Integrative Bodywork

Trager® Psychophysical Integration

Trager® sessions include both table work and movement exploration off the table. Gentle, rocking movement is used by the practitioner to help the client unlearn patterns of holding and tensing the body. This approach invites the recipient into a new relationship with his or her body.

Trager Work aims to:

"Touch the body, teach the mind, reach the spirit."

Trager Work can bring about:

Trager Psychophysical Integration was the discovery of a single individual, Milton Trager, M.D. He discovered its simple principles and its surprising effects intuitively, and almost accidentally at the age of 18 and then spent the next 50 years, expanding and refining his discovery.

Dr. Trager's manner of manipulating the body is not a technique or method, in the sense that there are no rigid procedures which are claimed to produce specific symptomatic results. There is no formula, no recipe, no standardized practical procedure. Rather, it is an approach, a way of learning and of teaching movement re-education.

The Trager practitioner does not change the condition of tissue with his or her hands, but uses the hands to communicate a quality of feeling to the nervous system, and this feeling then elicits tissue response within the client. When a body feels lighter, it begins to stand and move as though it were lighter.

Elements of a Trager Session

A Trager Work session takes from 1 to 1 ½ hours. No oils or lotions are used. The client wears a swim suit or briefs and lies on a well padded table in a warm, comfortable environment.

During the session, the practitioner makes touch contact with the body of the client in such a gentle and rhythmic way that the person lying passively on the table actually experiences the possibility of being able to move each part of the body freely, effortlessly, and gracefully on his or her own.

The rhythmic, fluid motions invite the bodymind to release old and unconscious long held patterns of holding, welcoming a sense of ease and lightness into the body.

After getting up from the table, the client is given some instruction in how to do 'Mentastics,' a system of simple, effortless movement sequences developed by Dr. Trager to maintain and even enhance the sense of lightness, freedom, and flexibility instilled by the table work.

'Mentastics' is Dr. Trager's coinage for 'mental gymnastics' - a 'mindfulness in motion' - designed to help his patients recreate for themselves the sensory feelings produced by the motion of the tablework.

If Trager Work interests you, Massage Therapy, Rosen Method Bodywork, and Joint Play may interest you as well.

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