One of the purposes of the AEQ program is to help a person improve their understanding of the role their upper body plays in movement and life. Through the AEQ explanation of the upper body’s main function, the participant can understand more and more clearly why he has chronically contracted muscles there and is capable of spontaneous movement. They will also understand why they have a distorted and reduced ability to feel what is happening in their upper body.
The upper body plays the main role in expressing and receiving aggressive emotions. We use it to express our energy, with which we wish to influence and change our environment. It is exactly this function that is commonly connected to the problems we have in our bodies.
The lower part of the body brings us to the location where we would like to influence the environment with the upper part of the body. The upper half doesn’t bring us to the location but does what is necessary when it arrives. The more important parts of the upper half are the arms, especially the palms, and the head, especially the face, eyes, and mouth, or rather voice as a medium to transfer information and influence our environment. These parts of the body are also the main recipients of influences from our environment.
It is precisely because the upper part of the body is the one with which we can most effectively influence the environment that the muscles in this part of the body are often severely contracted. We suppress them to limit their ability to influence the environment or receive influences on us that could cause us to react inappropriately and thus harm ourselves. Thus, the upper body suffers from very severe and common chronic muscle contraction, so we lose our ability to effectively influence our environment. In terms of physics, this means that we limit our ability to express kinetic energy or rather act or react to the environment. The reason behind it is that our environment doesn’t like, want, or cannot take our action, thus negatively responding to it or ignoring it because it doesn’t have time for it.
This usually happens in our childhood. When our surroundings have a strong negative reaction as a result of our actions, we very quickly and thoroughly learn that it is best not to express our energy. In this case, it usually comes to very strong and uncomfortable contractions in our body above the diaphragm.
The AEQ method focuses on understanding what active emotions or aggressive emotions are. Among them are anger, love, and joy. The AEQ method teaches the purpose of these emotions, where the energy for them comes from, and how they should be expressed from the abdominal cavity, where energy is stored and accumulated, through the diaphragm, chest, shoulders, arms, neck, and head, to the environment in the most efficient way. We also learn why we weren’t allowed to learn this or why we had to decrease the efficiency of expressing our emotions in the past. We learn why we had to divide ourselves from one entity into several separate units so that we could be ruled more easily or that we were less burdensome for the environment in which we lived as children. In this way, we develop the inability to relax the muscles, especially in the abdominal diaphragm, intercostal muscles, and the main, large muscles of the upper body; in both pectoral muscles of the upper back, trapezium, rhomboids, latissimus, and neck muscles. Problems also occur in the muscles around the jaw, which control the opening and closing of the mouth. Inhaling and exhaling, as well as verbal or vocal expression, are related to this. The muscles around the eyes are also very important, with which we try to control what emotions come out of the eyes into the surroundings or enter from the surroundings through the eyes into our chest or into our heart.
The knowledge will help us understand and use AEQ exercises and shed the armor which we had to don in the past to survive and develop a high enough level of emotional maturity that the inexperience of being freer does not return us to the seemingly safe illusion of repetition of the past.
