Eurhythmy
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The eurhythmy therapy emerged from anthroposophy and was developed by Rudolf Steiner. The word eurhythmy is of Greek origin and means something like “beautiful smooth movement”.
According to Steiner, a Greek had an opportunity to experience everything he saw, thought or said as a movement at the same time. Thinking, feeling, moving and acting are harmoniously interlinked. That is what eurhythmy therapy wants to unlock /move in the person as a linguistically guided movement. Rudolf Steiner was able to recognise this language experience movement in the human body, which is unconscious for us. He provided concrete information to the individual qualitative form of each sound, so that it could be practised by eurhythmics in those days. A new performing art has emerged, a pedagogic field of study for Waldorf schools, so-called hygiene eurhythmy for everyone and then finally eurhythmy therapy.
The most surprising thing for everyone who gets to know eurhythmy is that you should move with the language. For us adults the correlation of movement and language has been largely lost. At the same time, all our joint movements can be transferred into a eurhythmic movement. Let’s take for example a rolling movement of the “R” and how it is carried out with arms, legs or the whole body, and think about activities as R-un, R-ow, R-ide, where the language has adopted this circling movement. It is clear that it has emerged directly from a movement experience. Another example is that expressing of feelings/sensations in the language, such as for example astonished and surprised “Ah” or “Ach”. The arms are often opened with the sound and at least the mouth remains open. In the eurhythmy, the sound “A” is connected with an opening elbow gesture of the arms or legs and has an anxiolytic effect on certain metabolic processes.
What happens in the eurhythmic practice? The therapist speaks in such a way that the sound of his voice fills the space. The patient makes corresponding gestures the way they were learned. This action is repeated many times, until the movement that belongs to the sound is interiorised. If the patient practices it himself (which is an essential part of the therapy, since regular repetition launches targeted processes), he concentrates internally on the corresponding sound while fulfilling the exercises to it.
This way, the consciously practiced language movement guides us back to our Innerself and can activate and strengthen characteristic structures. Exactly this is now specifically used in the therapy, in order to balance certain shortcomings and to guide the “emerged from the movement” into its own organic movement flow or onto its form.
The eurhythmy therapy can be applied in each age and during each physical or psychological illness, disorder or disability. The exceptions are febrile illnesses; in this case, you should wait until the acute episode is over.
The physician makes the diagnosis and gives the eurhythmy therapists directions for an approach to exercises, which they use as a basis for a therapeutic concept. The patient regularly practices the exercises. The most people do it willingly, since they often experience changing and pleasant effect very quickly.
