The Highest Yoga
Path of Spiritual Heart

Warm-Up

After this, especially at the first few sessions, a very important element of practice would be a physical warm-up, which not only allows us to “cheer up” the energies within the body and to get rid of unnecessary mental dominants, but also teaches us to concentrate the consciousness in the working parts of the body. The latter will come in handy in the future when we will be working with the chakras.

Let us stand up. By making paddy movements with the legs and the trunk, we swing both arms back and forth and then rotate them simultaneously. Concentrate in the shoulder joints. Visualize light emerging and growing brighter inside the joints.

Tense the muscles of the arms. Bend and unbend the arms repeatedly in the elbow joints. Watch white light gathering from the entire body to the working muscles.

Extend the arms in front of the body. Move the relaxed wrists quickly up and down. Tense the fingers. Bend and unbend them. Move the wrists while tensing the muscles of the forearms and wrists. Then let go of the tension and relax the entire body.

Bend the head from side to side while keeping the neck relaxed. Roll the head over the shoulders making a circle. Turn the head to the right and to the left around a vertical axis. Imagine that the neck segment of the spine is an axle and the cervical vertebras are balls stringed on it. See a beam of white light coming up the axle. Tense the muscles of the neck. Repeat the same exercises but this time with the muscles of the neck tensed. Imagine a stream of white light diameter-of-the-neck wide rising through it. Again relax the entire body. Shift the head from side to side while keeping it vertical and without moving the shoulders, then rotate the head in the same manner.

Raise the arms over the head. Take the right hand with the left one by the wrist and pull it over the head while bending the body to the same side and stretch the side muscles of the trunk. Repeat this movement with another hand.

While holding the arms up, tilt the trunk to the sides first in the pectoral and then in the lumbar segments of the spine. Tense the muscles of the trunk and make tilts and turns of the body. Imagine that the trunk gets filled with light. Relax the body. Turn the trunk around a vertical axis while relaxing the muscles and keeping the feet on the floor, trying to turn the head as far to the back as possible, concentrating in the spine.

Shift the pelvis to the sides without tilting it and bending the legs, keeping the muscles as relaxed as possible. Concentrate in the area of the spine below the navel.

Raise the right leg so that the thigh is parallel to the floor. Rotate the ankle as if drawing a circle on the floor. Concentrate in the ankle joint, seeing white light and warmth emerging inside of it. Rotate the shin, concentrating in the knee-joint.

Swing the shin from side to side, keeping the knee in one place and concentrating in both hip joints.

Draw a circle with a straight leg, first in front of the body, then at the right side, and then behind the body.

Repeat these exercises with the left leg.

Vladimir Antonov, Ph.D. (in biology)
(chapter from the book Ecopsychology)

Translated from Russian
by Mikhail Nikolenko

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