Most people's relationship with their body is a series of complaints. It aches, it fails, it will not do what it is told, and attention goes to it only when something is wrong. Nobody would keep a friendship on those terms.
This is the flagship practice of the whole syllabus, and it is exactly what the question describes. You go through yourself part by part — toes, feet, ankles, all the way to the throat — and at each one you do four things, one of which is smile at it. It takes an hour the first time. So the question is worth asking exactly as it sounds. How do you make friends with your own body?
The claims made here are the largest anywhere in this material, and they need holding at arm's length. It is called a healing exercise, used to reverse serious physical, mental, and emotional conditions, with truly remarkable reports from people who work it regularly.1
One case is given in detail. A man at a later gathering had been at a one-day workshop where the exercise was taught. He said it changed his life — that he had suffered chronic depression for as long as he could remember, and that nothing psychologically or medically helped him in any way.1
He started working it daily, and within a relatively short time he successfully rid himself of the debilitating mental condition. His words were: you do not know the value of this practice.1
That is a single anecdote, reported at second hand, about a serious illness, alongside a statement that medicine failed. Nothing here is a reason for anybody to change or stop a treatment. The practice itself is harmless and free, which is the only reason the claim is worth reporting at all.
The honest description of the scale comes next. This is in fact an enormous meditation, in which you have to come into contact with the individual parts of your physical anatomy, and it could take a lot of time in the beginning.1
It compresses with practice, and the compression is described in stages. Later you may group areas of your body and tune these collectively. And eventually, when time is extremely limited, you need only take a few breaths and hum a few times in order to fully contact and vibrate your entire anatomy.1
Then the key, repeated from the earlier practices and extended. Maintain your warm inner smile, and feel an intense friendship — as it were a union — with every part of your body you are approaching.1 Friendship is the operative word, and it is meant part by part rather than in general.
The opening sequence is short and specific. Once the previous two practices have left you sufficiently calm and surrendered, commence by taking three deep breaths.2
With a caution attached. Do not strain or over-breathe. Simply take three comfortably deep breaths, and sigh on exhalation.2
Then the sound is introduced. Pause momentarily, take another deep breath, and this time hum during the exhalation, feeling your body vibrating with sound. Sense your body surrender more and more while intoning, and do this three times.2
The unit of the practice is four moves, and it is taught on the toes. Sit comfortably, close your eyes, and look at your toes.3
The obvious objection is answered before it can stop anybody. Do not think how do I look at my toes with my eyes closed? If you shut your eyes now and somebody says look at your toes, what are you doing? Your attention is automatically in your toes. Do not make an issue of it.3
Then the four moves, in order. Smile at your toes, and feel the warmth of your smile reach inside and permeate them. Then imagine the very pores of the skin are like millions of little mouths, and that you can breathe vital energy in through them.3
The image given for the breathing is deliberately ordinary. As you inhale, imagine you are sucking vital Life-Force directly into your toes — the same sensation as imbibing a cold drink while sucking at the end of a straw. Your toes are the straws, or better, sponges.3
And the fourth move closes the unit. Keep smiling inside your toes, and on each exhalation hum and vibrate them, literally feeling them humming with you.3 Look, smile, breathe in through the skin, hum out. Four moves, and then you move on.
The same four moves are then run over the whole body in a fixed order. Toes, feet, ankles, lower legs, upper legs, genitals and anus.4
Then the torso in sections. The area from the navel down to the genitals, then from the navel to the diaphragm, then the chest — and here ladies should not forget to include their breasts.4 Then the shoulders, the upper arms, the lower arms and the hands.
A marker is placed at exactly that point, which is how you know whether it is working. If you are working the procedure correctly you will by now feel so deeply surrendered and peaceful that you might lose all sense of the body having any dimensions whatsoever.4 It might be experienced as entirely made up of scintillating energy, with each hand as a large locus of energy and warmth.
The head is last and it is worked in detail. The neck, with specific attention to the back of the neck. Then the back of the skull, the middle of the head, the forehead, the ears, the eyes, the nose, the cheek bones.4 And in conclusion, the mouth, teeth and jaws, and finally the throat.
Then the instruction that makes this more than a relaxation exercise, and it is the most important thing on the page. Whatever happens, stay with it.5
The specific case is named. If your Nefesh suddenly becomes emotional — laughing or crying — let it do so freely, while you, the Ru'ach, the Conscious Self, simply watch without trying to suppress the emotions in any way.5
And the reassurance is given in advance rather than afterwards. Do not become uptight or frightened in the least. This working, as a process of mental, emotional and physical healing, might surface hidden thoughts and feelings. Let them arise freely and clear out, and after such a diversion simply continue with the exercise.5
Then the reason, which is the whole relationship in one sentence. Your Instinctual Self will soon realise that it can trust you completely.5 The crying is not the problem being solved. Not interfering with it is what builds the thing the entire syllabus exists for.
The finish has two parts. Pause a few seconds, sensing the vibrant energetic state of the body. Then smile with your entire body, experiencing every portion opening up, like the bud of a flower unfolding itself to the sun. Breathe with the whole body via the skin, and on exhalation hum and feel the entire body singing and vibrating with you. Three times.5
You want to run this tonight, and it will take the best part of an hour. Four moves, repeated about two dozen times.
Start after the first two practices, since that is where it is placed. Surrender to gravity, do Bardon's sitting, and only then begin — you are meant to arrive at this calm and surrendered, not to use it to get there.
Then learn the four-move unit once and repeat it about twenty-four times. Look at the part. Smile warmly into it. Breathe in through its pores as through a straw. Hum and vibrate it on the out-breath. That is the whole practice. Everything else is the route.
Then use the hands as your checkpoint. By the time you reach them, if it is working, the body should have stopped having dimensions. If it has not, the answer is not to push harder. Go back and spend longer on the smiling, which is the step people rush.
And decide in advance what you will do if you start crying. The instruction is to let it happen and watch it without interference, and then carry on with the next body part. That is the single most demanding thing in the practice, and getting it right is described as what makes the animal self trust you.
The practice itself is fully specified and costs nothing, which is the strongest thing about it. Every step is stated, the order is given, a marker is provided at a named point, and a failure mode is anticipated with an instruction attached.
The healing claims are a different matter entirely and should be weighed separately. One second-hand anecdote about one man's depression, with no follow-up, no timeframe beyond a relatively short time, and an explicit statement that medicine had failed him.
Tension left open. The claim is that the exercise reverses serious physical, mental and emotional conditions. The mechanism offered is attention, breath and sound directed at body parts. Nothing connects the two, and a practice that produced deep relaxation daily for months would produce real improvements in many conditions without any of the vital-force account being true.
🚩 PRACTITIONER SOURCE. 🚩 MEDICAL — a testimonial about recovery from chronic depression is reported alongside the statement that nothing medical helped. Nothing here should inform any decision about treatment, and the practice is compatible with continuing one. 🚩 SINGLE SOURCE — truly remarkable reports is the only support offered for the healing claims. 🚩 The vital Life-Force absorbed through the pores is a doctrinal claim, not a description of anything measurable.
The compression promise sits oddly against everything else here. Eventually, when time is short, a few breaths and a few hums will contact and vibrate the entire anatomy. The whole hour, reduced to under a minute.
Set that against what the hour is said to be doing. It is not covering ground. It is building trust with a self that has to learn it can rely on you, part by part, over months, and trust is not the sort of thing that compresses.
The reconciliation is probably that the short version is a recall of a relationship already built, the way a familiar phrase can stand in for a long conversation between people who have had it. That would make the compression available only after the long version has been worked many times. With practice implies it, and nothing states it. A beginner reading it as a shortcut has been handed a version of the exercise that cannot do what the exercise is for.
The Felt Sense — psychology.
Gendlin's term names something this practice is entirely built on and never defines. Before a thought forms, before a word arrives, the body already knows — not always correctly, not always usefully, but always first. The felt sense is the body's pre-verbal report on its own total state, distinct from emotion, distinct from thought, and distinct from the catalogue of individual sensations.
It is what you reach for when somebody asks how are you, really, and you actually pause before answering. The pause is the moment of consulting it. Most people consult it rarely, because they already have the narrative — busy, stressed, fine — and the felt sense is the unnarrated thing underneath it.
Which explains why this exercise is built the way it is. Twenty-four stations, one part at a time, is a very long pause. The route is not the point. The length of the consultation is — and going part by part makes it impossible to answer fine about the whole, because nobody can narrate a toe.
And it accounts for the crying without any doctrine at all. A practice that holds a person in unnarrated bodily attention for an hour will surface material the narrative was covering. The instruction to let it happen and not interfere is right on either account, and it is what Gendlin's method says too: attend, do not manage. What the tradition adds is the reason to bother: not insight, but an instinctual self that learns it can trust you, which is a relational goal rather than a therapeutic one.
Sharpest implication. The marker is not a feeling of peace or a vision. It is that the body stops having dimensions, and it appears at a specific point in the route, at the hands. So it is a checkpoint you either pass or do not, rather than a state you decide you are in.
Generative questions.