Welcome to Part Two of the book. Here I am going to go over all the areas of the body giving you the exercises for each area.

A reasonable question which you might have is whether you can start this work even though you have not nearly finished the work on the breathing that I presented in Part One. The answer is not as easy as the question.

Different areas of the body contain different amounts and even kinds of tension. They have different effects on our nature and feelings. Therefore, reasonably, the answer is yes for this exercise, no for that exercise, and somewhat for another exercise. Therefore throughout this part of the book I will say which areas or even exercises in any given area may be done before, after, or during your work on the breathing in Part One.

Recall that I emphasized repeatedly in Part One that the rule of the work is: always too slowly. Your nature and your relationship to your body do not want to change, they want to stay the same. Even if you are consciously committed to change, your subconscious is just as committed to not changing. In the way human beings are constructed, in a contest between the conscious and the subconscious the subconscious will win. By will and choice you have control of your voluntary muscles, but your subconscious has control of all the rest of your body. In pictures, if your will is a race horse, your subconscious is a mule.

Now, as always, the choice is yours. You can believe the nearly 65 years of experience of Dr. Willis and Dr. Regardie or you can think you know better. But if all the caution I have indicated is not sufficient for you, I will add one more reason to move cautiously. There is phenomena in this work called "a holding state." This happens when more advanced work is done before prior work makes the subconscious system ready to accept the new challenge. In a holding state the more advanced work, done before you are ready for it, causes other areas to become set and rigid in their holding pattern such that they can not be broken through. Holding states are bad, steady progress is good.

I want to add one more description here before I get into the actual exercises. As you do the work you will find that your body starts to tremble or shake. The trembling can be very subtle, almost like quivering, or it can be larger trembling (often seen in the legs), or it can be spasms. Except for the types of spasm I mentioned in Part One where it might be corrected by doing the swimming kick exercise and/or by taking a magnesium & calcium supplement, there is no reason to be concerned with this quivering or trembling or spasms. Just keep breathing through these involuntary body movements. These body motions may seem strange, even inexplicable, to you but in fact they are a sign of progress. Welcome them. (See footnote 19 on page 116).

This work, like the breathing work, should not be done within three hours of eating. Give your stomach time to clear all the food before you do a session.

I have one more very important point to make before I describe the exercises. There is a kind of natural error that many, if not even most, people make in these exercises. They make the same error in the breathing part of the work that I discussed in Part One. The error could be described a number of different ways even though there is only one source of this error. The nature of the error is that people do not trust that they will do things correctly if they do not control everything. That is, they approach their own body with the assumption that they could not do something if they did not think it out, if they did not mentally control and command their own body.

I mentioned this error in Part One. Now it is time that I made this issue a prominent one. One of the major reasons why people do their breathing in two phases (first an inhale and then an exhale) is that they think they have to think the sequence instead of simply getting the feel of what it is like to breathe continuously and let it become an automatic, natural process. This becomes even more of an issue now that I add exercises on top of the breathing. Needing to exercise control, when they add another point of control, they find that they can not do both because they can't think both points of control at the same time. They can think the breath cycle or they can think the forehead movement (to pick one example) but they can't think both at the same time.

We are jumping way ahead of ourselves here but still it is not a bad place to make a point about the nature of this work. Recall from Part One that you are changing your nature with this Reichian work. Now a simple question will make the point: do you think your sexuality is something separate from your nature? If you answered: yes, you're beyond this book; simply stop here and forget this work. For all the rest of you, what is an orgasm other than a letting go of control and giving into the automatic operation of your body? Answer: it is nothing else!

What is sexual arousal other than letting the sensations from your body flood your whole consciousness? Same answer! The need to control is a part of one's nature. To the extent you control and/or to the extent that you disown your body, to that extent you are preventing arousal and the full experience of the sexual experience in orgasm. I can promise you without any question that this work will have a profound effect on your sexual experience. It won't happen quickly and it will be a gradual increase in intensity rather than a sudden change, but it will happen.

This change will happen especially when you get to the work on the pelvis. But a note of caution. Don't skip the eye work to get to the pelvis.

However long it takes, first clear any chronic tension you have in the forehead and the eyes before you go on to other areas.

Footnote 24. Actually, in practice in a therapist's office, there are a host of exceptions to this rule. It would simply complicate this book beyond endurance to deal with all these exceptions. Therefore, to make this book readable and usable, I have simply ignored all the exceptions. But I can mention that if Part One of this book is not clearing up the breathing, there are some exercises in Chapters 16, 17, and 18 that can help. But, then again, that is not license to just do all the exercises in those three chapters before the breathing is even half right. As mentioned a number of time, it is better to be too slow in this work than it is to jump ahead and undertake exercises for which your character is not ready.

One note of mea culpa before we enter Part Two of the book. In preparing this book for publication I noticed that almost without exception I had made a serious error in photography. I may or may not be a good therapist, but I am a bad photographer. The error is that I was so focused on getting the shot I wanted that I failed to notice that in almost all shots the model's mouth is not sufficiently open. The mouth should, in all exercises, be wide open.

As in Part One, there are major boxes:

minor boxes:

and notes: