Written by Jack Blackburn
Jack Blackburn-Report from Switzerland: Dear Ones, My partner Koito and I journeyed to Switzerland in early September and stayed for two weeks. Bill and Gabriella Scholl brought us there to teach some basic treatments to members of the Swiss Trager Association. The classes we taught were: Trager Clinical Methods-Decompression Somatics: Part 1 Low Back, Pelvis, Abdomen; Part 2 Head, Neck, Face, Jaw. The place we taught was Kiental which is in the Swiss Alps. The class was very unique because most of the 20 participants were quite experienced using clinical approaches in their Trager sessions.
Trager practitioners in the past have been discouraged from using the words treatment or clinical unless they had specific licensure in addition to their Trager certification. Because of their unique training background and acceptance of Trager as a treatment modality in Switzerland, we were able to introduce positional release techniques combined with client conscious proprioceptive awareness to the class. The class content was directed at specific difficulties in respective body parts (Examples: sciatica, TMJ and throat disorders, bunions and plantar fasciitis, eye strain, releases for low back pain and tight hip rotators).
Drawing client's proprioceptive awareness directly into contact with the practitioner's hands can create a two-way interaction. I have written about healings that derive from this form of shared awareness. It is still quite unique in the world of bodywork because it involves client conscious participation. Once clients feel the shifts towards pain release, relaxation, and freedom of movement that accrues, they become eager participants. Part of the transformation that both client and practitioner experience is a change in their relationship to pain. First is the realization that pain is a helpful signal, because it draws our attention to that body part and establishes a two-way meeting place. Second, because the sensations of pain are occurring now and that allows practitioner and client to join in presence and meet proprioceptively.
Third, that proprioceptive channel opens the possibility of engaging in mutual curiosity or shared hookup. Practitioner Questions like “What are you feeling here?” Client Responses like “I can feel the warmth of your hand.” Practitioner Responses like “I can feel some softening and warming right here under my thumb.” Client Responses like “I feel much less pain... it's almost as if the tissue is melting... I'm filling your hand with my breath and touch... the pain is gone!” Practitioner Questions like: “Can you feel these changes coming down your arm?” Client Responses like: “As you are bringing that movement into my shoulder, I feel freedom all the way up that side of my neck.” One thing that is possible with this kind of interaction is that both client and practitioner are affected! We also got to try out a new modality which we are calling Original Face Work. At one point the persons who had been on the table stood up and looked around the room… I was transfixed by how their inner faces reflected such beauty!
Our stay in Switzerland was made beautiful tours, magical by many persons and especially by Bill and Gabriella. They took us on sensational tours of old Zurich, boating the lake, Einstein’s coffee bar, Lenin’s apartment, cheese and chocolate outlets, exotic train rides, hiking excursions, and a Swiss beehive building with multiple colored entrances for different colonies. And the Alps were replete with dairy cows with bells which would start ringing early in the morning… and at one class break we went outside and yodeled to the Alps! Some of our best times were touring other parts of Switzerland with new-old friends.
