ShinsungHwa: The Visualization of Émile Coué’s Spiritual Energy (2022)
What is ShinsungHwa?
ShinsungHwa is a unique form of spiritual art where drawings emerge through spontaneous, flowing movements. Artists tap into their subject’s energy and let Qi(氣) guide their hands, creating geometric patterns that serve as a universal language.
Commentary on a ShinsungHwa: Émile Coué
“Every day, in every way, I am getting better and better.”
— Émile Coué
Many of us have heard this line before, though we might not remember where. It comes from Émile Coué, the French pharmacist and psychologist who is often called the father of autosuggestion. This year marks the centenary of his little book, still quietly alive after a hundred years. And because his ideas about self‑suggestion still speak so strongly, I wanted to create a ShinsungHwa in his name.
Coué once said,
“The wealthy person is the one who believes himself to be wealthy,
the poor person is the one who believes himself to be poor.”
He lived in the same era as Freud. While Freud was turning the new science of psychoanalysis inside out, Coué was quietly studying hypnosis under Dr. Ambroise Liébeault. From that, he developed his own approach — what we now call the method of autosuggestion.
What caught his attention was the way a single thought could grow into something larger, carrying its own weight and turning into conviction. He emphasized two simple things: focus — the ability to rest on one thought, and repetition — the steady rhythm of saying it over and over. From those two acts, he believed, transformation followed.
The French medical establishment wasn’t much impressed. But Coué himself never doubted the power of his method. He traveled widely, lecturing, treating, persuading. His words and practices ended up shaping not only his patients but physicians and psychologists, too.
In the simplest of terms, his message was this:
- Repeat a phrase such as “It disappears” or “It is being healed,” and the mind and body begin to lean toward that truth.
- The speed depends on how much faith one can bring to it.
- Tell yourself, “I am tired,” and you will be. Resolve, “I must not do that,” and sooner or later you will. Better to say, “It disappears,” and let the mind go quietly with it.
- Don’t think, “I want to live,” but rather, “I can live.” Don’t force, “I must be healthy again,” but whisper, “I am getting better.”
To Coué, autosuggestion worked best under two conditions:
first, having confidence that it will in fact happen; second, avoiding strain. Instead of struggling, one simply imagines and repeats. No grand effort — just the rhythm of belief, gently circling back again and again.
His ShinsungHwa
Coué’s ShinsungHwa is unusual. In it, a short path to the spiritual core concludes with a bright symbol of light. Around this, there unfolds an 8‑directional operating system, its fields of energy extending outward in quiet symmetry. A larger symbol of light divides into five directions, from which streams of energy reach toward the centers of the body — the head, the chest, the hands, and the feet. Together, they reveal the image of a flow gathered into one continuous whole.
Even the hands are drawn with care. Each one rendered differently, as if to show two ways of holding life. In the right hand rests a figure made of hexagonal energy, not just a shape but an instrument — alive, charged. It suggests that Coué’s practice of self‑suggestion was no dusty theory, not something confined to a book, but a living force he carried and used. And perhaps that is what remains with us a century later: the reminder that a phrase, repeated softly enough, steadily enough, has the quiet power to alter the very current of our being.
A Life in Suggestion
If you were to step into the French town of Troyes in the late 1800s, you might not have noticed Emile Coué at first. He wasn’t the kind of man who drew attention with grand gestures or loud speeches. He moved through the world in a modest way, carrying himself more like a careful neighbor than a revolutionary thinker. Yet, in his quiet persistence, Coué gave shape to an idea that touched lives far beyond his small pharmacy counter—an idea about how words, repeated simply and gently, could shift the way a person experienced daily life.
Coué is often remembered as the father of what came to be called autosuggestion—the practice of influencing one’s own thoughts and behaviors through repeated affirmations. To some, that may sound like a thin precursor to today’s motivational slogans or self-help mantras. But in his time, it was something both radical and surprisingly practical, a bridge between old ideas of healing and the psychology that was beginning to make its mark in Europe.
A Chemist Who Paid Attention
Emile Coué was born in 1857 in Troyes, a city east of Paris known more for its medieval charm than for intellectual revolutions. He trained as a pharmacist, which set him on a path of encounters with patients who came not only for medicine but for reassurance. In an age when prescriptions were less refined than they are today, the role of a pharmacist wasn’t just to hand over pills; it often meant listening, comforting, and sometimes improvising.
Coué noticed something that many others overlooked: when he handed a medicine to someone with a few kind words of reassurance, the medicine often seemed to work better. A mother who truly believed a tonic would calm her child often came back praising the results. And patients who arrived with worry etched across their faces sometimes walked away lighter, not because the bottle contained anything unusual, but because they believed it would help.
This gentle observation—hardly spectacular, but deeply human—was the seed of his life’s work. He began to wonder whether the mind itself was a medicine cabinet, waiting for its keys to be found.
The Method of Autosuggestion
Unlike other thinkers of his time who wrapped their theories in complicated language, Coué kept things simple. He believed that if people repeated a certain phrase to themselves with focus and regularity, their unconscious mind would eventually accept it as truth and act accordingly. His most famous formula was: “Every day, in every way, I’m getting better and better.”
The words themselves were not magic. Coué encouraged people to say them morning and evening, with rhythm and calm determination, almost like the lull of a nursery rhyme. The practice was less about forcing belief and more about planting a steady seed in the subconscious.
He rejected the idea of sheer “willpower,” which he thought could create inner resistance when someone tried to impose change too harshly. Instead, his approach was more like watering a garden: consistent, patient, not demanding immediate results.
To modern ears, this may sound close to positive affirmations or even mindfulness exercises. In Coué’s time, though, it stood in sharp contrast to the stern medical treatments and hypnotic trances that doctors often prescribed. He was not trying to put people under his control. He was teaching them how to guide themselves.
What makes Coué interesting isn’t only his method but the way he lived it. Accounts of his lectures describe a man who was calm, unhurried, and deeply modest. He didn’t present himself as a guru or a miracle healer. He spoke as if he were simply sharing a useful trick he had stumbled upon—like teaching neighbors how to tie a stronger knot or fix a squeaky hinge.
When he invited people to practice autosuggestion, it wasn’t in the tone of a salesman. It was more of a neighborly “Why don’t you try this? It might help.” He was known to encourage those who came to him not to abandon medicine, but to combine it with his method. In that, he was practical and refreshingly grounded compared to others in the self-help tradition who often promised sweeping cures.
Yet, his humility didn’t prevent him from becoming unexpectedly famous. By the early 1920s, Coué’s lectures in England and the United States were packed with curious onlookers, physicians, psychologists, and ordinary folks searching for hope. Newspapers wrote about him in tones that blended admiration with skepticism. He became, briefly, a household name.
Praise and Doubt
As with many new ideas, Coué’s method attracted both enthusiasm and ridicule. For some people, repeating a daily phrase really did bring relief—relief from anxieties, from nervous habits, even from physical pain. Testimonials poured in. To an age weary from World War I, when families had seen destruction on a scale they could hardly comprehend, the idea that one could lean on gentle, personal words as a way to rebuild inner stability was deeply appealing.
But just as many critics dismissed him. Newspapers poked fun at the simplicity of his “formula.” Doctors accused him of promoting nothing more than a placebo effect. Satirists joked that chanting a phrase could hardly mend broken bones or cure illness.
Coué did not fight back with bitterness. He accepted that not everyone would see value in his work. Still, he reminded his audiences that even if what he offered was a version of placebo—if the mind could shift the body toward healing, if someone’s days could feel lighter and less burdened—what harm was there in that?
The Honest Limits
One of the admirable things about Coué is that he did not pretend autosuggestion was a miracle. He recognized its limits. It wasn’t meant to erase serious disease or to replace surgery. Rather, it was a way to soften fears, build resilience, and sometimes nudge the body into healthier rhythms.
If someone used autosuggestion and still required medical help, he would not shame them. In fact, he often urged them to use both together. This modesty—rare in a world of sweeping promises and grand cures—may be why his influence, though quieter than some, remains enduring.
In essence, he was saying: You hold more influence over your well-being than you may think. Use that influence kindly.
A Legacy Ahead of Its Time
Although Coué’s fame faded after his death in 1926, his ideas never quite vanished. Psychologists later drew upon similar principles in cognitive-behavioral therapy, where repeated thought patterns can influence behavior. Popular culture absorbed echoes of his method in “positive thinking,” though not always with the same humility he displayed.
Today, when people repeat affirmations, practice mindfulness, or remind themselves to breathe deeply during stress, they’re walking paths Coué helped lay a century ago. Even the booming industry of self-help books and seminars owes something, however sideways, to that French pharmacist who once handed people remedies with a kind smile and noticed that belief itself could be healing.
Seeing Him Clearly
It would be easy to turn Coué into either a saint of self-help or a figure of parody. Neither seems fair. He was not a magician, nor was he a charlatan. He was, quite plainly, a man who, through daily encounters with suffering and worry, noticed that the way people thought about their lives mattered. And he offered a simple, almost homespun method of changing those thoughts.
There is something touching in the ordinariness of it all. A man behind a counter, observing quietly, offering a few words of encouragement. A method repeated quietly at dawn and at dusk, not in grand halls, but often in the hush of everyday bedrooms, kitchens, and workbenches.
In many ways, Coué’s gift was to remind people that help didn’t always have to come from outside, that the words one speaks to oneself carry their own kind of medicine. And while history may not place him at the very center of psychological science, he occupies a quieter corner: the one where ordinary lives meet small moments of betterment, repeated each day like a steady breath.
Final Thoughts
Nearly a hundred years after his death, when the world seems noisier and more complicated than ever, perhaps there is something refreshing about looking back at his gentle approach. No promises of miracles. No demands for perfection. Just a reminder that our own words, spoken with care, can shape the way we meet each day.
And maybe that is why Coué’s legacy still lingers—not in fame or headlines, but in the small, steady lives of people who whisper to themselves, before the day begins or just before sleep: Things can be better. I can be better.
