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.”

Edgar Cayce Exercise Video

This Edgar Cayce exercise video featuring JoAnn Brickley contains the same routines as a CD sold with Peter Van Daam titled "Western Yoga For All."
Video

Edgar Cayce Exercises

Someone who goes by the name of grammawdoeshisduty has been posting many short YouTube videos that demonstrate Edgar Cayce exercises. This person also has a Website at http://www.choosing-natural-health.com where Cayce products and cures are posted. Here are the exercises I have found so far.

Swing Arms

SittingSitups

BendAndSwing

Rotate Legs

NeckRolls

The Bear Walk

The Cat Walk

Torso Circles Hemmorrhoids Cure

The "Reach and Stretch" Hemorrhoids Cure

The Best Exercise

The following is an article by Carol Baraff that appeared here.

Nowhere is the term “Use it or lose it” more apropos than in matters of physical fitness. Trim, flexible, well contoured bodies are, by definition, bodies in motion. Sedentary habits quickly give rise to less complimentary adjectives. More importantly, the exterior reflects what’s going on inside, and exercise has far-reaching benefits for circulation, muscles, nerves and more.

Although the best exercises for us must (sometimes by default) be defined as those we actually do, more specific parameters are found in the Cayce readings and in a highly recommended book, The Edgar Cayce Handbook for Health Through Drugless Therapy by master therapist Harold J. Reilly and Ruth Hagy Brod.

One thing we learn is that certain exercises are best for us at certain times of day. For instance, “setting up” exercises, in which the arms are swung and circled and the upper torso rotated were typically suggested first thing in the morning. Cayce commented that this will bring strength to the lungs, vitality to the blood supply, and a new life, as it were, to the muscular forces of the body (4462-1).

Morning calisthenics also often included rising on the toes and stretching the arms high over the head while breathing in and then swinging them back and lowering them slowly while breathing out. This is an excellent exercise for posture and for aiding in keeping this balance (1773-1)

A type of routine that included stretching, bending from the waist and the well-known head and neck exercises, in which the neck is gently stretched in each direction and then rotated both ways was recommended for giving a better circulation through the whole area from the abdomen, through diaphragm, through the lungs, head and neck (470-37).”

The stretching and bending motion in particular (in this case morning and evening) was considered a specific for hemorrhoids, with the claim that if this is taken regularly these will disappear—of themselves 2823-2)!”

A typical Cayce guideline for choosing a program based on time of day was vertical calisthenics in the morning and horizontal ones that exercised the legs and lower torso in the evening. Exercises for the blood flow away from head…swinging, circular motion then of lower portion of body in evenings (298-11) Exceptions to this rule seem to be cat stretches and walking.

Exercises that imitate the arching back and extended limbs of the cat were so highly regarded that Cayce stated categorically, No better exercises may be taken than…the cat-stretching exercises (687-2)

Walking was almost universally endorsed, when properly done:

Walking is the best exercise, but don’t take this spasmodically. Have a regular time and do it, rain or shine (1968-9).

Walking is the best exercise, but this—though—in the OPEN when at all practical (1530-2).

Walking is one of the best of exercises; walking, swimming, anything that has the calisthenics; tennis, handball, badminton; any of these activities for the body (2153-4).

This focus on the health benefits of walking and other types of exercise has received recent confirmation from several long term studies. One, based on records made during the well known Framingham Heart Study, concluded that even waiting until age 50 to start a “very active” exercise program significantly improved heart health and increased life expectancy by up to three and a half years. Another examining close to 500 adults found that cardiovascular fitness was improved by only half an hour of moderate to brisk walking at least three times a week. A third study, which followed nearly 40,000 healthy women over several years, concluded that whose who regularly walked at least one hour a week reduced their risk of coronary heart disease by half.

Finding the right exercise program is an individual matter which takes experimentation to get it right. One clue is that the body will feel deeply relaxed and vitally energized at the same time:

It’s well that each body, everybody, take exercise to counteract the daily routine activity so as to produce rest (416-1).

The best way to acquire the correct amount of pep is to take the exercise (288-38)!

Yes, it’s true. Fitness simply feels better.