Trager® Movement Re-education: Essentially a Feeling State
Betsy Oldenburg, Certified Trager® Practitioner

What is Trager® Movement re-education? Think about softening and widening. Think about lengthening and expanding. Think about feeling light, lighter and lighter still. Think about a dancing cloud. Picture the free and spontaneous physical expressions of a young child. Now take a moment to notice how your body feels just thinking of these pleasurable things. Trager Movement Re-education both creates and operates from a feeling state of pleasurable, effortless, easy movement.

Pain, whether long-lasting or fresh and sharp, causes contraction/tension in the body and in the mind. So can pressures at work or home, history, attitudes, and serious health challenges like multiple sclerosis, cerebral palsy, Parkinsonism, polio, and genetic or accident-caused body differences. Fear of pain and concern about its impact on daily life increase contraction.

Often this contraction is beyond the control of our conscious mind (or we would simply and fully relax whenever we wished to do so). Our unconscious - the body's maintenance engineer and defender - very soon recognizes the pain is continuing, puts the contraction on automatic pilot, and goes about its other business of pumping and balancing organs, glands and fluids; responding to invading viruses and bacteria; pulling us back from accidents; and preparing us to defend ourselves or run away from perceived attacks and dangers. The contraction is by then firmly in place and "forgotten."

Milton Trager, MD, spent seventy years as a lay practitioner and medical professional, exploring with clients and patients the relationships among gentle movement and expansion, pain and contraction, and the role of the autonomic nervous system (which he associated with the unconscious mind). He was convinced that it is the mind which creates the contractions, and it is therefore the mind which will free them.

Dr. Trager spent his last thirty years teaching others how to access and communicate the feeling state of "open, effortless and free" to clients’ bodies and minds. He said this special feeling state "is like the measles; you have to catch it from someone who has it." Trager practitioners develop and constantly expand the feeling state in their own bodies and minds - the better to share with their clients. To communicate this feeling state, practitioners use the language of movement: gently rocking, swinging, stretching and pressing a body. They work within the client's pain-free range to provide a sense of how it feels to be able to move freely and painlessly.

Gentle and extensive body rocking, done while the client is standing, sitting or lying on a massage table, encourages the client to temporarily relinquish muscular and mental control, and to sink slowly into a very deep state of relaxation similar to a Zen meditation. While in this state, and still being moved by the practitioner, both the unconscious and the conscious release their grip of fear and learn anew that they no longer need to contract in order to escape pain and worry. Afterwards, the practitioner will often instruct the client in simple ways of moving to create this relaxed feeling state in daily activities.

This decade is a complex, exciting, and occasionally exasperating time. How would it feel to live now with less tension and contraction in our bodies, minds and hearts? How might that influence the way we come into contact with others in our lives? And how far might that ripple of pleasure and effortlessness travel?

This article is an edited version of one written by Megan Eoyang, CMT, of Santa Rosa, CA. It is submitted by Betsy Oldenburg, a certified Trager® Practitioner and Tutor for 21 years. She maintains a private practice in Greensboro, NC, where she has helped a wide variety of clients ease the physical and emotional stresses of life. Betsy also works part-time at Integrative Therapies in Greensboro. Trager® is a registered trademark of Trager® International. Betsy Oldenburg may be contacted at 336.288.3145.