But one or two items must suffice here, as mere examples of how attention to physical acts may influence the state of the mind.
Better Position; Better Breathing; Less Muscular Tension
1. When the heart and lungs and stomach are sunk and sagged down, there is a tendency to mental as well as to physical “depression.” The right Exercises[D]—quite simple and easy—will draw the organs up into their normal place again, and thus will help to remove “the dumps” and bring Happiness.
2. Happiness has its own type of Breathing (as shown by the Pneumograph and the registering cylinder-drum) quite different from the type when there is fear or anger. If we establish as a habit the deepness and fulness and rhythm of the Breathing that goes with Happiness, we are half way towards removing Non-Happiness and getting Happiness itself.
3. When there is anger or restless worry, there is, regularly, some muscular tension. Do away with this, and relax the muscles—the Art[E] can be taught and learnt—and the tendency is for the unsatisfactory feelings themselves to disappear.
A Warning about Stimulants with Re-action
But, in physical “cures,” we often have to distinguish carefully between the temporary effects and the ultimate effects. Too often there is recommended some way which produces almost immediate exhilaration—or at least freedom from the sensation of worry or depression—by driving toxins etc., which had been in the blood and had thus tended towards depression, etc., not out of the body altogether, but only out of the blood and into the tissues, where, as Mr. Collings has been able to prove, they remain stored,[F] to work mischief in the body and blood and mind in the future.
The passing sensations of ease, if not of positive satisfaction, may be brought by such means as a cup of tea or coffee, some aspirin, a smoke, a cold bath, and so on. But this is not an avenue to Happiness. It is, rather, a patch that crosses the avenue to Happiness at one point, and then leaves it again.
We Want the Habit of Happiness
What we want is not the flash of Happiness at heavy expense of future Well-Being and Happiness, but the habit of Happiness. We want to keep happy. We want to sacrifice, if need be, the immediate present for the lasting future. As the author of “The Way of the Servant” says: