Mentastics as a Field of Practices
In the past several years, I have begun referring to Mentastics (or Somatic Movement Education) as a Field of Practices, all of which grow in the fertile soil of sensory presence.
I use this description to help the wider world glimpse the possibilities Milton Trager suggested—a world that urgently needs the messages we practitioners carry: freedom, ease, playfulness, and peace. I also offer it for students and new practitioners, as an image to support self-care and inspire creativity in their work with clients.
It is no accident that I choose the image of a field. I have always encouraged students to view our work as inclusively as possible—to make room for everyone. The trained and the untrained. Those with backgrounds in other somatic disciplines, manual therapies, movement education, dance, or ancient healing traditions—and those arriving new to it all.
And I want to be clear: Mentastics should not be limited to a particular vocabulary of movements or movement explorations. The essence of the work arises through movement, but the work itself is not the activity of moving. No matter what physical movement we are doing, whether the movement that is an ordinary part of life or the movement that grounds a dedicated daily spiritual practice—it is the movement of the mind’s attention that defines these “mental gymnastics.” It is our skill in managing the focus and quality of our attention, no matter the activity, that yields all the richness of experience and potential for personal transformation.
How about coming with me on a little journey to understand some more about this field. Imagine you’re out for a walk in the mountains with a small group of friends, when you come across a beautiful meadow. You all stop to admire it, each of you taking it in in a slightly different way.
Your friend, Jason, who is totally into studying herbal medicine starts to identify some of the plants that he knows, ones that he says contain certain healing properties. “This one, if you boil the roots, make a great digestive aid. That one’s fuzzy leaves make a great calming and sleep enhancing tea. This tiny one here, if you gather lots of it on a full moon, and make a tincture out of it, will give you a powerful skin balm that takes the sting and itch out of all sorts of rashes.” If you let him, he will go on and on in this vein.
Your friend, Shelley, is a painter, well known for her skill at capturing the light and color of landscapes. She starts talking about what she sees in a completely different language. “Wow. Just wow.” She punctuates her speech with long, awestruck pauses. “Oh, my god, my goddess.”
So, you prompt her. “Yeah. It is beautiful. I love the sunlight on those yellow flowers over there. What is so wow-inspiring for you?”
“Oh my gosh. There are just so many shades of yellow. Look at those big daisy shaped ones. They are almost gold. And even a bit bronze in their centers. And that whole area, with all the little sparks of silver and lavender amidst the bright green…that would be so hard to get just right, but worth the effort.” She turns her head to the right and gasps. “Oh, look at that big area carpeted in bright blue with purple spikey things and a dusting of sprigs of white. And over there, a bit further away, it is all luscious deep green, spring green and olive green. Green weaving green with green…and still distinct and separate colors. And if I let my eyes soften into the distance, I know the bluish haze is just the humidity in the air, not more blue flowers. That would take a wash, I guess. Really challenging.”
“Come on,” you say to no one in particular. “Let’s find out what is over that horizon.” You begin dancing out into the field, headed up a rise where your sightlines hide what is beyond. You frolic up the rise and gallop down into a dip of the earth. Then further and further up, only to discover the field flows on down the other side and on up another rise, seemingly without any boundaries.
When you turn around and make your way back to your friends who have not, in fact, followed you, you see your friend, Maxie, lying face down in a bed of soft grass. At first you are concerned they are in trouble. But then you remember that this favorite non-binary friend of yours always leads you into astonishing transcendent moments. So you approach reverently, kneel down, making sure not to cast a shadow over them, then quietly ask, “What’s here, Maxie. What beached you here on this particular spot?” When you see a big breath fill their torso, you press further. “Can you tell me what you are noticing?”
Maxie’s head turns, and then just this. “Warm earth. Fecund smell of wet soil. Weary bones dissolve. I am it, and it is us, and we are all the same.”
So, you lie down, too. And you begin to dissolve, too. And you see the colors of the flowers from underneath, and want to call Shelley over to see things from this perspective also. And the bouquet of scents in this moist bed draw all the tension out of your head. So, you want to call out to Jason. You want to make sure he catalogs this exquisite heady aroma, and you hope he can tell you how to bottle it for use at home, while also knowing in your gut that the aroma would be nothing without the colors, and light, and vastness of the field, and the hike, and the very different perspectives of your friends.
Like the group of friends in the anecdote above, the community of devotees to Milton Trager’s work each understand and experience the work through their own particular and different lenses.
For those of us who look at the work as a source of recipes for healing, we look for utilitarian movements that support rehabilitation, perhaps even distilling corrective exercise out of the array of possibilities. We examine the various movements in our Mentastics repertoire for their qualities of flow and ease and lightness. We know that the movements themselves aren’t worth much without the particular attitudes or qualities of attention we bring to them. We look for how a particular movement done in a special way or from a very specific quality of mind yields freedom from joint pain, or softening of tenaciously dense muscle tissue, or a better balance of weight distribution, or the supportive, more evenly spread expansion throughout the fascial web. We seek to address the effects of debilitating diseases like Parkinson’s, Multiple Sclerosis, Cerebral Palsy, etc. We see the roots of our work in more traditional physical therapy, but with Milton’s particular holistic approach.
Some of us focus less on handling the already present results of injury and illness, and instead put our attention on studying, articulating, and teaching the ways our human nature at its best intended us to move. We investigate and practice the human body’s most efficient and elegant movement patterns as well as the joyful expressiveness of our human spirit, convinced that focusing on practicing these positive patterns will support the growth of helpful, regenerative habits. We explore hanging our skeleton in better alignment with gravity, expanding the connective tissue web to allow more space for the full range of potential movement, inviting freedom in the body to move in all the directions it is intended to move. We relate to the work as movement education, and allow the therapeutic benefits to accrue from the repeated practice of natural, health-enhancing, pattern re-building gracefulness. Graceful in gravity is our mantra. We cultivate that ourselves so we can show and teach others how to maintain ageless ease throughout the human life span, as nature intended.
For those of us who see how playful movement brings lightness to our spirits, we might begin to detail the many ways an active, alive, and well-connected mind and body color our mercurial emotional flow, as well as our long-enduring moods. We see clearly how body function, movement quality and our striving for both mature elegance and childlike joy and freedom are interdependent. We believe in the importance of uncovering and revealing our essential beauty.
For those of us that are looking for relief from the heaviness, stiffness, burdens of too many years of “adulting”, we love how these simple movement games, played in a childlike way, can gradually dissolve tissue density built up from years of struggle. We see how the compensatory patterns and protective armoring have put a drag on all of the body’s systems. And we love how the sluffing off of those layers of psychophysical weight leave us feeling clean, soft, and smooth like a snake freshly molted out of its crusty old skin.
And for those on the quest for a fountain of youth, what a treat to discover that the fountain is built into the biochemistry of our bodies. All we have to do is free that source of vitality--daily, hourly--with the light-hearted and enlivening neuropeptide effervescence of silly, rippling, intentionally random, delightfully age-defying bubbling up of vitality. We who travel our life-road with this simple, profound approach to movement are rewarded with joy, and frequent comments from our contemporaries that we look a decade younger than our biological age. “Movement as a way to agelessness.”
For those of us more familiar with practices of meditation, but who struggle with the body positions or mandated physical stillness that are often taught as an entrance requirement to the path of spiritual bliss, this unorthodox approach of Milton’s is a godsend. Here we can find mental quiet achieved through body movement--a road that employs the simple, everyday activities of living to convey the messages of relaxation, ease, peacefulness, mental clarity, and spiritual comfort to the deep recesses of the anxious mind. As a spiritual practice, Mentastics helps us address pacing and pausing in our lives, helps us slow down and savor the sweetness and grandeur of little things. We may learn self-acceptance, embrace a willingness to recognize what is. We may even become a more all-embracing, kind, mature and compassionate presence in the world. From “basking in a vast ocean of pleasantness” we learn through our own body’s experience what it is like to absorb, allow, drift, float, and flow…in sync with the speed of life…hooked up to the unhurried pace of our own lives.
Looking for the overlaps with other wisdom traditions and other somatic systems of self-cultivation, we may travel far and wide, explore many other teachings. And still, we find we have not left the vast field of Mentastics.
The way this work can become one’s operative approach to any number of other fields of endeavor is both deeply satisfying and also often frustrating. How do we carve out our slice of the market? How do we differentiate our work from the work of others, as wonderful as their work might be? How do we appease the small-minded parts of our brains that want boundaries to keep things separate, clear delineations that we can diagram? How do we nurture this ground and its entire ecosystem so it grows strong plants that flourish?
How do we embrace all the lenses through which different ones of us engage with this field of Mentastics? Can we simply enjoy this rolling meadow of endless possibilities, whether we lie down and merge deeply with one tiny flower, or dance ecstatically from horizon to horizon, or drift aimlessly bathed by the bliss of colors in this vast landscape?
Sidebar: quote from Natalie Goldberg about a large field to wander in. She beautifully describes why it's so important to view the field of your creativity as a very large field, so you have plenty of room to develop yourself and explore yourself without needing to escape the field,
