When it's all beginning to crowd in on you, and you feel the thick cloud of stress-smog descending, Autogenic Therapy (AT) can help. It clears the air, and raises you above the chaos and clutter of life into a zone of peace and calm. AT may sound like an involved and elaborate practice, but it teaches the exact opposite - simplicity and equilibrium from within.
The AT training course includes simple exercises in body awareness and relaxation. You learn to transform tortuous and self-defeating cycles of reacting to life's stresses into highly effective ways of rising to life's inevitable challenges. During the training, you learn and experience 'passive concentration', a state of alert but detached awareness which enables you to break free of excessive stress, whatever its origins.
How Does It Work?
The way we live now is associated with the dominant left hemisphere of the brain, the home of language, logic, planning and analysis. Day-to-day experience can often become a struggle to achieve goals, meet deadlines, organise our time, and perform satisfactorily for colleagues and family. While these activities have their place, focusing on them exclusively can lead to anxiety, frustration, and feelings of failure - that life is being driven by events beyond our control. We can become so focused on life as a succession of obstacles that we become oblivious to the emotional needs of friends and family, to warning signs from our bodies and to intuitions from our subconscious minds. The broader meaning can be lost.
This tendency is aggravated by the way in which our 'fight and flight' response interacts with modern living. The fight and flight response is a primitive physiological reaction to a perceived threat or challenge, such as the sighting of a potential prey or predator, which gets us ready for a short burst of intense physical exercise. It is easy to see how such a system suited our hunter-gather ancestors. In modern life, however, we are constantly exposed to challenges which do not lead to a burst of physical activity, and which do not diminish in a short time. Our human grasp of language and logic gives us the ability to predict threats which are quite abstract, to imagine the outcome of those predictions, and to react to our imaginings as if they were real.
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