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 last few months, Trager Talk featured the script for each part of the series. This month we are closing with Part 4: Playing in Gravity. 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 4: Playing in Gravity
Grounding our sensory experience by releasing the inner sense of weight into the floor, we learn to channel excess tension and find our way to stillness and rest.
We renew our trusting relationship with the earth.
Resting on the ground, we cannot fall. Our inner sense of security returns and anxiety dissolves.
Settling brings relief from the common stresses of everyday life, allows the mind to clear, and allows the body to recover renewed vitality.
Regaining deep connection with the ground, we regain the sense of intricate connection with all life.
Releasing held tensions, repeatedly letting go of blocks in movement, our natural life energy can flow more freely, and we can experience and nurture the vitality waiting within.
No matter what movement we are doing, ordinary and functional in the everyday sense or extraordinary and set apart for its own purposes, gravity is always there as our faithful friend.
Letting go into gravity we can discover ways to rebound up out of the earth, to stimulate different support for our body from reflexive neuro-muscular responses.
Letting go, we enjoy the natural swings and bounces of weight, and reap the benefits of a buoyant joy as our movement finds its natural rhythms
Letting up on ourselves, we release self-inflicted pressure and coiled tensions
And discover that easy suspension in gravity facilitates all other movement, reduces muscle tension, and removes compression from weight bearing joints.
Tail sinking down balances the head floating up, bringing a natural graceful length to the spine, and effectiveness and beauty to our gestures.
This does not need to be effortful. It is the opposite of rigid. It is fluid and creative.
We can learn to reduce muscle effort, and discover ways to sustain inner length no matter what we are doing.
We learn to feel for an even and easy suspension in gravity – and then practice re-distributing the effort of whatever we do throughout our body so that no one place gets worn out from taking too much responsibility.
This even distribution of effort top to bottom, inside to outside, front to back, and right to left is the defining experience of ageless ease.