Dear Colleagues, 

At the next TTC Meeting, I’ll be sharing more with you about Somatic Foundations of Presence, Touch, and Movement. But as you first look at it, it might be helpful to have some context. 

The Somatic Foundations booklet was developed as a class handout and as the syllabus for presenting a new format of the 24-hour Mentastics class. I schedule the class in four 6-hour days instead of three 8-hour days, allowing each of the themes to have a 3-hour segment (morning or afternoon) in which we explore that theme through personal and paired movement explorations. We then apply what has been learned through body feeling and mind awareness (“mental gymnastics”) as they touch a partner in a short exploration of table work. 

In addition to the booklet, students are also offered a free opt-in access to an online library of resources that presents additional support videos, articles, stories, poems, etc. correlated to the seven themes. I am still in the process of further development of that online resource. Any suggestions for additional resources are welcome.

I have developed this format for the Mentastics class as potentially the initial course within the Core Curriculum, and market it to the public with the title “Somatic Foundations of Movement, Touch, and Presence”. The title is deliberately leaning into the trendy buzz word “somatic” to attract more people. But this way of identifying the meaning and impact of Mentastics within the training in the Trager Approach is not new for me. Mentastics as the source of our unique and potent Trager quality of touch has been a mainstay of my tutoring and teaching for years. 

I chose these particular seven themes, among the many others that also hold a big place in our work, because I felt clear enough about how to summarize their place in the work for people new to Trager, and also because I have developed specific explorations I can easily teach to both beginning and advanced students that help students feel the principles acting through their whole body in motion. Are there other principal themes of Mentastics that you feel belong in this grouping, themes that you teach through movement and touch explorations and that inform the potency of Trager touch?

I also want you all to know that I understand Mentastics to be a vast field of overlapping practices some of which focus on helping ourselves and our clients with our self-care in daily life, some of which focus on daily dedicated practices that help us develop more functional and resilient bodies, and some lead gradually to long-term self-development in attitude and embodied presence. In the Somatic Foundations class that is laid out here, we address all of these intentions as we explore the seven themes of the workshop, while giving special attention to transforming our quality of touch and Hook-up through somatic movement explorations. 

Somatic Foundations of Presence, Touch, and Movement is a fresh re-framing of the heart of Milton’s work — Mentastics. This presentation attempts to meet a moment in our culture: 

• a moment when we are looking for better ways of articulating the essence of our work to all those interested in embodying more ease, freedom, joy and peace 

• a moment when new language is needed to keep current with new paradigms emerging in body-mind therapies 

• a moment when local organizers need clear and enticing postings on social media and other digital platforms to support their local efforts in attracting potential students for introductory workshops as well as professional trainings

• a moment when our scattered international Trager community needs more in person events to gather in a community of support where we can steep ourselves in the feeling of moving in Hook-up

From the beginning, my teaching has been shaped by the lineage of Milton Trager — his vision that freedom, ease, and play could be learned directly through the body, not as abstract ideals but as a felt experience. Alongside that lineage, my own path has been nourished by decades of encounters with students and colleagues, and by conversations across the arts, sciences, and somatic traditions. What I offer here is not a departure from Trager’s work, but my particular articulation of it. 

For instructors and tutors, Somatic Foundations offers a clearly structured iteration of the 24-hour Mentastics course that can be offered as a stand-alone course for the public and a broad spectrum of professionals in other therapeutic disciplines, as well as an integral part of the Trager Certification Training Program. I am happy to mentor others in offering this framework, as I have been doing recently with Roger Hughes. And my assistant, Wilfred Henry, who designed and edited this online presentation, is available to consult with others interested in building similar online products.

From the late 1980s onward, our instructor group recognized the need to teach Mentastics on its own, not only woven into other classes. That recognition led to the adoption of a dedicated three-day course in the 2001 international curriculum, created collectively but always enriched by individual voices, backgrounds, and teaching styles.

Somatic Foundations reflects my own contribution to that ongoing evolution. The demonstration video, companion booklet, and growing online library are not prescriptive. They are offered as a foundation and a support to help clarify the language we use, to provide touchstones for guiding movement and awareness, and to encourage creativity as we shape the learning environment for our students.

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. 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 how it looks to the outside observer, 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 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 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 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?

In the past several years, I have begun referring to Mentastics (or Somatic Movement Education more broadly) 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 movement that is an ordinary part of life or 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. 

Let me invite you 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, makes 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 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 in 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 sloughing 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?