15 BLACK LIGHT
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Goal: To deal with difficult or unbearable stress situations.
Time: This exercise will be most effective if you can provide for
a fairly long undisturbed period(approximately one hour).  You may
not need the entire hour to do the exercise, but you need to know
that a full hour is available if you want and need it.

Preparation

Find a location as free as possible from noise and distraction. 
Lower shades, close blinds, turn off lights; if necessary, wear an
eye mask and use earplugs.  It helps if you are physically tired
rather than energetic, and your stomach is empty rather than full.

Roll your eyeballs upward and focus on a point uncomfortably high
above your line of vision; keep them in that position while closing
your eyes, and for some moments thereafter.  You will find that
this helps you to enter your trance state.  Now, deepen the trance
by relaxing all your muscles, not forcing it but nurturing and
monitoring your gradual descent.

The Exercise

As you go deeper and deeper, the room seems to descend with you,
going further down with you until it is an underground prison cell
in which you are locked.  There is no light, and the silence is so
profound that you fell you are alone in a pit of emptiness, totally
deserted in a tomblike stillness.

Enter into this total silence with all your senses.  You reach out
with your hand and feel the clammy texture of a wall which no
sunlight has ever touched.  Your eyes try to discern an outline in
the blackness, but o no avail.  Your ears strain for the slightest
sound of life, but there is none; even the sound of your breathing
is lost in the stillness.

You feel yourself becoming a part of this unearthly silence, so
that even you can no longer make a sound to break it.

You feel you cannot stand this for another minute, yet you know
that you must - for days, weeks, months.  You being to sense the
demand that will be made upon your sanity at the very thought of
your situation.  You are imprisoned in this unbearably endless
void, and you must somehow survive here.

At this point, focus your attention to your body and slowly
consciously, relax every inch of it, from the top of your head to
the very tips of your toes.  Tell yourself that you will count from
ten to zero, as you have done so often before; and that, when you
have reached zero, your mind will present to you the recollection
of one of the happiest days of your life.  There is no need to
strain your mind or search for images.  Simply count to zero, stay
relaxed, and let the pleasant recollection arise in your mind
gradually and easily.  Let the picture be like a landscape seen
hazily at a distance, becoming clearer and clearer.  

Now the happy picture fills your whole mind, and it is so
incredibly vivid and detailed that it is no longer a recollection
but a re-living.  You are truly there, in the time and place of
this happy memory; you relive it exactly as it happened, through
all your senses- what you saw, what you heard, everything you
touched, or smelled, or tasted.  You are fully reliving the
original experience.

The darkness and terror of the soundproof cell have disappeared as
if they had never existed, just like the reality in which you are
performing this exercise: For the moment, and for as long as you
choose, nothing exists except the reality of this relived
happiness.  You know that you will be able to summon this happy
experience again whenever you wish.  And you also know that you
will, as always, return from this place by telling yourself that,
after counting from one to three and opening your eyes, you will be
back in your state of everyday consciousness, feeling perfectly
relaxed and at ease, capable of dealing with whatever stresses come
your way.