Moving into Agelessness
Many of you will have seen the video series Roger Tolle produced a decade ago, Moving into Agelessness. In case you haven’t, it is still available in 4 parts on YouTube and on his website, RogerTolle.com.
Over the next 4 months, Trager Talk will feature the script for each part of the series. We are hoping the simple, direct language can be an inspiration for you to speak and write succinctly about your work to clients and to the public.
Part 1: The meaning of movement
Movement is aliveness.
If we are alive, we are in movement. And we can choose to observe and explore our own movement, expanding our movement potentials with no additional effort.
Breathing is movement. From the moment we took our first breath at birth, throughout all our life experiences, and continuing till we die, our unique patterns of breathing are always with us. In any moment, we can notice whether our breathing feels easy, or labored, big and full, or thin and weak.
We are designed to be in movement.
Shifting weight and playing a subtle balancing act in gravity is part of our upright lives.
Our skeleton moves, bringing articulation and clarity to gestures, and helping us choose direction. We can explore many ways of giving our skeleton more room to move freely.
The movement of muscles and connective tissue allows the alternation between action and support, between release and receptivity. From them we reap the benefit of a continually shifting dynamic of connection and freedom.
Emotion is movement too. Expressing our desires, hopes, dreams, and emotional states happens in and through our bodies in many visible and invisible ways. And in contrast, repressing emotion requires a shift in tone in our bodies and freezes our movement and our potential for all other emotional states.
Movement, no matter how small, creates sensation. And sensation increases our awareness of our aliveness. Sensation and awareness are the cues that trigger consciousness of being alive.
Movement defines us.
Our movement reveals our history, our learned patterns, our current state of being, our emotional flow.
Stresses and traumas in our lives caused us to momentarily freeze our movement.
When stresses were repeated or became constant, our frozen movement hardened our body structures (leaving us less and less room for the joyfulness of unlimited human expression) and compromised all of the processes that would repair us.
This is the root of the conditions we associate with aging.
Whoever we are, in whatever condition, with whatever personal history, we can always learn to improve the quality of what we do.
It is wonderful to find out that being held back by embedded, often unconscious movement patterns is optional. And that we can choose at any time to begin to practice and integrate easier and freer movement patterns.
Beginning to embody patterns of free-flowing movement expands our movement potentials and with them, potentials of feeling, expressing, relating and sustaining health.
The return of these potentials is what we associate with staying young--with feeling and appearing ageless.
Embodying patterns of fluid, omni-directional, responsive, and dynamic movement expands our movement potentials and builds a sense of hope for our future--a future that moves toward ageless joy.
Part 2: “Choosing to Feel” will be published in the February 2021 issue of Trager Talk