What is Trager?
The Trager® Approach is an innovative, gentle and pleasurable body therapy that improves movement and mobility and releases habitual patterns of muscular tension that have accumulated over the years in your body. It was created and developed by Dr. Milton Trager over his lifetime and continues to evolve based on the founding principles.
Through touch and movement, Trager sends a message to your body and mind, encouraging feelings of lightness, ease and comfort. With the gentle quality of the practitioner's touch and the assistance of gravity, this message is conveyed to the nervous system and the memories of lightness, ease and comfort are activated at the cellular level. This results in renewed awareness of a sense of oneness, wholeness and presence in a relaxed body.
Each Trager movement bypasses the way that you habitually move, introducing movement options that are easier, more pleasurable and more functional.
Trager has many benefits, including deep relaxation, increased mobility, and heightened clarity of thought. The benefits of a Trager session are cumulative, with subsequent sessions allowing for deeper and long-lasting changes.
A TRAGER SESSION includes table work and self-care movements and generally lasts 60 to 90 minutes. You can choose to be fully clothed, or partially clothed and appropriately draped. No oils or lotions are used.
At the beginning of a session, a Trager practitioner enters into a state of awareness, a form of active meditation. From this state of mind, your practitioner uses touch and movement to communicate with your body.
During the table work, you lie on a well-padded table in a safe, comfortable environment while your practitioner gently supports and moves your body within its pain-free range of movement and natural rhythm. You'll experience gentle rhythmic rocking, elongation, and rotating of your body's tissues in your legs, arms, shoulders, back, neck, chest and abdomen. This produces a pleasurable response in your body and a very deep state of relaxation.
Trager uses hundreds of little movements including rocking, shimmering, different pressures and gentle elongations - and each one of these elements of touch is imprinted into the unconscious mind of the recipient.
As the practitioner sets your body into motion, you experience the feeling of moving effortlessly and freely on your own. As your body and mind receive these soft movements, tensions disappear and new movement patterns become possible.
A session also includes instruction in the use of easy self-care movements called Mentastics®. You can use Mentastics between sessions to continue to develop the quality of feeling that you experienced during the table work and release stress and tension.