Session 1

Relaxation, the Key

In April 1975, M.B., age thirty-four, found himself in a Philadelphia hospital being prepared for surgery. His doctors had discovered that a spinal cord tumor in his neck was causing the progressive paralysis he had been experiencing in his arms and legs for the preceding two months. When the operation was over, the doctors gave him the bad news. They had not been able to remove the tumor because of its involvement with the spinal cord. It was malignant. He had but a year or two to live.

One year later, on the first anniversary of the operation, M.B. was due for an examination. The doctor found nothing. There was no evidence of a tumor. The same doctor who had told M.B. a year ago that he was terminally ill was now saying that he, the physician, must have made a mistake.

What had M.B. done in the interim? He had used the Silva Method.

It was about ten months after the operation that M.B. heard about the Silva Method and took the training. He had practiced what he learned there for only two months prior to his anniversary examination.

For about fifteen minutes, three times a day — upon arising, after lunch, and before retiring — M.B. relaxed deeply. He used a progressive relaxation technique, relaxing first his head, next his neck, then his shoulders, and in progression all of the rest of his body all the way down to his toes. Once relaxed, he pictured his body and the tumor. He imagined the tumor getting smaller. During each of these relaxation sessions he pictured the tumor a bit smaller than the last time. He also imagined that he could see his immune system — the white blood system — going after, dispersing, and eliminating the cancer cells. He told himself that these cancer cells were being passed out of his body every time he went to the bathroom. M.B. also gave himself positive instructions, repeating over and over in this relaxed, meditative state, "Every day, in every way, I'm getting better, better, and better."

When M.B. began to tell his doctor about these mental exercises, his doctor walked out of the room. The process was completely foreign to him. Physicians are rarely able to accept our ability to direct our minds to correct our bodies. These interactions are not taught in medical school — not yet.

It is in order to protect Silva graduates from being embarrassed by skeptics in their home towns that initials are used in many of the examples of healing cited in this book. Still, we occasionally receive a written report from a graduate who is so eager to share his or her success with others that permission is granted to use the full name. In many cases, these reports are even witnessed and notarized. Where that is the case, I have happily included the names in the case descriptions.

Activating More of Your Mind

By now, you have realized that the key to the Silva Method is relaxation. But the relaxation taught here is not passive. You will learn to relax actively. Both achieving and using this state of relaxation is an active process. By using our minds to relax and then to picture positive images, we are activating the creative role of our brain — a function of the right hemisphere that is seldom fully involved in our thinking.

Simply stated, the Silva Method places us in conscious control of deep levels of our mind. It enables us to employ relatively slow brain waves (alpha) to expand our awareness and our problem-solving abilities. Health problems are the easiest to solve, because we are in control of the very source of these problems.

Programming Our Behavior With Words and Pictures

Our bodies are equipped for self-healing. We interfere with this natural process by reacting to events with worry and stress. We can withdraw this interference by responding to external events with relaxed reactions.

We can also harness a healing energy by conceiving positive mental pictures and positive mentally verbalized instructions.

The Silva Method for better health is based on the use of positive mental instructions during relaxation. The method is simple and easy and becomes more effective with practice. Even though you are a beginner, expect a miracle. Your belief and expectations are a "green light" that tells your brain neurons to change your body's condition for the better.

The moment of decision has come. Do you want to gain more control over your life? If your answer is yes, you will profit not only with respect to your health but also in regard to every other facet of your life, as brain neurons that have either been loafing on the job or working against you are suddenly made to work for your betterment.

Because you cannot read this book and relax simultaneously, use this strategy. Read the instructions first; then put the book down, close your eyes, and follow the instructions. Here is your first set of instructions:

1. Sit comfortably in a chair and close your eyes.

2. Take a deep breath, and as you exhale, relax your body.

3. Count slowly backward from 100 to 1.

4. Daydream about some peaceful place you know.

5. Say to yourself mentally, "I will always maintain a perfectly healthy body and mind."

6. Tell yourself mentally that when you open your eyes at the count of 5, you will feel wide awake and better than before. When you reach the count of 3, repeat this. When you open your eyes affirm it again ("I am wide awake and feeling better than before").

Read the instructions once more. Now put the book down and follow them.

You have just experienced programming.

Your ability to program will get better with practice. You will gradually relax more quickly and deeply. You will visualize more realistically and your expectation and belief will heighten, thus creating bigger and better results.

I will take you every step of the way. As you approach the end of this book, you will be able to help yourself to good health and use your mind's energy to program others at a distance for better health.

Session 2

Controlling Your Body by Controlling Your Mind

1. Sit comfortably in a chair and close your eyes.

2. Take a deep breath and, as you exhale, relax your body.

3. Count slowly backward from 100 to 1.

4. Daydream about some peaceful place you know.

5. Say to yourself mentally, "I will always maintain a perfectly healthy body and mind."

6. Tell yourself mentally that when you open your eyes at the count of 5, you will feel wide awake and better than before. When you reach the count of 3, repeat this. When you open your eyes, affirm it again ("I am wide awake and feeling better than before").

To be in control of your body, you must control your mind. To learn to control your mind, you must control the alpha level. To control the alpha level, you must control your state of relaxation.

The starting point is to control relaxation. Let me share a story with you from M.R., a lieutenant in the U.S. Navy:

Recently, my eight-year aviation career in the navy was in serious jeopardy. I suffered an allergic reaction to a medication, which caused a brief episode of heart arrhythmia.

An examination at Brooke Army Medical Center revealed that I had a prolapse of the heart mitral valve. This is a congenital defect that can only be diagnosed with sophisticated equipment. Navy regulations prohibit anyone with this defect from being on flight status. Two second opinions confirmed the diagnosis. My case looked open and shut. I was to be examined in three weeks by navy doctors at the Naval Aerospace Institute.

I had not been very consistent in practicing my Silva techniques, but I did remember that abnormalities could be corrected. I came to the alpha level frequently and envisioned a perfect heart with no defects. I also said to myself over and over that my heart was now perfect. This thought ran through my mind day and night until I believed it was so.

Three weeks later I was examined by three navy doctors. No mitral valve prolapse! A congenital defect of thirty-three years had disappeared. All the diagnostic equipment and tests revealed a perfect heart. I was returned to flight status.

I am now a firm believer in the power we have within ourselves to improve our lives.

M.R. relaxed and pictured his heart as perfect. What the mind pictures, the mind creates — if....

This is a big if. The mind creates what it pictures if it is at the alpha frequency. The brain is a three-pound organ confined to the skull. The mind, limitless in its scope, still depends on the brain. It is at the alpha level that the brain — especially the right hemisphere, the realm of thought, feeling, and emotion — works for us. M.R. pictured his healthy heart and talked to himself when his brain was at this frequency. Mental pictures and verbal instructions are the mechanisms for making physical changes at the subjective, or alpha, level. Using these mechanisms is what we call programming. M.R., while at the alpha level, pictured his heart as perfect, and in this way programmed his mental computer to make it perfect. The mind runs the brain and the brain runs the body. And so the body complied.

Alpha is the key. It takes you away from the objective realm, the physical world, and into the subjective world, the causative or creative realm, the realm that is the source of the physical world. Existing on this level gives you a blissful feeling of being alone within yourself. You are aware of the goings-on of the outside world but not actively in it. You are physically and mentally at ease.

"Feeling" the Alpha Level

With each day of practice, you go deeper in the direction of alpha. After you reach alpha, each day of practice brings you into deeper alpha, keeps you from going too deep (back to sleep), and enables you to use your mind for super health — for yourself and for others — while you remain at alpha.

Noted biofeedback researcher Barbara Brown has been able to train people to control their alpha levels by associating the alpha with pleasant feelings.

The coauthor of this book, a Silva lecturer in Hawaii, uses the Hawaiian word aloha to mean alpha. Aloha means oneness, symbolized by o, the middle letter of the word, he explains. Get a handle on oneness and you have reached alpha. He demonstrates at the chalkboard by putting a handle on the o in aloha, which changes the o to p — and the word aloha into alpha.

Alpha is indeed a delightful feeling. Perhaps the reason is that by entering it we move away from the physical world toward the world within — one step closer to heaven.

When you reach alpha, no bells will ring, no sirens will sound, no voice will announce, "This is alpha."

You will just feel good.

A Positive Attitude

In essence, the Silva Method trains one's awareness at low brain frequencies for specific benefits. This control over the awareness enables the practitioner to improve his or her productivity, and problem-solving ability.

But suppose that during this training you took the attitude that while the method might work for somebody else it would never work for you? This attitude also constitutes programming. To hold it would be to program your brain neurons to ignore the training and maintain the status quo.

Or suppose that after completing the training you took the attitude that it would not help you to correct your particular health problem. That expectation of failure also constitutes programming, and it would cancel out what you gained in the training, keeping you sick. Desire, belief, and expectation are the components of faith, the link between mind and brain that enables programs to be realized. The brain works both in the objective and subjective realms.

Take the bright college student whose father wants him to be a lawyer. He does not want to be a lawyer, but his father has a thriving practice and is respected in the community. So, encouraged by his father, the son becomes a lawyer. Does he prosper as his father has? No, because his efforts are half-hearted. That half-hearted quality affects his whole career. He becomes a mediocre lawyer.

Compare the son's desire with the father's motivation when he was a youth. The father had a burning desire to become a successful attorney. Despite financial obstacles and other problems, he applied himself and eventually succeeded. Desire, belief, and expectation set the stage for success in both the objective and the subjective worlds.

When Dr. Carl Simonton received a new patient, he showed that patient "before" and "after" pictures of former patients. "Now you see the cancer; now you don't." He was not bragging or selling himself by doing this. He was stimulating the patient's negative expectation and belief ("I'm a goner") to reverse themselves, becoming positive expectation and belief ("I, too, can be cured"). He usually showed these pictures, in the form of slides, to several patients at a time. He also insisted that patients 'families see the slides. He wanted to change their expectations and beliefs about the patients' prognosis so they would communicate those expectations and beliefs to the patients, thereby reprogramming patients positively.

Belief turns on the mental computer by entering the message that "programming is on the way."

Belief also enables us to picture an end result with enthusiasm, and enthusiasm heightens the flow of energy that runs the computer. The brain then processes the information given to it by the believing mind. Its critical faculty has given the green light: "I will succeed."

When the second artificial-heart recipient sat up in his Louisville hospital bed only a few days after the implantation, the doctors were jubilant. One was quoted by the Associated Press as saying that the patient's "positive mental atttiude is a very important factor and a very strong factor in favor as far as recovery is concerned."

Reinforcement Procedure

The mind is the controller. So we benefit when we control the mind, thereby generating success with expectation and belief.

1. When you awake tomorrow morning, if you have to, go to the bathroom. Then go back to bed. Set your alarm clock to ring in fifteen minutes.

2. Close your eyes and roll them slightly upward toward your eyebrows (about 20 degrees).

I have analyzed the visualization process and have determined how it works best. Recall how people turn their eyes upward to find an answer to a question as if the answer were written on the ceiling or in the sky.

I have found that looking up in this manner triggers the brain to produce alpha rhythm. At the same time, looking upward and unfocusing the eyes in the process of looking away from any objects also triggers more right-brain activity.

The Mental Screen

Mind-control advantages occur best when the eyes are about twenty degrees above the horizontal. I call this area the mental screen.

Our use of the mental screen at the alpha level becomes an important means of improving our health.

With these explanations in mind, you can continue the procedure begun above:

3. Count slowly from 100 to 1. Do this silently — that is, mentally. Wait about one second between numbers.

4. When you reach the count of 1, hold a picture of yourself in your mind as youthful, radiant, healthy, and attractive.

5. Repeat mentally, "I will always maintain a perfectly healthy body and mind."

6. Then say to yourself, "I am going to count from 1 to 5. When I reach the count of 5, I will open my eyes, feeling fine and in perfect health, feeling better than before."

7. Begin to count. When you reach 3, repeat, "When I reach the count of 5, I will open my eyes, feeling fine and in perfect health, feeling better than before."

8. Continue your count to 4 and 5. At the count of 5, open your eyes and affirm mentally, "I am wide awake, feeling fine and in perfect health, feeling better than before. And this is so."

Eight Steps That Are Really Only Three

Go over each of the explanations of these eight steps below so that you understand its purpose while becoming more familiar with the sequence:

1. The mind cannot relax deeply if the body is not relaxed. It is better to go to the bathroom and then permit your body to enjoy full comfort. Also, when you first awake, you may not be fully awake. Going to the bathroom ensures that you wake completely. In case you are still not alert enough to stay awake, however, set your alarm clock to ring in about fifteen minutes, so that you do not risk beginning your daily schedule late.

2. As I explained, turning the eyes upward about twenty degrees triggers alpha rhythms in the brain and also causes right-brain activity. Later, when we do our mental picturing, it will be with our eyes turned upward at this angle. Meanwhile, this eye movement is a simple way to encourage alpha.

3. Counting backward is relaxing. Counting forward is activating. Counting 1, 2, 3 is like "get ready, get set, go." Counting 3 to 1 is pacifying; it takes you nowhere except deeper within yourself.

4. While relaxing, imagining yourself the way you want to be creates the picture. Hypochondriacs who relax and imagine themselves sick frequently create unwanted physical symptoms. You will do the opposite. Your mental picture will create wanted conditions youth, health, and attractiveness.