By Roger Hughes, LMT, TRAGER Practitioner and Instructor
Everyday walking is more than just getting from point A to point B.
Walking benefits us physically, mentally, and literally reseats our insides into a healthier dynamic organization. This is by design. Taking a walk after eating a meal helps support peristaltic activity. Walking is a good way to lighten the weight of worry or of prolonged thinking, or from too much sitting.
Move with your ‘center of gravity’. Walk with a pace and stride that you are most comfortable with, not too fast, not too slow, just right for your body. Your center of gravity is located between the 2nd sacral segment (beneath the lumbar vertebrae) and a few inches below the umbilicus, or beneath the ‘gut’. As we move forward the center of gravity waivers vertically and horizontally. This is most pronounced during the transition of weight from foot to foot. Can you picture or sense your center of gravity?
Be aware of your transition of weight through each foot’s articulated movement, and into toeing off or rather ‘lifting off’ as a result of gravity’s rebounding forces (GRF). At the rising height of your foot-to-foot transition, The GRFs spreads up and outward into the body’s biotensegral foliage via the fascial system, soft tissues, bones and consciousness. Think of bobbing heads in a mass moving crowd!
This innate process is pre-programmed from the time we place ourselves on our feet. We soon learn how to maneuver easily enough, without thinking, it develops into pattern. Our life experience with the thousands of distractions, disappointments, injuries, loss, literally play on the movement and shape we take and continually evolve into, or get stuck into.
Walking is simply a great way to reset the orchestra of your body’s parts to play from the same score of music. It creates an even tone in your muscles, harnesses your bones in proper balance of tensile and expansive forces, improves breathing efficiency and gives way to a feeling of lightness, freedom and positive self-awareness.
Conscious walking, if even for a moment, reminds us that we are inhabiting a living, breathing, energetic, and adapting macrocosm.
If you are not walking as much as you’d like to, due to an illness, injury, surgery or just feeling a little blue and unmotivated, receiving a Trager session would give you the ‘somatic’-body-based feeling and movement that you need to rekindle and enhance your walking experience. Trager helps you recognizes what is moving right and addresses areas of stiffness, misalignments, and/or pain with pleasurable, fluid and connecting movements. A Trager session always feels good, deeply, from the inside out.
Tips for taking your body for a walk:
ü Be in our feet, feel the ground rising up to meet you
ü Rest your eyes on the horizon, a peripheral view
ü Move with your center, or simply allow your pelvis to lead
ü Notice the passive contralateral swinging movement of your arms
ü Take in Nature’s bounties!
ü Enjoy the swinging forward of each hip and leg
ü Sense the ‘lift-off’ as you toe off
ü Receive the rebounding forces of gravity that reach into levity
ü Walk with imaginary springs in your joint
