Imagination · “Feel It Real”
See the Perfect
To pray for healing by relaxing, turning toward God’s life, vividly picturing the person (or oneself) already whole, and giving thanks.
See the Perfect in 5 lines: Same time, same place — relax and be still. Turn toward God’s life and ask it to increase in you. Make a clear, simple picture of the body already well and whole. Bless the picture and give thanks that it is being accomplished. Then rest in thanks rather than asking again — and keep up real medical care.
What it is
This is Agnes Sanford’s signature healing-prayer method from The Healing Light (1947): become still, turn toward God’s “life-giving power,” then hold a clear mental picture of the body — your own or another’s — already well and whole, and give thanks that it is being re-created in perfection.
Sanford called it a “child-like method, the method of happy visioning.” It fuses New Thought’s “see the perfect” affirmative imagery with a sacramental Christian frame, where the picture is offered to God rather than asserted at “the universe.”
The Method
Sanford’s healing prayer runs in four moves:
- Relax and become still. “Be still and know that I am God.” Choose the same time and place daily, get comfortable, lay aside worry, and quiet the mind. → see the companion stillness practice.
- Turn toward the inflow of life. Consciously remind yourself “of the reality of a life outside yourself,” and invite it: “Heavenly Father, please increase in me at this time Your life-giving power.” Sanford pictured this as connecting to a source the way an appliance connects to electricity.
- Picture the body well. “Make a picture in your mind of your body well.” Make it “clear, concrete, vivid and simple.” Hold the healed condition as present and real — the limb mended, the person walking, the face at peace — not the illness being fought.
- Give thanks. Bless the picture and “give thanks that this is being accomplished.” Sanford’s rule: “No matter how much we ask for something it becomes ours only as we accept it and give thanks for it.” After the first time, she said, “we may say, ‘Thank You,’ instead of ‘Please.’” (Sourcing note: quoted phrases are short excerpts from / faithful paraphrase of Sanford’s text as reproduced in published excerpts; the four-step shape is hers.)
Source & Lineage
Agnes Sanford (1897–1982) was a lay healer and a principal founder of the modern Inner Healing movement; The Healing Light (1947) sold over half a million copies.
Her “see the perfect and give thanks” method draws on the New Thought affirmative-prayer current (Trine, Holmes, Wattles’ “image of perfect health”) and the Christian laying-on-of-hands tradition, set within Episcopal sacramental practice.
She extended it into “healing of memories,” seeding charismatic-renewal and mainline healing ministries.
The Traditions' versions
Wattles’ “image of perfect health” — holding the picture of oneself as already well.
- Simonton healing imagery — picturing treatment and immune response working, framed medically rather than spiritually.
- Gawain’s creative visualization — the same “picture it as already real, with feeling, then give thanks” shape, secular/New Age framing.
- Regardie’s art of true healing — Hermetic light-and-energy healing imagery.
- Affirmative / spiritual-mind treatment — declaring wholeness as already true in God.
Common refinements
Straining the picture. Sanford warned against effortful, anxious visualizing; the tone is “happy visioning,” relaxed and confident.
- Picturing the illness “being fought.” Hold the finished state of wholeness, not the battle — keep it positive and present-tense.
- Asking endlessly instead of thanking. The shift from “Please” to “Thank You” is the operative move; clutching at the request re-asserts lack (The Inner Creates the Outer).
- Treating it as a substitute for treatment. It is an adjunct; Sanford herself worked alongside, not against, medicine.
- Blaming the sick for “not enough faith.” A serious pastoral and ethical error the genre is prone to — avoid it entirely.