The Trager Approach

What is the Trager Approach?

“The Trager® Approach is a pleasurable, gentle and effective approach to movement education and mind/body integration. The Trager Approach helps release deep-seated physical and mental patterns and facilitates deep relaxation, increased physical mobility, and mental clarity. The benefits of a Trager session are long-lasting and cumulative, with subsequent sessions allowing for deeper and longer lasting changes.”

What Does a Session Look Like?

“At the beginning of your session, your Practitioner enters into a state of awareness that Dr. Milton Trager termed Hook up, a state similar to meditation. From this state of mind, your practitioner uses touch and movement to communicate with your body and mind the feeling of a freer and easier way of being and moving. There are two aspects of The Trager Approach. In one aspect of the work, usually referred to as the 'table work', you, the client, lie on a well-padded table in a safe, comfortable environment while your body is supported and gently moved within its pain-free range of movement and natural rhythm. You may choose to be fully clothed, or partially clothed and appropriately draped. The quality of touch and movement is such that 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. The other aspect of the Trager Approach, called Mentastics, involves instruction in the use of self-care movements. Mentastics is taught both in private sessions and in group classes.”

Dr. Milton Trager

The Trager Approach was discovered by Milton Trager, M.D. He employed its principles first as a therapeutic practitioner and then as a medical doctor. He went on to train others in the practice, and there are now thousands of certified practitioners all over the world. Milton Trager was born with a spinal deformity, but despite a sickly childhood, he overcame his physical challenges through practice and patience and became an athletic, graceful young man. At the age of 18, he was in training to be a boxer when he discovered that he had a remarkable ability to help others find relief from pain and physical and mental difficulties through touch. He went on to explore his approach with anyone willing to try it. People with a multitude of conditions, including emphysema, asthma, multiple sclerosis, muscular dystrophy, polio, and back pain, “responded to his touch with degrees of benefit ranging from greater ease to the miraculous.”

"The US Trager Association." United States Trager Association. N.p., n.d. Web. 12 Nov. 2012.