What Do I Mean When I Say Somatic Foundations?
When I speak of the Somatic Foundations of the Trager® Approach, I am referring to the movement explorations—paired with a certain quality of attention—that help the bodymind learn and eventually embody the central principles of Milton Trager’s work.
These explorations are not techniques in the narrow sense. They are invitations. The class consists of explorations, experiments, personal activities, paired activities, and group explorations that deepen our understanding of what the principles of this work offer—to ourselves, our clients, and our students. Always, they are grounded in curiosity—about how we move, what we feel, where our attention is placed, and how these inquiries continually shape one another.
For me, these are the practices that give depth, meaning, and lightness to all the touch interactions we call Trager Tablework. They teach us not only how to soften our touch, but how to imbue that touch with potency, clarity, and resonance. They help us guide clients into new qualities of experience: small shifts in weight, moments of ease, waves of movement that ripple through old holding patterns.
Some of these explorations are inventions of my own, born of decades of practice and the needs of particular students. Many come directly from Milton or from the dozen-plus instructors I studied with early in my career. Over the years, I’ve gathered ways of teaching that help students feel something different—something new that sparks their attention. Not novelty for its own sake, but the kind of difference that changes how they sense themselves, and how they sense their clients.
I’ve found particular movement explorations that combine with others to feed me with pleasure and ease, comfort and liveliness, and a depth or gravitas in how I feel and express myself. They also bring a sense of lightness, playfulness, curiosity, and delight in both touch and movement connection with others. This combination of gravitas and levity is something I bring into daily life conversations, into public addresses, and very effectively and usefully to clients who are in deep distress around what they have begun to perceive as intractable discomfort.
Through patience and curiosity—two key qualities of this work—and through creativity and constant readjustment of the trajectory or path, I guide myself and my clients in the exploration of rebuilding into the bodymind system the lost qualities of the natural exuberance of childhood. Together, we rediscover the spongy, delicious, engaged tissue quality that we were born with and relied on to move into the world and engage with our lives.
The Somatic Foundations class is, at its heart, an introduction to this way of being. It is not about memorizing a set of movements, but about cultivating full-body presence through touch and movement. It asks us to pay attention to our relationship with gravity and lightness, with stillness and motion, and with one another. It is an ongoing invitation to wonder: what else is possible in how I move, how I touch, how I attend?
