During the AEQ breathing program, for the first time, I consciously felt my diaphragm, how shallow my breathing was, and mainly, due to the tightness of the abdomen, only with the upper part of the lungs. During the day, I noticed that I was constantly tightening my stomach and abnormally...
THE FOUNDATIONS OF THE AEQ METHOD
Home » AEQ method » The foundations of the AEQ method
What is AEQ method®?
AEQ is a method that, through a higher awareness of the body, helps us truly feel ourselves and better satisfy our needs. It offers us the knowledge required to understand the discomforts we feel when we increase contact with ourselves, helping us not be afraid of our reality, which is stored in the body and our subconscious.
The first step in change is becoming self-aware. Observe yourself: your thoughts, fears, beliefs, habits, actions, and inactions. Most of us believe that we direct our lives by ourselves, with our own decisions. But is it like that? I think not. Depending on how spiritually developed we are, we may make hardly any decision daily that would fully express that we are clearly aware of our path and ourselves in the present moment. For the most part, we act like robots, self-sufficient, automatically programmed, under the tactic of old habits developed from reactions to emotional events from the past. This affects our physical condition – chronic pain and our psychological condition – depression, anxiety, anger, and emotional instability.
By learning the AEQ method, we also learn how to act consciously. We train our consciousness to act as an observer of our thoughts, which allows our decisions and actions to be realized by supporting our goals and desires.
Thus, the AEQ method teaches us self-awareness and control of movement, thinking, and actions restore the ability to control muscles, body, self-will, and thinking. It offers an original way to relax muscles, which also has the effect of relieving stress.
It is incredibly important to develop the ability to feel your own body. We can improve and maintain it with AEQ exercises. Being self-aware feels pleasant, even selfish; you are paying attention to yourself and are changing the way your body works with your mind. Who am I to be so important? We are just as important as everyone around us, which we should respect and love, just as we love ourselves. That’s why we think about ourselves and are trying to familiarize ourselves with our inner depth and nurture the spiritual explorer within us.
But our body, the one guiding the explorer, is also present. Something is hurting us, or we aren’t relaxed enough, and we feel as if certain movements and movements are tightening us. For a long time now, we no longer know how to move with full awareness, so we listen to the movements and observe them; movement is a matter of course for us, doing things that do not require excessive attention or control. We control and improve the things we are aware of; if our awareness is trained, we can better control our thoughts, words, actions, and movement.
When we train self-awareness, we live to the fullest because we will most likely drop any useless or harmful habit – both physical and psychological. Our responses will become more appropriate because we will use our newly discovered potential. A person is shaped by his genetic material, primary family, and society. Beliefs, habits, behavioral and thought patterns, and information should guide us in our vigilance: let us vigilantly monitor our inner happenings and actions! This will make it easier to determine which burdensome patterns we are so faithfully implementing are not needed at all. When we become aware of the consequences of our bad habits, we can decide to change them. Our beliefs and actions, which match our desires and intentions, will help us achieve better control of our mind and body. We don’t want to be software, but an organic computer that evaluates and modifies and improves the software to make it work better and better as a whole.
As mentioned before, beliefs are not necessarily right or wrong, but regardless of their value, beliefs circulate and travel from one generation to another until they reach you as well. Once you know this and feel the consequences of wrong habits, you can consciously choose to abandon all beliefs and actions that do not support your desires and replace them with beliefs that will help you achieve better control of body and mind.
Remember that thoughts lead to feelings, which lead to actions, and actions lead to results.
With the AEQ method, we safely, gently, rationally, and eliminate chronic pain causes in the long term.
This is an education process with which we ‘retrain’ ourselves and consciously change our behavior, posture, and movement. It is an active, not a passive method; it is a successful way of sensory-motor organic learning that teaches us to eliminate the causes of most chronic muscle pain and movement limitations in life.
The AEQ method was created by upgrading clinical somatics (in Latin, Clinice, the science of healing bed-ridden people and Greek, soma, the body) and it’s the study of soma, where soma is not only how we perceive our body in the first person, but also how we control it. Soma is a set of sensory-motor functions, some of which are conscious and intentional (acting under the influence of our will), and we have learned them, while others are those we learned as children and then forgotten about.
The cause for the state of chronically tense muscles is the loss of conscious sense and control over our muscle tone. We lose the ability to stop performing a movement and doing something completely different. This condition is caused by sensory-motor amnesia, which develops from injuries, habits, and stress. Due to sensory-motor amnesia, the muscles became used to being tense, and they stay that way, despite us trying to relax them. Stretching, massages, chiropractors, or painkillers won’t help us in the long-term. If we wish to remove the problems, we must once again sense and learn how to relax tense muscles.
The AEQ method has solutions that will help fix continuous and unnecessary muscle tension. It enables them through changes in our brain or nervous system and their control over muscles and movement. Due to sensory-motor amnesia, the brain does not feel the contraction and forgets how to relax the contracted muscle when its tension and contraction are not needed.
While most pain relief methods try to eliminate pain in a particular part of the body (neck, hips, back…), the AEQ method understands that body pain is only an integral part of a broader pattern of our dysfunction. These patterns reflect our characteristic responses to stress, which include muscle contraction. Sensory-motor amnesia and dysfunctions caused by it manifest in three special movement patterns that we call the green light reflex (go forth), red light reflex (stop, go back), and the trauma reflex (results from injuries).
The basic purpose of the AEQ method is to increase order with contracting and expanding muscles that participate or should participate during movement. Muscles participate in the movement in two ways: by contracting and relaxation/expanding. With every small movement, all muscles will have to work together in a coordinated manner and perform the movement in an orderly and efficient manner. This is only possible if no sensory-motor amnesia is present.
The brain’s task is to guide the muscles into performing the correct move by synchronizing their participation in the movement. That’s why good sensing is important. The brains create the required order in the soma. According to the degree of orderliness, we can perform more or less complex movements. We perform the movement lightly, painlessly, with a pleasant feeling and without resistance, if the level of our orderliness for the movements is high enough. However, suppose the movement requires orderliness and a degree of control that our neuromuscular system does not possess. In that case, we feel fear, resistance, and the need to overcome our limits to perform the movement anyway. We never see this in children, as they do not perform movements for which they are not yet prepared, but remain in a pleasant area that shows them the limits of current knowledge.
Children are being led into discovery by curiosity, which allows them to slowly and progressively increase their knowledge without the need to fight or overcome themselves. But despite the apparent slowness of a child’s approach to improving the development of new skills, his learning leads to progress that adults cannot achieve even with diligence, effort, and overcoming themselves.
- Headaches
- Migraines
- Jaw pain (TMJ joint)
- Neck pain
- Whiplash
- Frozen shoulder syndrome
- Thoracic outlet syndrome
- Knee pain
- Tendonitis
- Plantar fasciitis
- Muscle cramps
- Balances unnecessary muscle tone
- Lowers the difficulty of everyday movement
- Improves movement coordination
- Shallow breathing
- Fibromyalgia
- Sciatica
- Piriformis syndrome
- Back pain
- Disc hernia
- Hyperkyphosis
- Pain in the joints
- Makes childbirth easier
- Lowers and eliminates menstrual pain
- Improves balance and orientation
-
Lowers fatigue and increases
our ability to move, work and do sports - Makes learning easier
- Improves attention and sensitivity to deviations from normal movement
- Hyperlordosis
- Scoliosis
- Bursitis
- Chronic fatigue
- Osteoartritis
- Tendonitis
- Carpal tunnel syndrome
- Lowers and eliminates chronic fatigue and burnout
- Helps with depression
- Improves the connectivity between our skeleton and body
- Improves posture, breathing, and regeneration post-effort
- Improves general well-being
- Makes us more self-aware
TESTIMONIALS
I am doing the exercises regularly and I know that this time is meant just for me (at first, 30 minutes felt long – my old patterns turned on – but when I go into the exercise slowly it feels like they go by really quickly – feels like a...
Through one’s awareness and receiving proper explanations one can go very deep into changing his patterns and habits. Aleš has a lot of knowledge and understands the connection between an individual’s situation and his somatic issues well. Highly recommended.
I was slowly giving up on my back and leg problems; Even a hip replacement at the age of 44 didn't fix the painful walking. Although the x-rays confirmed that the operation was a great success, to my great disappointment...
Even when I was reading your book, which was gifted to me for Christmas, I knew this was a very serious matter. However, with your introductory lecture my trust in you grew even more, which is reflected every day, especially during exercises. Your leadership is convincing, your answers mathematically accurate.
If life is fair in anything, it is in settling accounts for our relationship with ourselves, our body, and our psyche. Everything we neglect while taking care of our body and mind with the excuse that it's not important...
Even though we completed our first ever exercise, you have already gained my complete trust. In today’s flood of charlatans, your method, accompanied by your dedicated guidance at every step, is reliable and, above all, very well-argued. I used to say to myself when asked various questions that you wouldn't...
I haven't noticed any progress in terms of improving my condition (SMA) yet, because I couldn't do movement exercises regularly because of the pain (I was doing breathing protocols). Still, I began to notice more and more the increased emotional maturity regarding regulating my behavior in relationships with people. I...
I take your exercises very seriously. I take my time and am focused on what and how I will perform the move, even though I sometimes drift off the path, but I always manage to correct myself. I feel that certain movements have changed, compared to what they were like...
I decided to sign up to the program due to the chronic pain in my left hip and back, which appeared in the middle of December and was always present, sometimes more, sometimes less. After an active AEQ therapy, the feeling of pain became a bit stronger. With the start...
Today I can understand that during the whole month, while actively performing AEQ exercises and breathing protocols as explained in the program, I had a regular symptom of cleansing the body with the presence of worms in the stomach and cleansing through diarrhea. A whole month after the program, I...
But I am aware that I still have a long way to go before I can feel my muscles and know how to consciously relax them. You gave us excellent instructions on the program and I realize that for certain things, everyone has to figure it out on their own...
I noticed changes in my body daily: immediately after the morning exercise as relief and relaxation of certain parts of the body, the pain in my joints was becoming less severe. Around 10am I felt fatigued so I took an hour long nap (I never took any naps before, I...
I joined the 30-day program of the AEQ method with the intention of eliminating or at least lessen the pain in my back, neck, knees and my feet, which I have cultivated in my life through various activities. Or so I thought. After the introductory session and the first two...
I read your book ‘’Lahkotno iz kroničnih bolečin’’ (Gently freeing yourself of chronic pain) during the summer, because I suffered from strong pain in my spine and was barely able to walk, especially when attempting to stand up. Going from lying on the bed to standing was nearly impossible. It...