This can be well illustrated by the fact that when a person starts out to walk with the chest slumped, the head hung down and with all the vital organs cramped, he comes back more weary than rested.
In walking we should, as has been shown, keep the chest well expanded, the body elevated, co-ordinating all the normal relations of parts. If we walk in this way it tends to rest rather than to weary us.
Therefore stand sympathetically expanded and easily tall. Walk in the same way and sit in the same way. Let there be a certain exhilaration and a sense of satisfaction.
4. HOW TO LIE DOWN
Dr. Lyman Beecher said that one should always assume a horizontal posture in the middle of the day. The heart, he said, had less difficult work to pump the blood horizontally than vertically.
Henry Ward Beecher attributed his power to do a great deal more work than ordinary men to this habit of his life of always resting in the middle of the day.
He justified his habit by quoting from his father, using even his father's antique pronunciation of "poster."
There is no doubt truth in this. To one very active and who performs a great deal of work it brings a variety of positions and greater rhythm. It rests the vital organs. It brings a harmonious repose and relation of parts.
Even in lying down, we find abnormal conditions. Some men cramp and constrict themselves. The chest is allowed to collapse and the whole body tends to be drawn together. Grief or any negative emotion of feeling or condition destructive to health tends to act in this way.
People, therefore, should lie down properly. They should lie down, as has been said, sympathetically and expansively long. They should directly manifest courage rather than shrinking, joy rather than sadness, with thankful animation rather than in a despairing state of mind. By the expression of joy and courage and peaceful repose and with a deep sense of the acceptance and realization of the good of life lying down will mean more. Express this in the body by normal position, by expansion, no matter what attitude the body may occupy. Man, whether he chooses or not, always expresses the state of his mind in the action of his body. And by cultivating the right mood and expressing the right feeling and so exercising the parts of his body as to express normally and more adequately that mood, men will develop not only health, strength and long life; but will also develop a nobler and stronger personality and more heroic and courageous endurance.