I had the recent good fortune to enjoy two days of personalized Tutorials/sessions with Roger Tolle at his abode in Charlottesville, VA. Roger picked me up at the train station Sunday evening, and driving to his home we discussed ideas and goals for the following days, before retiring for the evening.
Monday started with fresh brewed coffee and breakfast and then a walk along the river filled with important gossip and Trager catch-up. That conversation was sprinkled with awareness of the beautiful surroundings and how our bodies moved through space. Arriving back at Roger’s, we played at the table, exploring how we can move from various systems of our bodies, and reaching people with more depth in various parts of their bodies including the organ, fascial, fluid, and joint systems. Other concepts related to shifting work to various body systems within the same move and finding the dance within each move. Like vectors shifting within a Trager move, Roger’s input shifted from the poetic, to the highly anatomical, to various applications as practitioner and tutor trainee.
Changing focus after lunch, I received direct work from Roger, further feeling the themes we’d worked with in the morning. After a swim and jacuzzi at the health club, we continued our Trager dialogue at a wonderful, family owned, middle eastern restaurant and walked along the pedestrian only area of downtown before retiring for the evening.
Tuesday began with another good breakfast and coffee-infused dialogue and a walk along the river, this time utilizing the entire walk as a meditative Mentastics practice, sensing our moving from various areas including the clavicles, pelvis and of course the golden string arising from the top of the head. The table work together was much more fluid now that my anxiety around learning, in full swing the day before, and handled with great patience by Roger, had yielded to the liquid joy of Trager. After lunch it was off to the airport for my flight home. Driving to the airport I was filled with appreciation for Roger’s warm and generous sharing of his home and his cellular knowledge of Trager. I arrived home with seeds of new learning and a harvest of new understanding evidenced in my first session back, and continuing to grow over time. Now, this was my kind of tutorial.
Joe Rodin