One morning while brushing my teeth I called my wife over and asked her to check out an itchy place on the upper back of my left arm – a place hard to see in the mirror. She responded, “Yeah, you have a little red rash about the size of my thumb there. Just keep it clean and it will go away.”

I forgot about it for a couple of days; then I decided to check it out myself using two mirrors. The rash had not gone away and, in fact, was bigger. The following morning it had spread down my arm nearly to my elbow.

At this point I made a big mistake. I went on line and typed in the description of it in Google hoping to find a quick and simple holistic cure. What came back at me was frightening. On several sites my description matched up perfectly with a known disease that was curable, but all sites told me that this problem would be recurring now for the rest of my life – it would come and go, but there was no permanent cure for it.

I’ve been taught that there are 3 steps in healing: 1. Identify the problem, 2. Cast out the erroneous belief, the mental cause of the problem, and 3. Fill the void with powerful truths that establish that I am the perfect child of God.

My mistake was that I thought that identifying the problem meant that I needed to become aware of the name of the disease. Not so.

Along with my growing fear, the rash progressed rapidly and by the third morning my entire left arm was covered with red boiling skin and I wondered if I had been bitten by a spider because my arm had clearly been poisoned. I could see it. It began to swell and the pain in my fingertips was like needles stabbing whenever I touched anything.

I had never had anything remotely like this in my life. I wore a long sleeve shirt and then a glove so that my wife could not see this because I did not want to scare her and have her hold this image in her mind.

In my life I’ve never gone to doctors, never taken medicine and never gone to the hospital because I’ve handled all my physical problems with prayer and a scientific approach to healing that I’ve been able to work for over 60 years. Also as a child my mother was a terrific healer who taught me the principles of not only healing, but also simply staying healthy. I’ve led a blessed life.

So I never considered going to a doctor or finding a medicinal cure. That idea was just not in my system.

I knew I had to really tackle this because the condition was advancing so rapidly and I could feel and see it moving from my arm into my body.

I told my wife, Julia, that I was going to go into our bedroom, shut the door, and not come out until I had this thing under control. I told her to stay out and just leave food at the door and knock. She completely supported my wishes.

The first day in my room I prayed, I read and studied the Bible and several books and articles on healing that gave me powerful truths to work with and think about in my quest.

I knew I had to first dispel the fear and quickly realized my mistake in going on line and identifying the name of the disease. This act had given me nothing but fear to contend with.

I realized that the first step of “Identifying the problem” did not mean to identify the physical problem, but rather it meant to identify the mental cause of the physical manifestation. I asked myself, “What mental thoughts had poisoned my thinking resulting in a poisoned arm?”

I made a list. I spent several hours that first day looking deeply at my life and my erroneous thinking. I searched through relationships with other people, my business ethics, my confusions of sexuality, my angers, my resentments, my regrets, and I came up with seven or eight real confusions in my life. I wrote these down in a notebook that was full of uplifting thoughts that I had collected. Some of these confusions were more recent and some were life long. I approached my thinking with a fine-tooth comb and left no stone unturned (to mix the metaphor).

I went to sleep that night determined to right these wrongs in my thinking, but exhausted by the day’s concentrated metaphysical work, upset with myself for letting my thinking get away from me, and still afraid that this might be too big a problem for me to handle.

When I woke up the next morning the rash was much worse. It had spread across my chest and stomach and was now half way down my right arm as well and crawling up my neck into my face. I remember looking in the mirror into my own eyes and saying out loud, “Well, Pete, it’s now or never. You’ve got to take a mighty stand here and align yourself in God’s Love for you.” I knew I needed to see only the perfect man, destroy the tremendous fear that was welling up in my body and mind and find out for once and for all if I could handle this healing thing with strength and assurance.

I went back to work. I looked deeply at my seven ‘sins’ and sorted out the errors of my thinking until each wrong was righted, promises to myself made and right thinking restored.

I did not work at all on healing a rash, my arm or the name of a disease. I worked on healing and eradicating poisonous thought. Better said, I eradicated poisonous thought problem by problem, step by step. I worked on my commitment to my own purity, and where I saw impurity, I cleansed.

I decided not to check myself in the mirror because I knew that the physical manifestation was not the cause but the result. So my only concern was the cause. Eliminate the cause and there can be no result. This made perfect sense, so I stayed with this practice and demonstration for about 6 hours.

Julia would occasionally knock and ask, “How ya’ doin’?” I would answer, “Hold only the highest thought for me.” She did.

About 6:00 that evening of the second day of seclusion, as my fearful thought began to break, the skin on my arm also began to break and drain. I had to change my shirt several times that night and I did not get much sleep because of the itching, but I knew that the itching was a sign of healing and one time when I changed my shirt I did notice that the rash had not progressed the way fear had suggested it might.

I finally got about 2 hours sleep after the sun had risen on the 3^rd day.

When I woke up, I went right back to work purifying my thought. Julia had been sleeping out on the couch in the living room, brought me breakfast, knocked and left it at the door. I ate and went right back to work. I made deep promises to myself, and deep commitments to my understood truths of behavior and thinking.

One example of the depth of my thinking was this:

As a young boy I was always fascinated with war. My playmates and I would spend long hours every afternoon lying under the bed or hiding in closets fending off the Germans or the “Japs.” I carried these childhood fantasies forward in my life in the following way. Often at night as I lay in bed trying to go to sleep, I would imagine myself in a foxhole with a machine gun. The enemy would be coming across the no man’s land before me in the darkness and I would shoot up a flare to light their approach and mow them down.

The foxhole was safe. I knew I would never die. It was my way of feeling protected from all harm. It was a weird and very false means of personal safety. In my work during those three days, I clearly understood the fallacy of this bad habit. I also understood that I had gone to sleep for far too many nights killing people. I was shocked at this realization and so clearly saw the error of my ways that I committed to never allowing that scenario to enter my mind again. I have since refused to pick up a gun in my imagination. I’m done with that fantasy.

I had to then find peaceful ways of entering sleep and I did.

This habitual error of thinking was clearly poisonous. Actually the habit was easy to stop because I so clearly understood the wrong of it.

About 5:00 that afternoon on the 3^rd day. I opened the door to my bedroom and came out for the first time. I said to Julia, “I’m healed.” And she responded, “I know.” The rash was still there, but I knew the cause was gone. No cause/no result.

When I work up the next morning the rash was only on my arm and had totally disappeared from the rest of my body. By mid day the rash had disappeared from my hand and forearm and within the next day was gone completely except for one little spot high up on my left arm where it had started.

I cannot even begin to describe the feelings of gratitude, triumph and joy I felt at this wondrous healing. My skin simply came back to its full normality with an instantaneousness that was a true testament to the power of mental healing.

An interesting note here: The 1”x1” spot hung on for two weeks on my arm. I saw it as a reminder that I had several major new commitments in life to demonstrate. It was a warning not to let go of the truths that I had learned and realized in my 3 days. In a strange/odd way, I was grateful for it. It said to me, “Don’t forget this lesson. Don’t become complacent and let things slide. Stay committed to your new-found principles. Prove the efficacy of your realizations. When, in the next two weeks, I was able to reconstruct my life with new and better habits, the spot disappeared – for good.

A very wise track coach once said to us in an inspirational prayer meeting before a track meet, “Boys, a healing, as you know, is no further away than your next thought … but then the thought after that, and the thought after that, and the thought after that, and the thought after that, …”

This always stuck with me.

I’ve stayed with the truths discovered back then in my life and in the four years since have experienced no further rash, poison or recurrence. I’m clear that as I stay to my principles, I am safe in the arms of Love.

That one healing was so worth the agony, the fear, the pain. I learned from it – big time.

I’m a better man for the experience.