Embodiment · “Being Precedes Having”
Wattles' Image of Perfect Health
Form a clear conception of yourself in perfect health, make it your habitual thought, do everyday things ‘in the manner of a perfectly strong and healthy person,’ and live in continual gratitude for health — strictly as a wellbeing adjunct, never a replacement for medical care.
Picture yourself in robust health and make it your habitual self-thought; carry yourself, eat, sleep, and move “in the manner of a strong, healthy person”; and give continual thanks for health. Direct will onto your thinking, not your organs. Use it as outlook and morale — always alongside proper medical care, never instead of it. Notice symptoms and get them treated.
What it is
The third book of Wattles’ trilogy, The Science of Being Well (1910), applies the SGR method to the body. The core practice: form a clear mental image of yourself in perfect health, hold it as your habitual self-thought, behave as a well person behaves, and live in gratitude to the source of health.
It is the health-domain twin of and. It is rendered here as a wellbeing/attitude practice only. Wattles wrote before modern medicine; his strong claim that thought cures disease is unverified and, taken literally, dangerous.
The defensible, useful core is a hopeful self-conception, confident active living, and gratitude — alongside proper medical care.
The Method
- Form the conception of perfect health. “The best way to do this is to form a mental image or picture of yourself as being well, imagining a perfectly strong and healthy body; and to spend sufficient time in contemplating this image to make it your habitual thought of yourself.”
- Receive health, don’t fight disease. “You are to receive or appropriate health rather than to reject and deny disease… to form a CONCEPTION of perfect health, and to relate yourself to it.” (See safety on the limits of this.)
- Think health, never sickness. “Never think of yourself as sick, or as likely to be sick; never think of sickness in connection with yourself at all.” “Always think of the way strong people do things.”
- Act in the well way. “You cannot long have faith in health if you continue to act like a sick person.” “Think of yourself as doing everything in the manner of a perfectly strong and healthy person” — in how you eat, breathe, sleep, move.
- Use will on the mind, not the body’s functions. “You direct the will upon the mind… in determining what you shall believe, what you shall think.” “Do not try to use your will to compel the healthy performance of function within you” — leave involuntary processes alone.
- Live gratefully. “Whenever you think of yourself, or of your advancing condition, give thanks to the Great Intelligent Substance for the perfect health you are enjoying.”
- Hold faith in health. “Do not assert with faith that you are going to get well; assert with faith that you ARE well” — Wattles’ confident self-relation. (Apply as morale and outlook, not as denial of treatment — §6.) (Sourcing note: quoted phrases are verbatim from The Science of Being Well, esp. Chs. IV-VIII; the structure is an attributed paraphrase.)
Source & Lineage
Wallace Delois Wattles (1860–1911), American New Thought writer. The Science of Being Well (1910) sits within the New Thought “mental healing” current (Quimby, Eddy, Hopkins), applying his one-substance metaphysics to a “Principle of Health” in the body. Read today, it is of historical and motivational interest, not a medical text.
Common refinements
Denying real symptoms. “Never think of sickness in connection with yourself” must NOT become ignoring warning signs. Notice symptoms, get them checked — then keep a hopeful outlook.
- Using it instead of care. The single most dangerous error. Use it with medicine, never instead.
- Self-blame. Treating illness as a failure of thought is cruel and false; people who fall ill did not “think wrong.”
- Straining the body by will. Wattles himself says leave involuntary functions alone; relax into the well-image rather than forcing it.