Here is a list of things inside you that you have almost certainly never put your attention on:
That's the route. You go down it in order, top to bottom, and work each one.
Qi is the body's live energy, used interchangeably with the Sanskrit prāṇa, and the claim underneath the whole exercise is the one that makes any of this possible: "when you focus or concentrate on an area of your body and try to feel the region, you bring Qi to that area."2
The mechanism is stated in one sentence and it's the load-bearing claim of the entire book, not just this practice:
This is because your Qi (vital energy) and mind (thought or consciousness) are linked. Your thoughts and Qi are linked such that the two "ride together" and your thoughts can move your Qi throughout your body. This is one of the basic principles behind Nyasa Yoga.2
Ride together. Attention goes somewhere and energy goes with it, as a passenger.
Which is why a list of glands is a workable practice at all. You don't need a technique for the pancreas — you need to be able to find it and stay there. Everything else in the method is machinery for holding attention on a place long enough for the energy to arrive and do something.
The procedure is short, and it has one instruction in it that isn't obvious:
To meditate on or cultivate your glands you mentally locate them within your body and then shine light on them or visualize them as if shining with light. You can also try to rotate your Qi within and around the glands.1
Locate, illuminate, and then rotate. The rotation is the part people don't do — you're not simply resting attention on a gland, you're turning something around and through it.
That matters more here than elsewhere, because glands are small, deep and awkwardly placed. You can't send energy along them the way you can along a limb. Spinning is the method offered wherever a region can't be traversed in a line — the same answer given for the belly, where the intestines curve and guiding is impossible.3
The sequence is fixed and the finish is specific:
You proceed by starting with the glands in your brain and then work downwards, visualizing the throat region, then thymus, and so on until you can visualize all the glandular regions simultaneously, feeling the Qi in these areas, and then you are finished.1
All of them at once, and then you stop. That's the same two-phase shape as every other method in the book — parts first, then the whole — and here it arrives in miniature. Seven stations, then seven held together. The finishing condition isn't a duration or a count; it's the moment you can hold the whole set simultaneously and feel energy in all of them.
And there's an addition for the head: "with the brain, it is also very important to take the extra step of focusing on the brain stem and cerebellum."4 Those two aren't glands. They're included because they're the hardest structures in the body to reach and the practice is already up there.
This is the one place in the book where a physical, non-spiritual result is named as a goal and endorsed rather than deflated:
your glands and endocrine system can all be rejuvenated through this technique too. By visualizing the glands of your body and sending Qi to those areas you can help activate them, which is a positive step towards physical rejuvenation that is highly encouraged. On the road of cultivation you want to reach a state of hormonal balance, and this type of cultivation practice will help you to do so.1
Hormonal balance and physical rejuvenation, encouraged without qualification. Elsewhere the book spends its energy telling you that a result you wanted is smaller than you thought — the deva body is the first of five rungs, the whole method tops out at the first absorption, chakras aren't organs. Here it does the opposite and promises something concrete.
The closing statement is the same: the practice opens "the Qi routes to your glands, which are some of the most important organs of your body," helps the hormonal system "achieve a better and more proper state of balance," and "can also produce some degree of physical rejuvenation."4
There's a related claim on longevity that gives it a mechanism, such as it is: "the rule of longevity is that subtle, purified or refined essences age slower and retain their cohesion longer."5
The book has a separate practice for the internal organs — the Six Healing Sounds, one syllable per organ — so the glands being given their own route is a deliberate separation.6 The reason isn't stated, but it's visible in what the two practices do. The organ practice is sound-led: you find a syllable that puts you in contact with your liver and use it. The gland practice is light-led: you locate, illuminate, rotate. And glands are precisely the structures for which no traditional sound exists, because they weren't identified as a system until anatomy caught up.
Which puts this practice in the same category as the recommendation to use nerve imaging and 3D anatomy software — a route built from modern anatomical knowledge rather than inherited from a tradition.7 There is no classical seven-gland nyāsa. There couldn't be.
Every other technique in this book arrives with a lineage. The white skeleton is Buddhist and ancient. The two lotuses come attached to Mahāvīra. The soma egg comes from Hakuyu through Hakuin. The Six Healing Sounds come from Taoism with a named immortal quoted at length.
The gland route has nothing. No text, no teacher, no tradition, no mantra — just seven anatomical structures, in order, worked with attention and light.
That's worth pausing on because it's a live demonstration of the book's central claim about what a practice is. If a nyāsa is only a schedule — a list that stops you skipping parts of yourself — then the list can be assembled from anything, including a modern endocrinology textbook. And the permission to build your own is granted explicitly: understand what the practice is doing and "you can design your own Nyasa sequence."8
So this is the author taking his own permission. And it makes the theory checkable in an unusual way: if constructed routes work as well as inherited ones, the deflationary account of what a nyāsa is gets support that no amount of argument could supply.
What the case can't do is settle it. Nobody has compared a constructed route against an inherited one, and the practice comes with no marker of its own — nothing like the warm feet of the skeleton practice or the trickling sound of the butter. You're told you'll know you're finished when you can hold all seven at once, which is a report about your attention rather than about your glands.
Get pictures first. You cannot attend to a thymus you can't locate, and most people place the pancreas, the adrenals and the thymus wrong. Look them up — the same instruction the book gives for the sinus cavity and the brain.7
Then sit and go down the list. Brain stem first, holding the pineal, hypothalamus and pituitary together as one region. Then the salivary glands at the sides of the mouth. Thyroid and parathyroid in the throat. Thymus behind the breastbone. Pancreas. Adrenals — just find your kidneys and take the caps on top of them. Then the ovaries and uterus, or the testes.1
At each one: locate it, then let it shine, then turn energy around and through it rather than just resting on it.1 Take the extra step at the top. The brain stem and the cerebellum, worked deliberately, because they're the hardest things you own and you're already in the neighbourhood.4 Then the finish, which is the actual practice. Hold all seven at once and feel energy in all of them together. When you can do that, you're done — and not before.1
Strongest support. The route is anatomically real, the structures are locatable, and the finishing condition — holding all seven simultaneously — is a genuine test that a practitioner either passes or doesn't on a given evening. The central tension. Physical rejuvenation is promised here without qualification, in a book whose method throughout is to deflate promised results. No mechanism connects attention on a gland to changed hormone output, and none is offered beyond the general claim that thoughts and energy ride together.
A second tension. The practice has no marker. Every comparable technique here supplies one — warm feet, a trickling sound, a full vibration in the region, lightness at the end. This one supplies only a report about your own attention, which is the weakest signal available and the one the book elsewhere warns beginners against trusting.
Source notes. 🚩 SINGLE SOURCE — no tradition, text or teacher is cited for the gland route, which appears to be this author's construction. 🚩 MOTIVATED REASONING — rejuvenation is a commercially attractive claim and it is the one result in the book that goes un-deflated. [POPULAR SOURCE].
Absence note. Drawn from printed pages 24, 134–138 and 163. Nothing here claims what the book says elsewhere.
Open questions. Is there any classical practice that works the endocrine glands as a set, or does the system only become visible once anatomy names it? And if the finishing condition is holding seven regions at once, is that a claim about the glands or about working memory?
Two accounts of where a route comes from run through this material and this page is where they separate most cleanly. On the first, routes are inherited. They come from named traditions with names attached — Mātṛkā, Pīṭha, Rāśi, Nakṣatra — and the mantras attached to them identify the practice to beings who answer it. On that reading a route with no mantra and no sponsor is a route nobody is watching.
On the second, routes are constructed. The list is only a schedule, any list of the right length will do, and going beyond the published formula is described as the thing the beings behind the practice actively want.8 On that reading the gland sequence is exemplary rather than anomalous.
The book holds both and this practice sits entirely inside the second, without any acknowledgement that it's the only technique in the book with no lineage at all. The convergence with Design Your Own Nyāsa is exact — that page grants the permission and this one exercises it. And it runs alongside The Regions a Nyāsa Actually Names, where the classical sequences turn out to include tissue-wide targets as well as places; a gland route is that same move made from the other direction, starting from anatomy rather than from an alphabet.
Felt Sense and Somatic Awareness is about attending to the inside of the body directly, as sensation rather than as an idea. Its consistent finding is that this capacity is uneven — some regions report readily, others report almost nothing, and the difference tracks how richly innervated a region is rather than how important it is.
Glands are at the far end of that distribution. They're small, deep, and have essentially no representation in ordinary body awareness. Most people cannot tell you anything about their pancreas from the inside, ever, under any circumstances.
What the pairing gives that neither side supplies alone is a reason the light-and-rotate instruction takes the form it does. Where there's no sensation to find, you can't use the standard method of resting attention until the region answers — there's no answer coming. So the practice substitutes a construction: an image of the gland, illuminated, with something turning through it. That's attention placed rather than attention received, and it's the correct move when the receiving channel is absent.
It also names the honest limit. On the somatic account, a practitioner attending to their thymus is attending to a mental model of a thymus positioned roughly correctly in the chest. Whether anything reaches the tissue is precisely the question, and it's the question the book's own rule — always link the visualisation to felt sensation — cannot be applied to here, because the sensation isn't available.
One handshake. A second candidate — a route constructed from modern anatomy rather than inherited — belongs with the material on the diagrams and what replaced them.
Sharpest implication. The book's own rule is that a visualisation with no felt sensation attached is worthless. The gland practice targets the structures least able to produce sensation of any in the body — which makes it either the practice that most needs the rule, or the one that quietly exempts itself from it.
Generative questions.