Exercises from "Edgar Cayce and the Sleeping Prophet"

In Chapter 8 ("Twenty Years Later") of Jess Stern's book, there is a discussion with Harold Reilly about some of the remedies he would try of people referred by Cayce, and he also demonstrated some of the exercises. Here is the part dealing with exercise:

Reilly stressed exercise, having maintained gymnasiums for forty-five years, and Cayce’s simple therapeutic exercises caught his interest. He noted that the mystic, while seldom exercising himself, recommended sitting-up exercises from a vertical position in the morning, floor exercises later in the day.

“In this way,” Reilly explained, “Cayce changed the flow of the lymphatic and blood circulation, getting the person who had been lying down all night on his feet to start the day.”

He also got him breathing deeply, preferably before an open window to eliminate stale lung air and oxygenate the body, giving it a full head of steam to open the day.

“Cayce,” Reilly pointed out, “specifically mentioned a Yoga breathing exercise, the alternate breathing.”

Mouth closed, the individual started off by breathing in through the left nostril, the thumb closing off the right, to the count of four, retaining the breath to eight, then exhaling through the right nostril to a similar eight count, closing off the opposite nostril. The breath was then taken in through right nostril, and the exercise repeated three or four times.

Demonstrating the Cayce floor exercises, the supple septuagenarian promptly got down on all fours and started moving his muscular body forward like a big cat.

“This is the cat crawl,” he announced. “You take five strides forward, five back, stretching every muscle in the body and bringing the vital hinge and rotary joints into play.”

As he finished his crawl, Reilly sat up with a smile. His face was red from the reversal of normal posture, but his blue eyes sparkled.

“Getting back to nature drains the sinuses. It wasn’t so many millions of years ago that man got around that way normally.”

Next was the Cayce roll-over. Sitting on the floor, knees hunched up, Reilly began to rock sidewise, from one half-reclining elbow to another.

“This stretches the side muscles along the ribs, flexes the hip joints, trims the thighs.” He shook his head. “Amazing that a man who didn’t know about exercise, consciously, should have hit on this simple yet effective movement.”

Reilly then slipped into a Cayce old-timer, the buttocks walk. Sitting up, legs stretched out, arms toward the ceiling, the septuagenarian started to move forward by first lifting one buttock and then the other.

“Many a woman’s hips I’ve slimmed with that one,” he said, negotiating the width of the room on the seat of his pants.

“I call it the beam-shrinker.”

From pushup position, Reilly then repeated the torso twist that Hovhaness had earlier demonstrated, his hips forming a circle, in first one direction and then the other. The bear walk, similar in posture to the cat crawl, was next. Reilly, again on all fours, walked flatfooted, his knees stiff, hips high in the air, heels and palms of hands flat on the floor.

And how was this different from the cat crawl?

“A stiffer walk,” Reilly explained. “It stretches the leg tendons, the hamstring muscle, and the area of the sciatic nerve, while also developing the arms and shoulders.”

Still demonstrating, Reilly slid into the morning exercise routine. After taking a few deep breaths, and practicing the alternate breathing, he began swinging one arm forward five or six times like a sidewheel on a Mississippi riverboat, and then reversed, repeating with the other arm.

“The individual,” he stressed, “is better stimulated, vertically, after a night of horizontal inactivity.”

After the arm swing, Reilly rotated first the left and then the right foot from the hip, in a brief circular motion, repeating five or six times in each direction. He then did a standup stretch, up on toes, arms high over head, meanwhile tightening the buttocks and then bending the hands to the floor, keeping the knees stiff.

“That’s the exercise,” he said, “that helped Hovhaness with his hemorrhoids, that and the torso twist.”

The demonstration continued. Arms again stretched overhead, Reilly lowered his head slowly to his chest, and then slowly pulled it back over his shoulders. It was the beginning of the head-and-neck exercise. Still stretching up on his toes, he circled the head slowly three or four times in each direction, and then, relaxing, started to rub his head. I suddenly noticed a new fuzzy growth of silver gray on the front of his scalp, where there had been no hair before. He noted my surprise.

“I don’t know what’s doing it,” he smiled, “but I’ve been growing hair on the bald spots for the last few weeks. It’s either the Cayce head-and-neck exercise, which I’ve been doing recently, or the castor oil I’ve been rubbing on my scalp. Nothing else has certainly changed after seventy.”