Continuing Education Workshops
For Massage Therapists, Movement Therapists, Bodyworkers, and other Somatic disciplines.
Movement Perspectives in Bodywork
Movement: the essence of being alive. Your individual unique way of moving reflects not only your level of wellness, but your entire personality, the way you feel yourself taking your place in the world. It is your birthright to move naturally with ease and comfort. Whoever you are, in whatever condition, with whatever personal history, you can always learn to improve the quality of what you do.
In this one day workshop for bodyworkers, we use movement to increase sensation, body awareness, and proprioception. We explore grounding, sensing, elongating, freeing and enlivening as tools for preparing to touch intelligently and with nuanced awareness.
Transforming Touch: Becoming the Ocean
The Trager® Approach to Somatic Movement and Manual Therapy is pleasurable, gentle, nurturing and non-invasive. Integrating principles of this work helps you address your clients’ specific concerns, whether to bring more joy into life, to enhance athletic performance, explore and release emotional constriction, or to address the functional limitations of pain, medical conditions, aging, disease, or injuries.
Softness: This segment is focused on the foundational principles of effective attitude, contact and meaning in hands-on therapies. Through your own experience, you’ll discover the deep impact of a softly inquiring mind, the potency of soft touch, the meaning as skin meets skin and mind meets body, the soft feel of healthy tissue, and how elegant ease arises organically up from soft feet.
Weight: Working skillfully with gravity adds powerful kinetic perception skills to your bodywork tool kit. In this segment we’ll explore: sensing weight and the deep peace of letting go; finding easy suspension in gravity; decompressing body structure; meeting resistance; working easily with clients’ weight.
Waves: This segment is focused on wave motion, on the surface and in the depths, and on the feeling of fluidity in mind and body. To sense liquid movement patterns we’ll stay fluid while working. We’ll explore organizing waves that free deeper structures and listen precisely to the backwash. A fluid body holds no disease…what would happen if we didn’t meet the challenges of life by bracing or holding?
Connection: We bring it all together in artful, full body and mindful integration. By first sensing and expanding our own fascial web (“taking out the slack”), we find more freedom and add more power to our movement. This lets us listen more deeply to all the subtle and important messages from our client’s body and spread the meaning of our touch-conversation more broadly and evenly throughout the body’s structure. Connecting to ourselves precedes connecting to the other.
Hands
The Trager® Approach offers great ways of working effectively with hand related issues brought to us by clients. The work also offers excellent practices for developing new levels of sensitivity, skill, quality and comfort for our own hands, arms and shoulders. Drawn from decades in practice and teaching, Roger shares his understanding of kinetic physiology and the interdependent influences of mind and body in movement, as well as insight into the deep, long-lasting impact of potent softness. Touching your clients will never be the same.
Feet
The feeling and function of our feet has an effect on our entire body. The Trager® Approach offers great ways of working effectively with foot related issues brought to us by clients. Self-care Trager practices also bring refreshed levels of sensitivity, support and comfort for our own feet, legs, pelvis, back and beyond. In this interactive workshop, Roger shares his experience and understanding of how positive feeling fuels and restores natural function, as well as insight into the deep, long-lasting impact of grounded presence. Walk away with a new spring in your step!
Breathe !
You are amazing. You breathe without thinking about it!
When you do put your attention on it, you can play with your breathing patterns in marvelous ways, and achieve deep pleasure, impressive power, inner peacefulness, and even higher states of consciousness.
This Trager workshop introduces you to ways you can dialog with your own and your clients’ body/minds with breathing in the foreground of your inquiry. We’ll work with partners seated and on the table, unlocking restrictive patterns in the unconscious, and offering new possibilities.
Washing out the Fascial Sweater
What happens when bodywork sessions speak eloquently and listen deeply to the multi-dimensional, multi-planar fascial sweater that weaves around and through the torso? Through discussion, demonstration and practice, we explore the role of skillful touch and mindful movement on body shape, posture, sensory connection and graceful movement. Perspectives and stories are drawn from study with the pioneers in the bodywork and movement education fields, personal explorations, and clinical applications.
Please wear loose, easy-to-move-in clothes and bring your video camera phone. You will have the option of being videoed on your own camera at the beginning and end of the day.
Testimonial: I have been using the tools you shared this weekend in Orlando. My clients have literally floated out of my treatment room. The results have been amazing, muscles let go, the clients let go, and everyone is happy. I am blown away. Thank you again, and I look forward to studying with you further.
- Nancy
Mentastics®
Mindful movement practices for self-care, self-development, and for our work with clients - this is Mentastics. Dr. Milton Trager coined the term to gather this whole field of practices under one title. Today, aspects of Mentastics interface with many other disciplines.
In this series of one-day classes, each morning focuses on principles of natural movement and how they enhance the sensing of freedom, softness, ease, groundedness, and connection. Afternoons challenge you to deepen your personal practice while connecting more meaningfully with others, both on and off the table.
These classes provide CE credits for bodyworkers and massage therapists and are open to professionals and students in movement education, mindfulness, yoga and wellness training.
Day 1: Gravity and Levity
Explore and Apply Sensory Presence, Feel Suspension, Feel Weight, Find and Facilitate Freedom
Day 2: Fascia and Fluids: Listening To The Liquid Body
Sustain Curiosity, Take out the Slack, Feel for Fluidity, Wash Out the Fascial Sweater
Day 3: Intake to Integration in Context of Mind/Body Medicine
Listen to the Unconscious, Work with Imagery, Reframe Expectations, Manage Symptoms with Movement Education
Movement and Transformation
Movement and Transformation is a series of workshops that have been taught for Trager International, and various massage schools and conferences since 1989. The workshops may focus on a specific theme for one 3 day weekend -- The Power of the Pelvis, Opening the Heart, Freeing the Voice -- or may be offered in introductory or longer (5 day) combined formats under the simple title Movement and Transformation.
There are no prerequisites for these classes. They are open to all students and professionals in the bodywork, somatic education, personal growth and holistic health fields. They can serve as one of the prerequisites for the Trager Certification Training Program. They may not be appropriate for persons who are mentally, emotionally, or physically unstable, unless the sponsoring organization can provide the needed support.
In these workshops we engage in pleasurable, playful and profound movement explorations grounded in the principles of Trager Mentastics. Supported by a rich selection of music, and with images from physical anatomy and the body's subtle energy centers, we seek to deepen our relationship to ourselves and our partners -- body, mind and spirit. The hands-on portions of the workshops further develop the themes begun in our personal explorations, and provide inspiration for deepening our professional practices.
Each day begins with 1-2 hours of uninterrupted movement accompanied by recorded music and guided entirely by questions. Each day ends with a trade of a 30-60 minute tablework exploration. In the middle, one or more themes (groundedness, fluidity, compassionate listening, etc.) are developed through demonstration, solo and partner Mentastics explorations, and group discussion.
Power of the Pelvis
In the Power of the Pelvis weekend, we use the principles of Trager Mentastics to focus on how the pelvis, and its associated energies of grounding, sensuality and balance, provides the roots for graceful movement and flowering of consciousness. Emphasis is placed on staying present, and developing fluidity through gentle rhythmic motion. Participants are guided in opening, strengthening and balancing the pelvis through a combination of personal movement explorations, and partner games both on and off the tables.
Class Objectives
To learn how to release tension, reduce stress, and build support in the lower body.
To palpate and assist freer movement and fuller awareness in a partners' feet, legs and hips.
To sense weight, groundedness, fluidity, balance, and freedom of movement in themselves, and in a supine partner.
To discover personal movement/awareness truths through open exploration.
To begin to be able to find connection, ease stress and access feelings of freedom and peace through simple movements done with awareness.
To gain a basic understanding of some of the principles of Trager Movement Education and Mind/Body Integration.
To explore how these movement principles bring new depth and lightness to a bodywork practice.
Opening the Heart
In the Opening the Heart weekend, we employ movement, sound, visualization and group support to open our Hearts and the associated subtle energies of compassion, healing and sense of oneness (Hook-up). We explore how and why our professional lives put extra demands on the Heart and how to avoid the "bodyworker's hunch". And we practice skills of compassionate listening, kinesthetic observation, and non-invasive touching.
Class Objectives
To learn how to release tension, reduce stress, and build balanced support in the upper body.
To palpate and assist freer movement and fuller awareness in a partner's hands, arms, shoulders, and ribs.
To sense breath, space, ease, elasticity, elongation, and freedom of movement in themselves, and in a supine partner.
To develop feeling connection to partners through kinesthetic observation, compassionate listening, and non-invasive touch.
To discover personal movement/awareness truths through open exploration.
To gain a basic understanding of some of the principles of Trager Movement Education and Mind/Body Integration.
To explore how these movement principles bring new depth and lightness to a bodywork practice.
Freeing the Voice
The Freeing the Voice weekend will use the principles of Trager Mentastics to explore fuller self-expression, with a special focus on the neck, head, face and voice. We seek a stronger connection with our inner Voices through active listening to vibrations inside our bodies, and discover the delights of soft inwardly focused movement and sound combinations. In looking for integrated ways of communicating what we truly feel, we sound into and out of our own bodies and join our voices in communal sounding circles.
Class Objectives
To learn how to release tension, reduce stress, and build confidence in the voice and self-expression.
To palpate and assist softening of tissue, freer movement and fuller awareness in a partners' neck, face, jaw, and breath.
To sense breath, vibration, ease, elongation, and freedom of movement in themselves, and in a supine partner.
To explore various relationships between sound vibrations and body movements.
To develop ability to perceive different rhythms, pitches, tone qualities in self and others.
To discover personal movement/awareness truths through open exploration.
To gain a greater understanding of some of the principles of Trager Movement Education and Mind/Body Integration.
To explore how these movement principles bring new depth and lightness to a bodywork practice.
