These exercises are general, not directed to a specific area of the body.

The Tennis Racket

The goal of this exercise is to practice anger in a controlled environment. To recall a previous discussion, while sex used to be the great taboo, now it is anger. In all too many people, anger evokes strong anxiety. The anxiety then serves to keep the anger in check, just as smiling keeps tears in check.

The common equipment for this exercise is a cheap wooden tennis racket. The cheaper the better. It is not that the racket is frequently broken — I have been using a $5.00 racket for 35 years and it has yet to break — it is only that you do not want to be concerned when using it that you might have to go easy on it lest it have to be replaced.

Before describing the exercise, I would add that there are several alternatives to the tennis racket. The other pieces of equipment do yield different results but the difference is slight enough that just the racket is sufficient for most work. The other possibilities are an approximately two-foot length of flexible polyethylene tubing or a phone book.

Here you are standing during the exercise. The tennis racket is held with both hands. It is brought up over your head and then slammed against the bed with a shout. The face of flat side of the racket is what strikes the bed. Whereas before we tried to insure that the shout was with an open throat, here the only issue is that the shout be done with maximum vigor, vehemence or anger as you can muster. This exercise only works if you put your full force into it and you shout as strongly and loudly as possible as you bring the tennis racket down to strike the bed.

There is always the possibility that you are so tall that standing and adding the length of the racket will cause it to strike the ceiling or a light fixture. Test this out first before you break something.

Most people tire quickly with this exercise so when you start to weaken in your slam or shout, stop the exercise for this session.

Interestingly, most people have more ability to do a hard slam than they do to add the vehemence to their shout. The shout is weak, it does not carry with it the rage that it should. Obviously, if you live in an apartment where the walls are thin, you have to do this only when you know that your neighbors are not home or you have to let them know beforehand that your shouting does not have any criminal meaning. It is somewhat disconcerting to have the police show up at your door because of a report that someone was being killed.

The rubber tubing can be substituted for the tennis racket or the phone book can be substituted where the book is ripped apart rather than used to strike.

Sense, Feel, Report (Passive Session)

In Part One I said that each session should end with a sense-feel-report period. Here I make that into its own exercise. This is the passive session I mentioned at the beginning of Part One (Chapter one, page 26).

This exercise seems so simple that you may be tempted to try it early in your work;

DON'T!

This exercise has immense power even though it appears to be almost benign. The power of this simple exercise is so great that the author has seen people thrown into full-blown anxiety after just a few minutes. On the other extreme I have seen people who were so guarded in life that the exercise had no effect at all and only served to help the student practice his nature of not being in touch with his body.

I would strongly urge anyone reading this book not to do this exercise for at least a year and then only when the forehead and eye exercises have done all their work.

Lie flat on the bed. The breathing is normal, no special need to breathe deeply and, as you will read in a moment, there is no 'ah' sound.

For one full hour talk out loud reporting on sensations from your body. It is critical for this exercise that you not let even a moment pass without saying something. If you have to, simply repeat the report you just made or simply use some vocal pause sound (uh, uh, uh ...) to make sure that you never stop talking. It is important in this exercise to not allow yourself to fantasize. You have a specific point of focus: your body, and fantasy will take you away from that focus.

Don't bother to set an alarm clock to measure the hour, simply do it for what you think must be an hour, then stop and check the clock afterwards. Don't check the clock and restart the exercise to get in an hour. However long you do the exercise, that is the time that will be spent in this session.

A session might start with a full scan of your body. Here is a made-up example.

"My forehead is flat. My eyes seem stuck in the middle of my head. I can't feel any tension in my jaw but there is a lot of saliva. My neck feels normal. There is a pressure on my chest as if there were a weight on it. I can feel the bed beneath my fingers and there seems to be a slight kind of tingle in my right wrist. My diaphragm feels a little like it is quivering. My abdomen feels empty as though there were a balloon inside it taking up the space. I am aware of my genitals. My thighs feel tight. There is a tingling in both knees. My right calf is tighter than my left calf. I can't feel anything in my feet."

Having gone over the whole body now you can do it again to see if there are any changes or you can focus on one thing (for example, the tingling in the knees) and see if and how the sensation changes. If you are focusing on one part of the body and it is not changing at all then leave that one part and turn to some other part or to a full body report.

It does not matter if you have nothing to report, it matters only that you do not let yourself stop talking and you continue to focus on the sensations from your body.

Sense, Feel, Report — Variation 1

This is a more advanced version of this exercise. As such it should not be done until you have rung everything you can from the basic exercise.

Footnote 34. A reader has informed me that Christopher Hyatt (a nom de plume of Alan Miller) published a book prior to his death, supposedly dealing with hypnosis but including my extensions to the sense and feel exercise. Alan had an early draft of this book and thus learned of my extensions to the usual Reichian sense-and-feel exercise. I am told, and I regard the report as valid because it is archtypical of Alan, that he did not include any warnings about use of this exercise. This I have added the above oval-box-warning in the hope that not too many people will be harmed by Alan's cavalier lack of concern with any damage his writings might do.

Now that you have done the basic exercise a number of times and are good at sensing your body, we are ready for this next step. Here, after sensing your body as normal, you pick an area of tension or other sensation and you start to manipulate the sensation.

If it is tingling, you may try to spread the tingling to more of the body. If it is tension you may try to increase the tension or you may try to relax that part of the body.

If you have a part of the body that has no sensation, is dead, try to put sensation into that part of the body (either tension or tingling).

When you have modified an area of sensation, just watch it and report (never stop talking). Don't forget issues like pleasant or unpleasant, scary or calming, hot or cold, alive or dead, light or heavy, etc. Just report everything you can sense, stay with the body, and never let yourself stop talking out loud.

Sense, Feel, Report — Variation 2

We come now to the last and most advanced-of-all exercise. In this one, to get the most out of it, you should have a tape recorder. The purpose of the tape recorder is so that you can be concerned only with your own body and feelings and memories and not be concerned with what you say. The tape recorder will capture what you say and you will listen to the tape after the session is over.

By the time you get here you have already done at least half a dozen simple 'sense, feel, report' sessions. You have also freed up at least your forehead and eyes. Now I am going to say that for this exercise, that degree of work is not sufficient. It is not that this exercise is dangerous unless you have freed more, it is that the exercise is wasted unless you have freed at least two other and better three other areas. The two other areas are the jaw and the neck. The third area is the abdomen.

Having reached that degree of work on your body tension, that, in turn, means that you have noticed a host of changes in your nature already and you are far more both emotional and at the same time far more able to control you emotions. I'll amplify on that last one.

Throughout both parts of this book I have emphasized that the goal is to actually change your nature. I have further emphasized that feelings will arise during sessions and that they are to be allowed to have their expression without you either trying to get them or trying to suppress them.

At this late stage in our discussion I am going to introduce another change that is likely to have happened. Since this is not a book addressed to professional therapists or teachers I will not go through all the theory behind the change, I will simply tell you what it is.

You probably heard all your life that feelings are irrational. But they are not! Feelings are as rational as all the rest of our being. But more important than their rationality is that they are subject to our will, that is they are subject to our conscious willed control.

Perhaps you can remember when you made a conscious decision not to allow expression of a given emotion or, similarly, when you made a conscious decision to make your breathing shallow or your shoulders rigidly pulled back. I recall clearly when I did it. I was nine years old. One day, crying in the park near my home, I decided that I was no longer going to respond to insults by crying. My technique was to go to the drinking fountain and start drinking from it. It is impossible to cry when you are drinking water. Within a short time I had my crying under control in general and the cry-problem was solved.