Overview

Autogenic Therapy is a powerful and comprehensive therapeutic system encompassing both mind and body. AT teaches skills enabling clients to utilise their own capacity for self-healing and self-development.

The core of AT is a training course during which clients learn a series of simple exercises in body awareness and relaxation designed to switch off the stress-related 'fight and flight' system of the body and switch on the 'rest, relaxation and recreation' system.

During training the client has the opportunity to learn and experience passive concentration, a state of alert but detached awareness that enables the trainee to break through the vicious circle of excessive stress, whatever its origins.

Once learnt, these techniques form a lifelong skill that can become part of a health-promoting lifestyle. They require no special clothing or difficult postures.

History

Autogenic Therapy, or AT, was developed in the early years of the twentieth century by the psychiatrist and neurologist Dr. Johannes Schultz.

Schultz went to Lausanne in Switzerland to study medicine in 1907, and began his specialisation in psychiatry in 1909. Schultz was deeply influenced by the pioneering research of Professor Oscar Vogt (1870-1959), a psychiatrist and neuro-physiologist who had dedicated his life to psychosomatic medicine, or what he called the 'Mind-Body problem'. In his research, Vogt had noted that patients practising simple verbal exercises to induce hypnosis reported a state of well-being. Complaints such as headache, fatigue and anxiety tended to disappear. In addition, many patients reported feelings of heaviness and agreeable sensations of warmth.

Schultz had systematically pursued the question of whether patients could achieve a similar state without hypnosis, by simply directing attention to sensations of heaviness and warmth in the limbs. He found that they could, under certain circumstances, by using passive concentration combined with simple verbal formulae that implied heaviness and warmth.

Schultz continued his research, as well as practising as a psychiatrist and undergoing his own Training Analysis. In 1932, Schultz published the first edition of Autogenic Therapy, which detailed the clinical application of the six Standard Autogenic Formulae, which still form the core of AT today.

Benefits

Autogenic Therapy, as a stand-alone treatment can:

• Help people switch from stress to relaxation at will
• Reduce or eliminate anxiety and panic attacks
• Increase confidence and self-esteem
• Significantly improve sleep quality
• Reduce the incidence of mild to moderate depression
• Offer a tool for self-empowerment and feeling more in control
• Increase concentration and focus

AT is your own portable treatment. You can practice AT almost anywhere — in an ordinary chair or lying down. You don't need special clothes or equipment and you can practice in your home or in a busy office, airport or train.

Procedure

No special clothing or unusual postures are required. AT is practised in a quiet, comfortable setting in three standard postures: simple sitting posture; reclining armchair posture; horizontal posture.

The exercises consist of the silent repetition of simple formulae, while focusing on different organs of the body. The formulae are designed to focus attention on bodily sensations that are associated with relaxation, and with a 'rest and digest' state of the autonomic nervous system: warmth and heaviness in the limbs, warmth in the solar plexus, regularity of heartbeat, and so on.

An essential feature of AT is that the exercises are carried out in a state of passive concentration, in which the conscious self ceases to strive for any particular outcome, and becomes an alert but passive observer, noting all that happens but unconcerned with achievement or results. In this state, natural self-regulatory mechanisms are able to function optimally, leading to a re-balancing of activity between the left- and right-brain hemispheres, and supporting the workings of the immune system.

Source of information: www.autogenic-therapy.org.uk