In answer to this, I might say with the Irishman, “Be aisy, but if you can’t be aisy, be as aisy as you can!” Do nothing as well as you can.  When you begin thinking of anything, drop it.  When you feel restless and as if you could not keep still another minute, relax and make yourself keep still.  I should take many days of this insistence upon doing nothing and dropping everything from my mind before taking the next step.  For to drop everything from one’s mind, for half an hour is not by any means an easy matter.  Our minds are full of interests, full of resistances.  With some of us, our minds are full of resentment.  And what we have to promise ourselves to do is for that one-half hour a day to take nothing into consideration.  If something comes up that we are worrying about, refuse to consider it.  If some resentment to a person or a circumstance comes to mind, refuse to consider it.

I know all this is easier to say than to do, but remember, please, that it is only for half an hour every day-only half an hour.  Refuse to consider anything for half an hour.  Having learned to sit still, or lie still, and think of nothing with a moderate degree of success, and with most people the success can only be moderate at best, the next step is to think quietly of taking long, gentle, easy breaths for half an hour.  A long breath and then a rest, two long breaths and then a rest.  One can quiet and soothe oneself inside quite wonderfully with the study of long gentle breaths.  But it must be a study.  We must study to begin inhaling gently, to change to the exhalation with equal delicacy, and to keep the same gentle, delicate pressure throughout, each time trying to make the breath a little longer.

After we have had many days of the gentle, long breaths at intervals for half an hour, then we can breathe rhythmically (inhale counting five or ten, exhale counting five or ten), steadily for half an hour, trying all the time to have the breath more quiet, gentle and steady, drawing it in and letting it out with always decreasing effort.  It is wonderful when we discover how little effort we really need to take a full and vigorous breath.  This half hour’s breathing exercise every day will help us to the habit of breathing rhythmically all the time, and a steady rhythmic breath is a great physical help toward a quiet mind.

We can mingle with the deep breathing simple exercises of lifting each arm slowly and heavily from the shoulder, and then letting it drop a dead weight, and pausing while we feel conscious of our arms resting without tension in the lap or on the couch.