Page 461 - Total War on PTSD

be pivotal. Though I had arrived at the session with some discomfort, there was no time during the session that I experienced pain. In fact, most of what I felt was curiosity mixed with relaxation. I was feeling that most, if not all, of my body felt good, not heavy or restricted as it had an hour before. Often during the session, I wondered why the practitioner was working on a part of me seemingly not related to the pain I had been experiencing. Yet, when the session was over, all traces of functional limitation and discomfort were gone. “Where did they go,” I thought to myself, “If they were not worked on directly?”
After my session I was given movement exploration exercises to do on my
own, Trager® Mentastics® (mental gymnastics), to help me meet my world differently; to explore movement possibilities outside my default, habituated way of moving about my environments such as work and home. It was through these homework movement exercises that The Trager Approach got its traction within me.
I began receiving sessions monthly to ensure that the pain did not return. In other words, so I did not fall back in to old movement patterns that set up the painful conditions. Also, I had become a committed student of the Mentastics which are like Tai Chi or gentle yoga-type movements that leverage principles of autogenic training, a widely recognized method of biofeedback used to lower blood pressure as it elicits physiological change through silently repeated phrases. Mentastics also encourages memory of the session, of how it felt when I received the work, re-living the therapy in my mind. Every movement after a session is an opportunity to reprogram how one moves in their body and in relation to their world.
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