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To float is just as important as to accept, and it works similar magic. I could say let ‘float’ and not ‘fight’ be your slogan, because it amounts to that.

Let me illustrate more clearly the meaning of float in this regard. A patient had become so afraid of meeting people that she had not entered a shop for months. When asked to make a small purchase she said, ‘I couldn’t go into a shop. I’ve tried, but I can’t. The harder I try, the worse I get. If I force myself, I feel I am paralysed and can’t put one foot in front of the other. So please don’t ask me to go into a shop.’

I told her that she had little hope of succeeding while she tried to force herself in this way. This was the fighting of which I had previously warned her. I explained that she must imagine she was floating into the shop, not fighting her way there. To make this easier, she could imagine she was actually on a cloud, floating through the door. I also explained that she could further help herself by letting any obstructive thought she might have float away out of her head, recognizing that it was no more than a thought and that she need not be bluffed into giving it attention.

When she came back she was overjoyed and said, ‘Don’t stop me. I’m still floating. Do you want me to float for something else?’

Strange, isn’t it, how the use of one simple word could free a mind that had been imprisoned for months? The explanation is simple enough. When you fight you become tense and tension inhibits action. When you think of floating you relax and this helps action. This woman was in such a state of tension that I have seen her nearly reduced to tears when, with shaking hands, she tried to find a car-key in her handbag. After learning to float, one day when on a similar search she said, ‘Sorry if I’m taking your time. The keys can’t be too far away. I’ve just floated past two bills, a lipstick and a purse. I’ll float round a bit longer and find them.’ The shaking hands were almost steady. She was learning to float past tension.

I have seen patients so tensed by continuous fear that they were convinced they could neither walk nor lift their arms to feed themselves. One man afflicted in this way had been bedridden for weeks. After a few conversations with him, I found he was able to understand that the paralysis lay in his thoughts and not in his muscles. He learnt the trick of freeing his muscles by floating past obstructive thoughts. Within a few days he was ‘floating’ the food to his mouth unaided and announced that he was now ready to walk.

This caused a fine stir in the ward. Several doctors, students, and nurses stood by to watch. No sooner had the patient stood up than a nurse, seeing him sway, said hurriedly, ‘Look out – you might fall!’

The patient, describing the event afterwards, said that this suggestion was almost too much, and he nearly crumpled to the floor. However, he heard a voice in the background saying, ‘Float and you can do it. Float past fear,’ and he said, ‘I “floated” down the hospital ward and back, to my own and everyone else’s astonishment.’

Such frightening thoughts as were experienced by these two people can be very persistent, almost obsessive, to a tired mind, and it helps some people to imagine a pathway along which they can let these thoughts escape, float away. (Another use for ‘float’.) For example, one woman thought of them as passing out of the back of her head; another said she let them float away along a channel over her right ear, where the grocer keeps his pencil; yet another thought of them as little balls that she let bounce off her head. This may sound childish to a healthy, resilient mind, capable of directing and discarding thought, but to the exhausted, frightened person it is not childish. Nothing that helps is childish to him and this idea works well.