Here are the magic words: "Every day, in every respect, I am getting better and better".
They must be said twenty times following, with the help of a string with twenty knots in it, which serves as a rosary. This material detail has its importance; it ensures mechanical recitation, which is essential.
While articulating these words, which are registered by the unconscious, one must not think of anything particular, neither of one's illness nor of one's troubles, one must be passive, just with the desire that all may be for the best. The formula "in every respect" has a general effect.
This desire must be expressed without passion, without will, with gentleness, but with absolute confidence.
For Emile Coué at the moment of autosuggestion, does not call in the will in any way, on the contrary; there must be no question of the will at that moment, but the imagination, the great motive force infinitely more active than that which is usually invoked, the imagination alone must be brought into play.
"Have confidence in yourself," says this good counsellor, "believe firmly that all will be well". And indeed all is well for those who have faith, fortified by perseverance.
As deeds talk louder than words, I will tell you what happened to myself before I had ever seen M. Coué.
I must go back then to the month of September when I opened M. Charles Baudouin's volume. At the end of a substantial exposition, the author enumerates the cure of illnesses such as enteritis, eczema, stammering, dumbness, a sinus dating from twenty years back which had necessitated eleven operations, metritis, salpingitis, fibrous tumours, varicose veins, etc., lastly and above all, deep tubercular sores, and the last stages of phthisis (case of Mme. D----, of Troyes, aged 30 years, who has become a mother since her cure; case was followed up, but there was no relapse). All this is often testified to by doctors in attendance on the patients.
These examples impressed me profoundly; there was the miracle. It was not a question of nerves, but of ills which medicine attacks without success. This cure of tuberculosis was a revelation to me.
Having suffered for two years from acute neuritis in the face, I was in horrible pain. Four doctors, two of them specialists, had pronounced the sentence which would be enough, of itself alone, to increase the trouble by its fatal influence on the mind: "Nothing to be done!" This "nothing to be done" had been for me the worst of autosuggestions.