Somatic Movement Therapy Moves Online

Trager sessions online. Really?

By Roger Tolle

I have spent way too much time over the past several months bemoaning the loss of regular contact with my clients. I’ve missed the tactile, energetic and interpersonal connections—sweet connections that had fed me, almost as much as it provided essential nourishment for them. After all, giving Trager sessions gives me a perfect excuse to be

fully in my own pleasurable somatic practices for the duration. The pandemic has been robbing me of all that.

A couple months ago, I read about ways of offering various embodiment practices online and realized it could be so useful to the world if I could offer the rich assortment of somatic movement practices I had mastered this online way, as well as in person. In the wake of pandemic induced social devastation, there was important new work to be done.

But my inner child (a powerful voice in my inner management committee) resisted. It whined that it was already oversaturated with screen time. And no way was that inner source of enthusiasm interested in offering its creative input to activities that would tie its squirmy playfulness to a chair for even more hours of the day. For years I have been teaching Trager as a healing and sometimes revolutionary act in our culture, an antidote to a life lived in the mind alone, possibly also a life dependent on working at a computer sitting in a cubicle. The thought of me working with clients that way, tethered by the internet, was deeply uncomfortable for me.

I’m guessing I wasn’t so different from other Trager Practitioners. I’d invested my body and soul (and my professional identity) in what I’d thought was the beautiful heart of Trager work--the part where the client lies passive on the table receiving messages of ease and freedom and balance directly from my hands. I’d relied on the non-verbal space of undulating rhythms, ripples, and reverberations to carry meaning deep into their unconscious mind, transforming brain patterns and freeing them up to a new way of being with themselves.

In March, when the Pandemic hit, I’d closed my in-person practice. It took a few months till RECALL re-asserted itself and I remembered that table work wasn’t all there was to this work.

I recalled so many sessions over the years where clients were rendered speechless when a few simple Mentastics completely changed the way they felt inside. Mentastics, when practiced regularly (with my support, at least for a while) had reduced stress, relieved pain, helped manage chronic conditions, and transformed relationships. In these moments of connection, the real heart of the work emerged--the bodymind’s reawakening to its natural self-regulating processes.

In Trager classes, we explore various Mentastics to prepare ourselves for a session, for a day of work, for a lifetime of living agelessly. With these simple, profound somatic movement games we soften, open, connect and enliven our body-minds, from our fingers all the way down our toes, from spinal cord out to the furthest outposts of the nervous system, from heart out and around through arteries and capillary beds and back through veins. We have learned and practiced how to ground our weight and bring buoyancy and lightness to our steps.

And we have practiced sharing our lived experience of all this somatic wisdom with classmates and clients in simple lessons involving presence, self-touch and movement. With practice, leading clients in Mentastics became easier and more part of my nature. “No big deal,” as Milton might have said.

In conversations with my friend and colleague Roger Hughes these past couple months, I found my resistance gradually yielding to his expressions of wonder and delight at how much was happening in some short Zoom sessions he was scheduling with a few of his clients. He talked about the looks on their faces, the changes in their bodies and

attitudes. He even let me read their texts of gratitude for the time he had spent coaxing

their recall out of hiding.

Together, he and I began to trade sessions online, and explore more ways we could use the principles and origins of Milton’s work to find our way to effective somatic movement therapy without table work at its center. And we leaned, open-hearted and vulnerable, into the challenges associated with interacting effectively online. And this month, we followed a calling to develop a course for other Practitioners: “Somatic Movement Therapy Moves Online.” Each of the five segments of the course will focus on a different theme: Protocol, Presence, Self-touch, Movement and Recall.

To find a common stance from which to step into this subject, we are starting with a free collective Zoom meeting to identify and share our strengths and insecurities as Somatic Movement Therapists, and surprise ourselves with how useful those strengths really are, and how surmountable those insecurities can be.

If we really believe, as Milton did, that there is a life force that is all around us and inside us, and that we can connect with that force through the effortless practices of Mentastics, then how can we not want to share how to surrender to the “vast ocean of pleasantness” with our favorite clients…even online, if necessary. Isn’t authentic connection with our clients really the most important thread in the weave of our work? Isn’t it at least as essential as the beautiful table work at the heart of Trager sessions?