Written by: Roger Tolle
I had to listen closely to understand the small, tight voice that crept tentatively out from my phone on that chilly morning in April. "Mr. Tolle?" her speech tinged with an Eastern European accent. "My name is Mina, and my doctor told me I needed to see someone to get help relaxing. Do you do massage?"
"Well, although my work is not strictly what is referred to as massage therapy, I am very good at helping people relax, deeply, from the inside out, using repetitive fluid motion. It's a very gentle process called the Trager Approach.”
I softened my tone even more as I asked, "Can you tell me some more about what's going on with you?"
"Well, I'm trying to write a book about my father, but I can't sit long enough to get anything done. My doctor says I have spinal arthritis. And I get severe headaches a lot. And I haven't been able to sleep for more than a couple hours at a time. So I'm really tired, too. Could your work help with this?"
I could hear the pain in her voice, and the restricted breathing, the rapid speech, the anxiety. But there was something beyond that, too. Was it, perhaps, that it was not easy for her to have to ask for help at all?
"Yes, I am pretty sure this work will help you reduce the tension in your body and ease your headaches. Would you like to make an appointment?"
With some urgency, she booked the first appointment I had available the next afternoon.
The next day Mina arrived punctually at my Upper West Side apartment where I had my studio. I opened the door to a short, compact woman, about 70 years old, dressed in an elegant pants suit with a tailored jacket. Her pinched smile told me about both her pain and her social etiquette.
Inwardly, I groaned at forgetting to ask her to wear more comfortable, moveable clothes, but given her age and her obvious European upbringing, this pants suit might just have been her version of dressed down comfort. At least she wasn't wearing a dress.
I hung her jacket on the coat rack, and invited her to lead the way to my studio down the long hallway. Following her allowed me to begin my assessment of her movement habits without her becoming self-conscious about it. What I noticed made me a bit apprehensive.
She charged straight forward, taking no notice of the photos of me and my dancers that lined the long wall. (I’d had my own modern dance company in previous years.) She carried her body in one piece. I saw no movement between her head and her torso, and also no movement within her torso. Only her legs and arms moved as she walked…short, quick steps stoically balanced on sensible heels…a determined march…a walk that said she had endured much in her growing up…a walk that said she was not about to surrender to this crippling body pain and not about to be derailed from her mission.
She sat upright in the chair next to my desk and told me more about her famous father, an internationally known artist, and about her desire to tell his story, to write his biography. She wanted to expose the horrible treatment he had gotten and their family’s harrowing escape from Nazi occupied Hungary. She also reiterated what she had mentioned on the phone, that she really wanted to solve all the distracting body annoyances and return to writing her father's life story.
My observations from the walk down the hall were confirmed as I continued my intake with questions about how she felt in her body and what she hoped our work together would offer her, both in this first session and in possible future sessions.
Sitting in my sun-drenched studio, her intense gaze on me ignored the plants in the window, the cheerful paintings on the wall and the boisterous green rug with red flowers that reflected warm colors up into the room. She ticked off the details of her years of intensifying back pain and restricted motion, her current inability to exercise because of it, her feelings of isolation, confined in her apartment as she was so much of the time. She told me, with embarrassed euphemisms, that without the necessary movement of her body, her digestive system had stopped moving. She was severely constipated.
And she told me how frustrating it was not to be able to bend over her knitting and mending for more than a few minutes, because merely tilting her head down spiked the ever-present headaches. Even the slightest movement startled her with a pain so sharp [it] she would freeze her entire body.
As part of my interview, I asked her to stand without her shoes on, so she could sense into how her weight could shift from right to left. When I asked if she could let the non-weight-bearing leg hang and dangle a bit, she looked at me as if I were crazy. I asked her to show me how far she could turn her head. Less than half an inch in each direction, it turned out. Finally, and much to her relief, I asked her to climb carefully up on my table and lie on her back.
Throughout the intake process, I’d become aware of the subtle body-to-body communication already at work. I’d consciously relaxed my own weight within my body, letting it sink into the floor, modeling the feeling I hoped she might begin to pick up on an unconscious level. My trusty mammal body began helping her trust the situation…helping her trust me. If I’d had a long fluffy tail, I’d have been wagging it in friendly greeting.
I was already letting her unconscious have time to feel out my intentions—letting there be time for her body energy to “sniff me out,” like dogs do when greeting another dog. In every little way, I wanted to project an unhurried pace without push or rush, without particular expectations. I let my professional assessing of the relative freedom or restriction in her movement take a back seat, and instead, let a more childlike curiosity take the lead.
As I slid my hands to the tops of her shoulders and back of her neck, she did not flinch, as I feared she might. But she didn’t soften either. She didn’t let go. There was no audible sigh of relief, nor any deepening of breath. The muscle tissue remained locked in a strangle hold, a ceaseless and exhausting bracing against the anticipated pain.
“Is my touch comfortable for you? Soft enough?”
Mina’s response was a bit slow, as if she were considering how to answer. “Nothing hurts. It is fine.”
“Is it better if I am even softer like this?” I reduced my contact by half.
“Yes. That’s quite nice.”
“Thank you.” To be clearer, I explained my intention in asking. “Thank you for helping me find the right contact where your body doesn’t have to be alert to pain.”
“Oh,” was all she said, and her neck muscles softened a tiny bit. If I had stopped to make notes, I might have written 10-20% softer, but I was already sinking my sensing below the surface muscles to those directly wrapping the spine. They were having none of this softening agenda. Not yet, I thought to myself, reminding myself of my training. When meeting resistance, go lighter, do less. Treat the resistance like a scared puppy hiding under the couch. Coax it out with sweet talk, tasty treats, and patience.
Sweet talk and patience it was. Lots of patience. Lots of waiting for each slight letting go. I must have spent at least 15 minutes quietly holding, shifting positions, holding again, deepening my own breathing, freeing my spine and my shoulders, returning to cradling her neck, caressing the tops of her shoulders and down her arms. Moving her neck, or rocking her head were out of the question.
Listening closely to what Mina’s body communicated, what I heard seemed quite clear. If it had been spoken it would have been something like, “I can’t let go. It is scary to let that move. I’m afraid of the pain.” But beneath that, I also heard a first opening to trust. Not yet sure what it might mean to let her neck trust my hands for support, afraid of it and wanting it all at the same time.
In spite of all the resistance, when I finally gave up on the neck, it felt a tiny bit freer to me. Her head could now allow itself to be turned an inch in each direction--twice as far as where we began.
Moving to the side of the table so she could see me, I asked. “Does that feel different in your neck now?”
In a slightly woozy sing-song, Mina said. “I guess.” Then paused and refocused her eyes. “I can’t really tell.” This change in her voice seemed a big gain to me, but I said nothing about it.
“Be sure to let me know if anything is in any way uncomfortable. Even a fear that something will cause more pain is a signal I want to pay attention to. OK? Will you let me know?”
She turned her face toward me and nodded, unaware that this simple movement had not been possible 15 minutes before.
In the back of my mind, I was charting these subtle changes in voice tone and available movement. I layered them between the sometimes wandering conversations and the questions I was gently guiding in specific directions. Reaching her unconscious mind with messages of trust, ease, smoothness, and freedom had become the holy grail for me in this work. If I could convince her body’s operating system to trust the process, and then to consider previously unreachable options through non-threatening, new, and enticing sensory experiences, I believed her system would update itself.
Actually, the body’s operating system, the “bodymind,” is constantly updating itself, daily redefining itself to itself. But for most adults, that updating is simply reinstalling yesterday’s movement and postural habits. Along with those come perception patterns, sensory expectations, immune responses, and capacities for cellular renewal. And all of these are colored by any unexpressed or unprocessed emotions that are continually carried forward unless and until we find a way to resolve them.
The whole sense of self is being daily recreated, and can be convinced through undeniably new, freer, easier, softer experiences--not just the idea of these possibilities, but the felt sense of these possibilities. The sense of self can learn and eventually integrate more functional patterns of moving and being. I wanted Mina’s bodymind to learn to relax, to allow its spinal column to lengthen just enough for a bit more freedom of movement to become available.
“I’m going to work with your legs now.” I said as I started a series of sculpting gestures at her diaphragm, wrapping my full, soft hands around the shape of her body. I let her sense the volume of her body there, then on down along her hips and thighs, knees and calves, ankles, feet and toes. I gave a series of tiny bounces to the thigh and knee weight, using my whole body to produce a feeling of buoyancy--each bounce, calibrated to fit what her leg would allow. Then I sculpted the whole leg again. I searched for freedom in a rocking leg motion, but found almost none. So I returned to sculpting, bouncing and weighing in a variety of ways for the next five minutes.
When I went to the other side of the table and explored feelings of length, volume, weight and freedom in the second leg, I grew frustrated by the lack of response. When, after a couple minutes, it dawned on me that I was working too hard, I backed off. With less effort and a less intense agenda, the leg responded. It gave me more. But only a tiny bit more. I had to concentrate on what I was feeling to notice the slight increase in freedom.
In the last third of our time, I focused on her torso. From the side of the table, I gave her ribs some light, springy bounces—some springing out from the table, some springing free from the spine, some just maintaining a hypnotically repetitive rhythm. This is usually such a joyful motion, with layers of rebound to feel, the give of the spine with each pulse through the ribs, the organs themselves, rebounding off each other like a bag of water balloons. But here in Mina’s torso, it felt as solid as wood. There was hardly any give, and none of the warm fleshiness of a healthy human body.
After she’d been on the table for about 45 minutes, I asked Mina to sit up slowly, then slide off the table to find the floor with her feet. Like I had done at the beginning of the session, I asked her to shift her weight side to side and forward and back so her nervous system could recognize the ground. Her body needed time to find its balance. I taught her to dangle each leg in turn, a movement I suggested she repeat frequently at home to help continue bringing freedom into her walking.
“How are you feeling, standing?”
She was unimpressed. “OK, but my head still hurts. These little movements don’t do much, do they?” She made no attempt to conceal her disappointment.
I masked my own doubts with an encouraging smile. “Give them a try. Just a little of this dangly feeling every hour. Not something to do. Rather something to explore.” I figured there was little hope she would bother with something that seemed so odd to her, but offered it anyway.
As she walked back down the hall, she asked about each of the photos as she passed. There was longing in her voice, and I wondered if she had studied dance when she was young, or if it was simply a longing to have that much freedom of movement again.
Before she left, I asked her to give me a call the next day to let me know how she felt. I was both hoping and dreading further sessions with her. Although already five years into my practice, working with her had been challenging for me. Allowing myself to remain peaceful and free in the face of so much density and hardness had not yet become simple for me. I was at least able to relax afterward, and reminded myself that I had sensed at least a little movement in a positive direction.
The next afternoon around 4:00pm, my phone rang, interrupting some tedious deskwork.
I was glad for the interruption and answered with an upbeat lilt in my voice. “Hello. This is Roger.”
“Hello, Mr. Tolle. This is Mina. What did you do to me?” The bite in her voice shocked my heart off its perch on my diaphragm. It landed heavy in the pit of my pelvis. I had never had that sort of reaction to my work.
Rather than panicking, or instantly beginning to apologize like I wanted to, I paused and took a deep breath. I reminded myself of what I had recently learned in a meditation training—to listen without jumping to conclusions, and to keep my curiosity focused in the present. Finally, I managed to make my mouth move, “Could you tell me what you’re noticing?”
“I just woke up. I slept 14 hours. I have no headache. I got out of bed easily. May I see you again today?”
I blinked. I reminded myself to breathe in, and then out. I kicked my mind back into gear, looked at my calendar, “Uh…Well…the next available time would be tomorrow at 1:00 in the afternoon. Would that work for you?” I still didn’t fully comprehend what had just happened. My first emotional reaction was still interfering with my ability to think clearly. After we made the appointment and I hung up, it took a full five minutes for the relief to breathe a smile onto my face.
When Mina came back the next day, she whooshed down my hallway, almost forgetting her manners in her rush to get back on the table in my studio. I repeated the work I had done, challenging myself to be even more gentle with her this time. Somehow, her intense reaction, and the transition from brittle and brusque to vulnerable and needy brought out the tender caregiver part of me. I kept flashing to images of my last trip to visit my mother in her 24 hour care center, where I’d held and rocked and sung to her withered body—the body that had often held and rocked and sung to me as a child—the body now abandoned by her Alzheimer’s riddled mind. Working with Mina’s armored body this second time, brought tears of wistful sadness to my eyes.
At the end of this session, her eyes were watery too. Sadness leaking out? Gratitude for the easing of tensions? Simple relief?
She listened closely to my suggestion that she interrupt her writing with frequent movement breaks. I showed her a few easy movements to start with. Then we set up a schedule of twice a week sessions for the following three weeks.
“Shouldn’t I come more often than that?”
“I think that will be plenty of new information for your body to integrate. And then we’ll taper off to once a week. Eventually, you won’t need me more than once in a while.”
When she returned for her third session, I insisted on asking more about what she had discovered since our first session. She bubbled on for a few minutes about all she had been writing, then paused, and became strangely shy.
“Well, uh, you remember I told you about the trouble I had been having with my bowels?”
“Yes. Are they still a problem or have they been moving better since you have been moving more?”
“It’s amazing. No more problem. First thing in the morning. Like clockwork. And I haven’t had a headache since that first session either.”
“Wow. That’s great Mina. And how about walking? Are you able to get about any better?”
“Oh yes. I have been out walking around the block in the morning and again in the evening. I am meeting my neighbors again. Some of them I like better than others.” Her sly wink surprised me. When had that sassy, strong-willed woman found her way into this old, arthritic body?
I continued to work weekly with Mina for the next six months. Each time, she reported about her writing, her walking, her visits with neighbors and friends. Her doctor gave her a clean bill of health, and although he still saw severe spinal arthritis in the x-rays he ordered at the end of the summer, it no longer prevented her daily movement routine nor her ability to bend over her mending. She even revealed to me her growing comfort and intimacy with Ross, a man ten years her junior and a full head taller -- her ballroom dance teacher.
On one of her regular Tuesday afternoon appointments that October, a stunningly bright and golden day, I asked her how much she was walking now.
“Earlier today, we walked around the park, like usual.” Her voice still had that clipped accent when she was peeved.
“Oh, what a perfectly lovely day for a stroll in the park. How long is your little loop?”
She looked at me like I was stupid, and made a big circular gesture with her arm. “We walked around the park,” her voice exasperated with my seeming density.
Then it dawned on me. “You mean you walked around the whole park? The grand loop around Central Park? That must be several miles.”
“Six point one miles to be exact.” Her proud smile and jutting chin challenged me to contradict her. “I looked it up last month, when Ross and I managed to get all the way around it for the first time.”