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The Principle of Softness

Softness is a hallmark of healthy tissue—a quality we can easily recognize in the supple, responsive body of a child. This state of tissue is plush yet resilient, striking a balance between strength and flexibility. It reflects a body that is alive, adaptable, and ready to move freely without unnecessary tension. Trager practitioners use gentle touch and rhythmic movement to invite this kind of softness in their clients, helping the body remember what it feels like to move with lightness and ease.

Softness is not just about the physical quality of tissue but also about cultivating a state of ease in the mind. It serves as a reminder to let go of the mind’s tendency to overthink, analyze, or force solutions. When we soften the mind, we create space for curiosity, openness, and gentle awareness, allowing new possibilities to emerge naturally rather than through effort. This shift fosters a deeper attunement to the present moment, inviting us to notice and savor the sensations arising within the body. In doing so, we cultivate a greater sense of presence and relaxation, which supports both mental clarity and physical ease.

Movement Explorations on Softness

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Morning Practice on Softness 
Morning Practice on Softness 

Be soft with yourself. Cradle your inner child with gentleness and solid reliability.

Be soft with your adult body. It is serving you every day in myriad ways, ways you are not aware of as well as ways you are aware of. It is letting you know what feels good, what feels better than good. So, ask your wise body...What feels safe, easy, effortless? What feels richly challenging? But also... What feels too challenging at this moment? What feels effortful, uncomfortable, or rushed?

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Articles and Essays on Softness

Essays and Articles
What Do We Mean By Healthy Soft Tissue?
What Do We Mean By Healthy Soft Tissue?

What do we mean by healthy soft tissue? The soft tissue of the body has many qualities—different qualities in different parts of that tissue. But when we touch another human body, we have an instinctive sense that healthy soft tissue in adults is very similar to what a child’s body feels like in our hands.

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Feeling for Soft
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.

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Book Excerpts on Softness

Book Excerpts
With Softer and Softer Hands
With Softer and Softer Hands

Excerpted from Jack Liskin’s Moving Medicine: The Life and Work of Milton Trager, M.D.

In Manhattan, Trager practitioner Roger Tolle had been giving sessions almost weekly to Marge Rivingston, a noted voice teacher whose students have included singer Linda Ronstadt and actors Meryl Streep and Kevin Kline, when she asked him to co-teach a class for her students. He describes his first day teaching.

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Tension and Release: The Sol/Gel of Muscle
Tension and Release: The Sol/Gel of Muscle

Excerpted from Deane Juhan’s Job’s Body

As we have previously remarked, one of the most impressive features of connective tissue, the quality that makes it so widely useful as a structuring agent, is its ability to behave like a liquid crystal. It can be watery, elastic, wiry, or solid, depending upon local functions and stresses.

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Milton Teaching Softness
Milton Teaching Softness

Excerpted from Jack Liskin’s Moving Medicine: The Life and Work of Milton Trager, M.D.

Again today, there is a child with cerebral palsy, a nine-year-old boy with beautifully tender and intelligent eyes, who uses leg braces, a walker, or a wheelchair to get around. Every move he makes, every word he uses, builds the child's trust and reinforces softness in his spastic muscles. Milton cannot impart this skill directly to students; it has grown out of long years of experience with children.

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Softness at the Table

The goals for Mentastics and exercise
are not the same.
In exercise, one pursues
increased tone, strength,
endurance or speed.
This takes effort.

The goal of Mentastics is hook-up.
Personal feelings of
freedom, lightness or softness
are developed within oneself.
This is an effortless process.

— Dr. Milton Trager,
"Trager Mentastics: Movement as a Way to Agelessness”

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