happens in that simple act of emerging from sleep and regaining normal consciousness. Profound influences are set in motion by the way in which you make the transition from one dimension of awareness to another. However, before creating an optimal plan for the use of that first minute in the morning, it’s worth examining more carefully what’s at work here.
Whenever we make a change in consciousness—any dramatic shift in our level of awareness—very important factors come into play. The quality and content of the experiences that follow are largely shaped by what is held in mind during the transition. This is not an abstract principle of psychology. It’s something we can observe every day, especially by looking carefully at nighttime experiences.
What happens to us during sleep (in dreams and otherwise) is heavily influenced by our state of mind as we drift off at night. You’ve probably encountered this principle in both negative and positive ways. For example, if you’re worried or upset when you go to bed, you’re likely to have a troubled night’s sleep. On the other hand, if you drift off with a question on your mind, you may well get an answer to that very issue through your dreams.
A similar process is at work for the transition we call death. Research with so-called “near-death experiences” suggests that the attitudes and feelings of the dying individual play a major role in the types of experiences
