To picture health is one of the most scientific ways of producing it in the body. To picture health Is one of the quickest roads to healing.

How often I have heard people wail, “I have prayed and prayed for healing. Still my health has not improved.” Investigation usually reveals that while these people sorely wanted health, they had not opened their minds to receive it, because they had not pictured it! Thus their prayers had seemed in vain.

According to Latin roots to “image” means to “conceive,”, “to become pregnant with,” or “to take into one’s mind.” Just as one cannot give birth to a child until after physical conception has occurred, neither can one give birth to a new health until mental conception has occurred. One must first image or conceive it. The image makes the condition. Without the image there can be no condition.

The French doctor, Emile Coue, proved the healing power of the imagination at the turn of the Century. After more conventional methods of treatment had failed, people from all over Europe sought out Dr. Coue for healing. The success of his cures became so widespread that at his height, he treated as many as one hundred people a day.

His method? He deliberately set up the picture of healing in each patient’s mind by first assuring him, “Nobody ought to be sick!” Dr. Coue then persisted in making that mental picture firm in the patient’s mind by having him affirm daily, “Every day in every way I am getting better and better.”

This Frenchman taught that the subconscious mind, which controls the body, was most quickly impressed by mental pictures. By changing those mental pictures, one could quickly change the subconscious, and consequently the body which houses it. He proved that the imagination is a much stronger force than the will; that when the imagination and will are in conflict, the imagination can always triumph.

Thus, if your imagination is picturing health, it is possible for that health to manifest in your body, regardless of a diagnosis to the contrary or a previous history of ill health. Knowing this, you should deliberately picture yourself as whole and well. The reasoning power of your will may insist that you cannot be healed, but pay it no attention. If you will dare to picture health consistently anyway, then your imagination is free to work for you to produce that health. Whatever the mind pictures and expects, that it will also build and produce for you!

For this purpose you will enjoy declaring often: “Even though I strongly want greater good in my life, I may not have opened my mind to receive it, because I have not pictured it. The image makes the condition. Whatever the mind pictures and expects, that it will build and produce for me. As I get busy picturing the good I want to experience the happy results astound and delight me. For this purpose I declare that vast improvement comes quickly in every phase of my life now. Every day, in every way, things are getting better and better for me now.”

The proceeding was from Catherine Ponder, one of America’s foremost inspirational authors.