The original article can be found on the bottom of the page.

And most importantly – it didn’t make most people ill. Time, movement, and the coronavirus. Let’s use this time to slow it down.

A short while ago, Aleš Ernst, a teacher of the AEQ method, wrote on our website about how creating negative stress lowers our quality of life.

The AEQ method and breathing deal with eliminating causes of chronic pain and chronic diseases that occur as a result of permanently increased muscle tone and changes in a person’s posture and movement. These conditions also have a strong effect on respiratory processes, which are particularly susceptible to the effects of physical or emotional stress.

When writing the previous article, he paid extra attention to the connection between chronic illnesses and inflammation with the autonomic nervous system’s malfunction. Perhaps we can write that his articles actually refer to what needs to be done to take a determined and quality step forward when things finally calm down. You will have to find some quality time for yourself. But what is quality time? That’s the thing he’s writing about.

Slowing down time

If we want to shorten the time we spend on a particular act, we need to increase how fast we perform it. This is the logic that prevailed in most people’s minds before the virus. Increasing the speed causes an increase in resistance, making energy requirements higher if we wish to overcome this greater resistance. The more decisions made and actions are taken, the greater the energy consumption and stress, and the more important the energy utilization. This further defines the effectiveness of the movement needed to take action and implement decisions. 

However, this is conditioned by the coordination of body movements and the connection between body and mind. More energy with the same coordination can lead to physical inefficiency, causing the body to alert us with pain. This is a good thing because pain is protection from injury and a command to slow down.

The purpose of pain is to force the body to slow down. Pain that is not perceived as a warning reduces the sense of movement, which means muscle mismatch. This causes a paradox. When a person needs coordinated muscle function the most, he even has to develop it, but at the speed of life, the body’s orderliness begins to collapse. Consequences occur.

Two ways of doing more in less time

Increasing effort is a faster and most common path, but it is only possible if there is an abundance of goods and a lack of time since it’s very energy-consuming. In addition to the problem of lack of time, there is also the problem of conscious control over the present. This further limits the increase in knowledge in line with the increase in effort.

This approach requires commitment, an almost fanatical degree of focusing on the end goal, and having a different understanding of pain – consciously ignoring both pain and other obstacles that are slowing the person down. Before the virus, this was a recommended and educationally chosen way to be better and more successful. With known and now unwanted results.

The second approach is increasing our knowledge and connection between the body and mind, which is better and more natural in the long-term. However, it requires substantially more time, attention, rest, prudence, appropriate effort, and a precedent that we should have gotten from our parents. Increasing our effectiveness and coordination is only possible with increased control and knowledge, which requires more feeling. We can gain that by understanding neuromuscular control.

If we give priority to effort over knowledge, we need to overcome more and more obstacles while we lose our feeling. However, we lack the knowledge to gain efficiency to cope with higher loads due to higher speeds. Pain, injuries, and wear and tear begin to slow us down or even stop us.

AEQ exercises require a change in values: making mistakes and slowing down

The modern way of living requires us to think ahead; we are convinced that we must not allow ourselves to make mistakes. This drives us into stress and the domination of the mind over the body. The body no longer co-decides; many of our decisions lead to a loss of meaning. That primary sense of bodily sensations and healthy emotions are lost.

AEQ exercises offer an alternative approach. They are challenging enough that, at first, we keep wondering if we are implementing them properly. We cannot sense ourselves well enough yet, we don’t trust what we feel, and we don’t allow ourselves to make mistakes. Because of all this uncertainty, we activate learned patterns and immediately move on to a pattern that requires effort. Therefore, most students perform the movement stiffly and inefficiently; he is trying to persevere and force his body to surrender, as he has done so many times before.

But the purpose of AEQ exercises is to make you allow mistakes to happen; and that we must learn from them without fear. Mistakes cause only temporary discomfort or mild pain, making the person understand why it exists in the first place and what he should change in order to minimize or eliminate it.

If we cannot perform something slowly well, then it is impossible to perform it well fast. With rapid execution, movement is controlled by the subconscious, so movement awareness is correspondingly poorer, as is the ability to improve errors consciously. There is a simultaneous change of the conscious and the unconscious.

That being said, if we don’t have enough knowledge to control energy, inappropriate rushing can lead to pain and injury, a drop in movement quality, and self-esteem. The knowledge provided by the AEQ method enables the improvement of the neuromuscular system. It is also an evolutionarily conditioned basic task of every human being, not just a child.

Adults should especially follow this premise. We approach higher efficiency by seeking perfection, and the easiest way to get there is to describe the meaning of the Japanese word shokunin; I do the same thing over and over again every day and consciously improve the little things; I always long for the better; I always climb up and go towards the top even though no one knows how far it is.

This is confirmed by the basic principle of the AEQ method. We persistently strive through practice to understand the exercises and perform them correctly. This takes some time, and rushing can have the exact opposite effect. Better control over the body’s energy saves time, which in turn allows for better knowledge and efficiency.

Most adults, unfortunately, are not concerned with the effectiveness of movement because they, therefore, do not have the time. Due to inappropriate feeling and knowledge, their energy is lower, the consumption inefficient, and their time is running out even more.

Until he becomes a patient, that’s when his body allows him plenty of time, but he is usually so alienated from his body that he does not know what to do with it. This leads a person to even greater haste and poorer muscle control, thus exhausting and burnout.