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The standard exercises
The origin of the exercises
How
to practice
Autogenic Training vs. Mindfulness Training
Mindfulness training
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Autogenic (meaning:
self-generated) Training was developed
some 80 years ago to help individuals regenerate from either acute or
chronic stress and that in less than 5 minutes, a sort of quick fix
solution with long term positive health affects.
Imagine
coming to a set of traffic lights. Red (stop, slow down) indicates negative
stress. Green (go, accelerate) indicates positive stress. Amber means no stress. When a dynamic system, be that a car or
a human, waits unstressed (i.e. takes a quality time out) it regenerates by
activating its self healing and self energising functions (set aside by
stress, i.e. the fight and flee response).
What Autogenic Training
does is put you in amber (hence ‘on standby’) during which you can recover your full potential.
Two groups
of people train themselves the quick fix autogenic way. The first is high
performance athletes and top-flight business folk who must endure massive
acute stress and need to regenerate quickly. The second group consists of
people suffering chronic stress that has begun to impact with debilitating
chronic illness, such as the various types of persistent pain, allergies
and asthma, obesity, diabetes, depression, uncontrolled behaviour of all
kinds and so on and on.
Autogenic
Training consists
of 6 simple and absolutely boring exercises (like putting nappies on a baby
or cooking the nth pizza). Each exercise, lasting no more than 3
to 5 minutes, induces the body and mind into the amber quality time out state, that is to say, into a
zero stress space (to wit: the wholly detached hence
calm ‘NOW’). When all 6 exercises
have been practiced to perfection, that is to say, when the exercises have
become automatic, the whole bundle of 6 is reduced to 3 to 5 minutes. The
bundle is then performed 3 times per day.
Research
has shown that doing the cycle of 3 times per day 3 to 5 minute autogenic
quality time out exercise will reduce your visits to the doctor, increase
your vitality and add at least 5 years to your life.
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