The Trager® Approach
(Psychophysical Integration)
A Feeling Experience..
No heavy or painful pressure is used in the Trager® Approach. Paradoxically the somatic touch is felt on a deep level, or from the inside outward. The practitioner will greet your nervous system as a friend and guide you into a feeling of deep restorative and functional ease.
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The touch of the Trager Practitioner permits you to feel yourself, in an educational context that potentiates lightness, spaciousness, expansion, connection and wholeness. Often the result is simply feeling more at home in the body.
Full and gentle touch supports easy movements that lull areas of tension into a softening, melting, and an unfolding process, all at a pace and rhythm that is syncopated with your nervous system, mind and body.
Benefits & Clinical Applications
The Practitioner works collaboratively with you and your nervous system. This pleasant process nourishes the parasympathetic reflex, or 'relaxation response'. In this way you actively learn by way of your own awareness what being more at ease genuinely feels like.
Approaching the nervous system in this way significantly influences the 'pain mechanism', effectively lowering pain and the body's effort to protect itself from perceived danger. Trager touch and movement has a calming effect on those who carry mental weight and pain.
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Clinical applications are wide-ranging, and can address and assist many specific issues, syndromes, conditions and neuro-muscular challenges.
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Acute and/or chronic pain
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Injury and surgery rehabilitation
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Balance issues
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Re-occurring tension
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Mental worry
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Headaches/migraines
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Trauma
Neuromuscular conditions
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Parkinson’s
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Multiple Sclerosis
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Stroke
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RSD or CRPS
Respiratory difficulties
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Shallow breathing
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Asthma, Lung disease
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Rib injury
Goals & Outcomes
A unique principle of this approach is the practice of self-care movements called Mentastics® coined from the words mental and gymnastics. Mentastics provide endless possibilities to seamlessly integrate effortless, fluid and balanced movement into daily activities. With equal potency Trager and Mentasatics can infuse a sense of enlivening and improved daily function for those afflicted with neurological conditions, see Benefits and Applications in the above section.
The quality and expansiveness of your relaxed states have a direct and corresponding effect in your ability to achieve and live in a freer body and calmer mind. The Trager Approach® can help you develop this practical and empowering skill until it becomes habit!
Manual Lymph Drainage
(Dr. Vodder Method)
Manual Lymph Drainage is recognized in the medical community as the #1 therapy in the treatment of lymphedema, lipedema and mixed edemas. It is additionally indicated in over 60 lesser pathologies.
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The Dr. Vodder Method is the 'original' form of of manual lymph drainage develooped by Dr. Emil Vodder in the South of France in the 1920s. It is a specialized massage that is characteristically very light, rhythmic and soothing. Typically a treatment focusses on the superficial lymphatics (right under the skin's surface), however, there are "deeper" techniques that are equally soothing that address the the tissues associated with the 'soft-tissues' and viscera.
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Manual Lymph Drainage is indicated and highly effective in the healing process after surgery, including:​
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​Cosmetic
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Liposuction
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Reconstructive
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Orthopedic
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Abdominal
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​Additionally, 'MLD':
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Strengthens the immune response
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Decongests the tissues
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Has a calming effect
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Lowers the inflammatory response
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Creates an analgesic effect
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And much more!
Mindful Movements for Groups
Roger offers somatic movement classes for groups ranging in size from 8 to 24 participants. In addition to movement teachings in formal Trager Certification Trainings, he has taught an array of classes for the public. These focus on assisting people in taping into their interoceptive awareness, curiosity and body presence to discover and develop self-caring practices for better self-regulation in daily life.
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Both in 2022 and 2023, Roger was invited to teach a class in Trager somatic movement for graduate Students in Northwestern University's Dance Program, under the leadership of Jeff Hancock.