How does it work?

By using short exercises, usually ten minutes or less, you retrain your nervous system to respond differently to the world. As your body starts to relax, your mind becomes clearer and you start to trust in yourself and life more and more.

Is it like Mindfulness?

Sophrology incorporates many of the ideas of mindfulness, but its exercises are much quicker to perform, and they include movement: you are standing up and sitting down, tensing and relaxing, visualising and directing your attention and your breath in various ways. Many people find they just can’t sit still to focus their minds with mindfulness practices and find it hard to persevere. With sophrology, you have no opportunity to get bored, and you seem to get to the same level of healing and stress-reducing consciousness more quickly.

Who created it?

The neuropsychiatrist Professor Alfonso Caycedo (1932-2017), who researched a whole range of methods for developing human potential and relieving mental and physical suffering. After his medical and psychiatric training, he traveled in India and Japan, learning different meditation techniques. He studied hypnotism and yoga, and worked with the famous psychiatrists Viktor Frankl and Ludwig Binswanger, a colleague of Sigmund Freud, and founder of the school of phenomenological psychiatry. This approach to the human mind focuses on subjective experience, attempts to avoid imposing outside interpretations on it, and lies at the root of the more well-known person-centred and Humanistic psychotherapies. Professor Caycedo incorporated ideas and techniques from all that he had learned, to create sophrology’s system of  ‘Dynamic Relaxation’. His genius lay in synthesizing all that he had discovered to create a simple and effective form of training. He, with the support of his fellow doctors who had also been working in sophrology since 1960, combined the discoveries of modern western medicine and psychology with tried and tested methods for healthy living drawn from the ancient wisdom traditions of the east. The result is elegantly simple, but with profound positive effects .

How do I try it out?

See the page on this site ‘The Book’ to try out some exercises. If you like them, have a look at the ‘Learn and Teach’ page to explore our courses, and see the Resources page for information on books and websites, or to find a sophrology practitioner.