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 was published in the February 2021 issue of the USTA’s Trager Talk.
Part 2: Choosing to Feel
Arriving in Sensation
Anytime we want to interrupt the trajectory of our growing, our aging, the evolving of our structure, we can make a choice to pay attention to what is going on inside our feeling experience. This will mean becoming less occupied with thoughts, and more interested in sensations.
As we start this process, we might first notice feeling the resonance of what preceded, what we just did, what it took for us to make the choice to investigate ourselves and possibly revise our habits.
Arriving in a respectful and innocent awareness of the movement sensations in the body brings us into direct contact with the living present.
Arriving is a conscious body-mind activity that happens over and over. Each new experience is the perfect moment to start fresh. Beginning again and again to pay fresh attention to the inner experience deepens the practice of acceptance.
We can learn to come home to ourselves…
And we benefit by pausing to savor the moment of re-connection… honoring the body we live in as the home for and embodiment of our personal life force
Developing a Practice of Inner Movement Dialogue.
A practice of movement inquiry can start from wherever we are, from the sensations we have become aware of, from the movement that is already happening.
From this starting place, we ask, “What movement does my body want, right now?” …And then become the observer of our own movement in the same delighted way a parent watches a child at play.
Moving the way we feel brings us into authentic contact with our inner desires, desires that are organic to our soft animal bodies, but that we may have been masking from ourselves in order to meet the needs of work, relationships, or life situations.
Dialoging with our inner movement gives us choice, empowering us to live and respond in more and more authentic ways.
We can learn to exercise our uniquely human capacity to observe and consciously explore the tiniest details of our movement experience.
We can ask ourselves about positive qualities of movement and experience, try them on, and listen to the subtle ways our body responds to those inner questions.
We learn to watch with delight how creative the body is…how many new ways it can discover to fit any situation…how resourceful it is.
We learn to trust our body; trust it to take care of itself, trust it to be available and supportive for what we might want to accomplish in the world.
Staying in inquiry
Inwardly directed questions, rather than demands, guide and animate the process.
And by not jumping to conclusions, not resolving movement conundrums too quickly, we become instead, richly satisfied with the joys of exploration itself.
Sustaining curiosity and exploration, especially later in life, fills our life with positive experiences we can own and identify with.
Eventually, new and more pleasurable feeling experiences, and the open-ended, un-fixed behaviors they give rise to, can become so dominant that we are no longer run by the less functional and uncomfortable patterns that have held us in ruts of behavior or expression.
Repeating over and over that which feels easy to us teaches us, for example, the broad and subtle language of ease, and lets us both fine tune and integrate ease into an expanding sense of self.
We are re-imagining and re-learning our vast capacity to innovate new solutions to movement concerns and not be stuck with how we have always done things.
Steeping ourselves in movement inquiry also floods our body with pleasure chemicals, stimulates the pleasure centers in the brain, and keeps brain cells growing new neural connections.
A growing and malleable nervous system is the opposite of an aging nervous system.
Part 3: “Improving Movement Quality” will be published in the April 2021 issue of Trager Talk