How to Do 7 Zvezda Exercises to Have Enough Physical Activity
by Maria Guseva
When I only started promoting Zvezda Gymnastics, I introduced the concept of a set of 7 exercises. Now I don't tell you to do only 7 exercises. I recommend doing 3, 7, 9 or any other number of exercises, but not more than 10, in the beginning. In some period there was a version of doing 7 or 27 exercises. It still exists but only for the initial stage. In fact, if you don't feel any energy at all, the exercises are easy and your body wants them, do all the 27 exercises during the first month.
At one of my seminars a girl told me that she wanted to be a Zvezda instructor and at the same time she modestly said that she did all the 27 exercises because 7 of them were not enough for her.
So, if you've been doing this practice for over half a year and it is still not enough and you want more physical activity, you do something wrong. I tell you this as a person well experienced in Zvezda Gymnastics.
If you've been doing it for over half a year, and you still "don't feel any energy", try to feel it! It's true that in the beginning, you may not be able to hear yourself, your body. It's ok. We live in the society where it's not common to listen to yourself. And it's quite usual to be taken to the hospital in an ambulance all of a sudden with a serious disease that "didn't exist yesterday". The fact that before the third stage of cancer there is the second and the first one and that you can feel some failure in your body before any tumor appears is a kind of classified information in our society. We say: "Thanks God, the doctors diagnosed the disease in the second stage!". Why doesn't the patient know that he/she has a disease? They don't know it because they don't feel their body.
So, if 7 Zvezda exercises are not enough for you, and you can do all the 27 of them, this means that your body sensibility is very low. And you shall start listening to your body until it start screaming out loud.
How can you increase your sensibility in this practice? I'll give some recommendations for those who have been doing it for over 3 months.
Start with drawing seven or nine cards with exercises. Watch the video. Read once again the description of these exercises. And start the practice. Don't do it as you usually do it. It's clear that while your child is sleeping you have to do lots of things. At least once try to do it slowly with the same speed that I use in the video. Feel every movement. Here you raise the arms, and here the leg is moving....Be present in your body. Try to be aware of what your arms and legs are doing, how your head is turned. This will require you to stop thinking about your child, husband, work or Christmas holidays for some time. You'll have to stop thinking about everything. You'll have to submerge in your body. Feel it, listen to it. Most probably, you'll learn a lot of new things. For this level of concentration you shall do Zvezda Gymnastics alone. Don't do it when your child is about to burst into the room for his playdough or when the TV is booming in the neighboring room. You need isolation and silence. In this case you won't want to do 27 exercises at a time. You'll want inner peace and silence. And seven exercise or even less will be enough for you.
When your Zvezda Gymnastics is slow and meditative, you do it right. In this state you do three-five exercises. Or seven at most. Don't do this practice as ordinary physical exercises and you'll get more than you could imagine.
Beauty and joy are the main guidelines for you. Don't care about a number of repetitions or the depth of bending. Pursue beauty and joy. Don't ignore these qualities and you will know yourself. Your true self.
When you learn to do Zvezda exercises this way, when you are present in your body and three, five, seven exercises are enough for you, you'll ask the typical question: what is next? How shall I go on practicing Zvezda exerices?
Now I'm going to disappoint you. There are no more instructions. The first recommendations are meant for a beginner to master all 27 exercises. I mean that at the first stage you need to learn and perfect all the exercises. As soon as you know all of them, there are no more instructions. You have absolute freedom and you shall base only on your feeling and desire. You may do these exercises as many times as you want and in any order. Though I think in the first year you should still do it regularly to thoroughly work with your body. And, probably, this is the only "recommendation".
I'd like to add one more thing. Don't do the exercises basing on your intuition meaning "I do the exercises that my body asks for". As a rule, this means that you never do almost half of the exercises. Believe me, in this case you lose a lot. Draw cards, use a pendulum or choose the exercises in some different way but allow your subconscious to make a choice among all the exercises and not only among the ones that you remember or like.
How do I chose the exercises for practicing? For a long time I've been drawing as many exercises as I currently want (usually five, but sometimes seven or nine) from the pack. This means that I don't divide the pack into the upper, middle or lower exercises. I just draw cards from a mixed pack. Sometimes I do it in a sophisticated way: draw a card, write down this exercise, put it back into the pack, mix it up and draw the next card. In this way, one and the same exercise can be drawn two or even three times. In this case, besides the cards, I also need some paper and a pen that's why I rarely do it this way. Sometimes it happens that I get a lot of exercises in the same position, for example, four middle exercises and one upper exercise. And I do them trusting the process. Though in the beginning I don't recommend to let some position prevail over the others. There shall be an equal number of exercises in all the three positions.
So, the purpose of this article is to recommend those who have been doing Zvezda Gymnastics for over a year to forget about the rules and to do this practice in the way that you feel the most appropriate to you now.
