Feeling for Soft
Feeling for softness in the tissue—or what we sometimes call “feeling for soft”—comes from Milton Trager himself. Broadly speaking, soft tissue refers to everything in our body except the bones. It encompasses fascia, muscle fibers, blood vessels, lymph vessels, organs—everything with a texture softer than bone. When we talk about feeling for softness in the tissue, we’re searching for and eliciting a quality of healthy, even density throughout these soft tissue structures.
Interestingly, even bones themselves are considered part of what physics refers to as "soft matter."Soft matter is a type of physical structure that is neither fully hard like metal, nor fully liquid like water. Our body’s bones are harder than other structures, but they are pliable, resilient, even springy to a degree. And they change and grow in ways only living structures do. Our bodies contain liquid, but in the context of physics, it’s thicker than water, filled with minerals and various cells.
When working on a client's belly, thigh, back, or shoulder, Milton would sometimes pause and remark, “I feel something hard here, hard like wood.” It was something he wouldn’t have expected in that location. For example, in the belly, the bones around the edges define the abdomen, but within that area, no healthy tissue should feel hard. Yet, when you touch with great sensitivity, different densities of soft tissue become apparent. Occasionally, you’ll feel something a bit harder than the surrounding tissue—what Milton might have called “blocked tissue,” or a blockage in the flow of texture between one area and its adjacent regions.
When Milton was playful, gentle, and persistent—when he did all the little gestures of soft tissue movement, which we might colloquially call "noodling around," "jiggling," "smushing," "gathering," or "rippling"—it would result in a change in the tissue, a softening. The tissue would become more evenly soft throughout.
Milton would often say, “There, I like it. It got softer. It’s simple.” His pride and gratitude were palpable. Sometimes he’d add, “It’s so pleasurable to me, I shouldn’t get paid for this because I enjoy it so much.”
Milton spoke about the pleasure his body got from being allowed to play in another’s body in this way—a pleasure that made him feel good about himself, that pleased his hands and mind. This aspect of him is something I deeply resonated with.
When I help beginning students understand what they’re feeling for, I remind them that they can already feel differences in textures. We experiment with different textures of objects in the room to illustrate this point. I often use the example of selecting peaches at the store: gently pressing them to check for ripeness. Our hands are incredible sensors of subtle quality differences.
Developing this simple skill into a therapeutically useful skill simply requires our mental attention, applied with kind intention through many, many repetitions, over years and years of practice. Eventually, we recognize the important differences in soft living tissue instantly—recognizing them in ways that are therapeutically useful and that, as a byproduct, provide a deep pleasure in connecting to what is healthy in the people we work with. We become experts at identifying anomalies in the ocean of healthy, soft tissue.
