My song today is “Nice ‘n’ Easy”. This song was a 1960 album by Frank Sinatra and spent nine weeks at Number 1 on the Billboard ‘Stereo Album Chart’, and one week at Number 1 on the corresponding mono album chart.] At the 1960 Grammy Awards, “Nice ‘n’ Easy” was nominated for the ‘Album of the Year, ‘Best Vocal Performance’ and ‘Best Arrangement’. The song "Nice 'n' Easy" was released as a single in 1960 and made it to Number 60 on the charts. It was also recorded by Charlie Rich in 1964, Peggy Lee in 1966, Alex Chilton in 1989, Michael Buble in 2004, Natalie Cole in 2008, and Barbra Streisand in 2011. In 2000 it was voted Number 545 in Colin Larkin’s ‘All-Time Top 1000 Albums’.
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I first heard this song when I was in my late teens. Because of a very bad traffic accident which prevented me from walking for three years between my 11th and 14th birthday, very few things were ‘nice and easy’ for me until my 18th year of life began to show substantial improvement. All of my leisure time outside my employment was devoted to doing all manner of exercises to regain my walking mobility. I had over fifty operations on my legs after my body had been wrapped around the main drive shaft of the wagon which knocked me down and ran over me. I spent the years between 14 and 18 attempting to turn my ungainly hobble into a more acceptable walk. This was extremely difficult as all the operations had left one of my legs three inches shorter than the other one, and the extent of leg-length differential left me with a pronounced limp. I was determined never to wear built-up shoes or footwear with metal braces to compensate for the weakness of my leg strength, despite medical advice to the contrary. I firmly held the view that if I was to ever reach a degree of maximum mobility, walking agility, and near normality, then I would need to find some other way to make my upper body compensate for my lower body by adjusting to whatever physical difficulties I faced.
The bottom line is that over a 4-year period, I learned to minimise the natural extent of my three-inch limp through a combination of mental imagery, progressive relaxation exercises, and engaging in every sport or activity that would improve my balance. The sporting exercises I did included, judo, boxing, amateur wrestling, horse riding, Indian dance, lawn tennis, table tennis, dancing, tight rope walking, and running. To minimise my limp, instead of dropping one side of my body down three inches more than the other side, each time I put my short leg forward to walk, I learned to ‘roll the motion’ by making each two steps I took one movement only instead of the more natural two movements. The effect of this ploy to the onlooker watching me walk was to visually disguise the extent in my leg measurement differentials. Yes, I still limped, but not as much as I otherwise would have. Over time (a matter of five years), because I had never worn different height footwear on each foot, my hips readjusted from a pre-accident horizontal level to each other to a post-accident diagonal level. This new posture of my hips assisted the ‘rolling’ motion of my stride each time I walked. Because I never used metal-rod reinforcement braces at each side of my short leg on my footwear, my legs had also grown stronger than they otherwise would have been. Last but not least in minimising my limp, when I walked, the image I held in my mind was that I walked with only a very slight limp. I was, in short, using the powers of auto-suggestion(self-hypnosis) to normalise the look of my walk. One of the counter effects of the methods I employed was that whenever my body became wearier (at the end of a hard day at work), my mental concentration was never as effective and I limped to a much greater extent than when I was refreshed and more mentally alert.
When I was first taken into hospital at the age of 11 years with multiple life-threatening injuries, my spine had been damaged with the torso of my body having been twisted around the wagon propeller drive shaft, and I had lost all feeling below my waistline. I also had a lung puncture, and my chest had caved in after the breakage of 22 out of my 24 ribs. Both legs, both arms, and collar bone were broken in at least two places per limb. My parents were first told that I would die, and for six weeks I remained at death’s door. When I came off the danger list, I was then told that I would never walk again. I could not possibly envisage a life from the deck of a wheelchair in my adult life, and I did whatever I could from that moment on that was to my advantage. When western medicine offered me no hope, I turned my young mind to eastern culture and traditions. During my nine months as an inpatient at ‘Batley General Hospital’, I read as many books as I could on subjects which would be difficult for most adults to understand, let alone a young boy who was not yet twelve years of age. These were books on the subjects of transcendental meditation, progressive relaxation, body balance, martial arts, pain control, and the power of mental imagery and mental instruction (self-hypnosis).
My teacher, Paddy McNamara, who visited me twice weekly in the hospital obtained the reading material this 12-year-old boy asked him to from library sources, and what the library shelves did not contain, he sourced elsewhere. I needed to understand the functioning of the human body, especially in areas connected to leg movement and spinal damage, and the communication channels which existed between the two. After reading about the physiological electro-chemical connection between my brain and body, I learned that a connection in my spine had been damaged, and that was why I did not have any feeling in my legs. For six months, by using progressive relaxation and mental image exercises, I imagined feeling pain in my legs reappearing. I would do these mental exercises three and four hours every day and a couple of hours during the night when I could not sleep. I also did a lot of praying. For whatever reason, my spine and my legs started transmitted pain signals to my brain again. The connection in my spinal cord was obviously what medics term today as being an ‘incomplete spinal damage’ and not a ‘complete spinal injury’ which is the permanent loss of function below the area of injury.
Feeling pain again below my waistline told me that my legs still had life in them, and suggested that the initial area of damage in my spine had corrected itself! This awareness gave me the hope that I might one day walk again.
From my accident, and for every day of my life thereafter, I have practised transcendental meditation and progressive relaxation exercises, along with positive self-talk, breathing pattern exercises, body balance, muscle contraction and tension release exercises, and pain control. I have always had a high pain threshold since my discharge from Batley Hospital at the age of 12 years. Ever since that day I became an avid reader of eastern meditation, and over the years ahead, I would become one of the country’s most authoritative sources in the discipline of Relaxation Training, which I have practised since the age of 12 years and which I have instructed for over 40 years. This early learning and application of these methods and disciplines (along with all the experience to come from my accident) led me to found the process of ‘Anger Management’ during the 1970s; a method that mushroomed across the English-speaking world within the following two years and which workers have used to benefit countless clients who display anger control problems. I have always kept abreast of any new findings of the electrochemical connections between the brain and body since I first became a Probation Officer and ongoing findings of the power of the mind and mental imagery and positive self-talk.
While a hospital patient at the age of 12 years, my teacher Mr. McNamara arranged to have me tested by Mensa, particularly after he witnessed the nature of reading material that I was asking him to source for me. I had always been either the first or second in my class, whatever the subject, so he knew I was bright. The Mensa test gave me a very high rating, but please be aware that such tests are not accurate measurements of ones in intelligence; they are more a reflection upon the pattern of one’s thinking. When I look back over my life, I was unable to speak properly before I was 4 years old, and as long as I can remember I have always thought in pictures and have been a vivid dreamer. In my later life, Art and paintings have been an immense pleasure of mine.
At the age of thirty, I became a Probation Officer and soon decided that any skills I learned during my Probation Officer training course did not equip me to deal with the range of problems I faced in my client list. I, therefore, abandoned the traditional Probation Officer Rogerian and Freudian methods, and I started to construct my own programme of work which I applied to every client I ever worked with thereafter. The beauty of the Probation Service in 1970 when I was starting out as an Officer was that one was given a caseload of clients to supervise, but nobody told you how to work with each client. So long as you helped them to reduce their criminal behaviour or stop them offending completely, you were considered to be performing your job role satisfactorily.
I therefore reverted to the methods which had helped me after my accident as an 11-year-old boy, and before my first year as a Probation Officer had gone by, I was dealing with the majority of my clients by group programmes, constructed along the lines which I chose to operate. At the heart of all my group programmes were progressive relaxation, assertive and social skills learning, positive thinking, positive self-talk, breathing pattern exercises, muscle control exercises, fear reduction methods, body posture, autosuggestion, and imagination exercises. There was no prime focus upon criminal offending, but instead, the overall aim was to regain control of one’s behavior and response pattern, establish appropriate fear and anger levels, reduce stress and high blood pressure levels, and improve self-image, confidence levels, and social and communication skills.
All groups I ran were of mixed-sex and all members were 18 years and over. The groups were comprised of three types of group members. Some members were offenders, and other members had never committed an offence in their lives but displayed other problem behaviours that they wanted changing to improve their lives. The third type of group member were professional colleagues from many different types of organisations and professional bodies who wanted to learn more about relaxation training instruction along with anger management techniques. All group members were known to each other by their first names only, and none knew what category of status had brought them to group membership (apart from myself), unless they chose to self-disclose their status to other group members. As I wanted to research and analyse the efficacy of my work year upon year (with it being highly new and unconventional at the time), I needed the unadulterated data of both offending and non-offending membership, as I was dealing with health hope and happiness issues as well as specific problematic client responses to certain situations.
Through a two-hour weekly group programme, spread over twenty-four weeks, and the expected weekly homework practise of all group members of the above methods taught in group sessions, I was eventually able to identify the composition and distinction between one response pattern and another. This enabled me to advance my own knowledge and developing working methods for changing involuntary responses in one’s behaviour pattern to voluntary responses. This was done on the presumption that when given a choice to either do or not do something, that most people (offender and non-offender alike) usually chose to do the right thing as opposed to the wrong thing. I also found that by emphasising the health, hope, and happiness objectives of my programmes that offenders might more readily stop viewing themselves as offenders and start to realise that they were much more!
At the very heart of every two-hour weekly programme session, 45 minutes was devoted to teaching group members a specific relaxation scene which they would practice nightly in bed before going to sleep. My success rates in all my objectives set turned out to be three times better than the national average figures of the Probation Service for non-reoffending. By approaching all group members in non-criminal terms, I was able to use the skills I had learned from my age of 11/12 years as a Probation Officer in my early thirties with great success.
In my 60th year, I had two serious heart attacks and I was warned to take it easy, which I have done ever since. In my 70th year of life, I developed terminal blood cancer, I had two nine-month courses of chemotherapy, and three years of blood transfusions every two to three weeks. In addition, I have contracted another three different cancers, I have had 11 cancer operations in total, and 40 sessions of radiotherapy. I currently have three different body cancers, and on October 30th, I am scheduled to enter the hospital again to have another cancer removed from my facial area. Given that I will have had seven cancer operations plus forty sessions of radiotherapy within the past two years, without my ability to relax my mind and body, I would never have had the strength to get through these.
Believe it or not, I take every day of my life today ‘nice and easy’, not because I have to but because I choose to.
Love and peace Bill xxx