By Trager ® Instructor, Roger Tolle
On Monday, August 10, Aleen Seidel and I attended our first meeting with ISMETA, the International Somatic Movement Educators and Therapists Association. Through Zoom, we shared a lively and welcoming conversation with leaders of the rest of ISMETA’s Affiliated Professional Organizations.
The USTA recently joined ISMETA to become an active participate in growing the profession of Somatic Movement Education and Therapy in the US and around the world. It felt so good for me to sit at the table with representatives of the Alexander Technique, Feldenkrais Method, Body Mind Centering, and Continuum, and focus on this common goal.
As a new liaison for the USTA, I want to let you know how becoming an individual member of ISMETA might impact your opportunities as a Trager Practitioner. I also want to encourage you to apply for and use the designation as Registered Somatic Movement Educator or Therapist to further promote yourself and your work. And I want to share what I learned about this umbrella organization that is working for our collective recognition.
But first, I want to introduce you to my life-long friend and colleague, Frances Kimmel. She and I spent much of the 1980’s in NYC dancing, exploring and diving deeply into multiple overlapping systems of somatically based training programs. While I stayed in the City and built a full time Trager practice, Frances moved to Richmond in 1989 with certifications in Laban Movement Analysis, Body-Mind Centering, as well as Trager. In her new city where none of these titles were known she aligned herself with The Virginia Commonwealth University's Dance Department, where she taught a course called Body-Imagery. She also got a job teaching one Yoga class per day at a Chronic Pain Clinic.
She found that “Movement Therapist” was more understandable to the general population than “Trager Practitioner” or any of her other specialties. It seemed to give her more credibility, and also the confidence to build a better paying part time job at the pain clinic as their Movement Therapist and Yoga teacher. They soon had her giving individual sessions in Trager and Cranio-Sacral Therapy, in addition to integrating Trager Principles into Yoga classes. The Registered Movement Therapist title allowed her to be positioned more easily as a key player in this integrative clinical practice.
When I spoke with Frances this week to get her view of why ISMETA registration might be important for the rest of us Trager Practitioners, she told me that each individual membership strengthens the profession of Somatic Movement Education & Therapy as a whole. And with enough members, we’ll collectively earn ourselves our own professional title with the US Department of Labor, a professional title that represents what we really do. To encourage more USTA practitioner and student members to join ISMETA as well, the new partnership of the USTA with ISMETA allows individual members to get a discount on both organizations’ membership dues.
In Monday’s Zoom meeting of the Affiliated Professional Organizations, we all had the opportunity to hear each other’s missions, visions, successes and challenges. Most importantly we heard that we’re all invested in our collaborative efforts to grow the profession of Somatic Movement. ISMETA has recently re-positioned itself to support our organizations even more.
The USTA is being asked to think of ISMETA when envisioning future projects, to consider ways we might multiply the efforts and results of those projects by collaborating with ISMETA, and perhaps develop a stronger training program that would fit the requirements for ISMETA Approved Training Programs. (This might be easy if we start from the template of the already existing extended training requirements for ‘Senior Trager Practitioner’ status.)
The next Affiliated Professional Organization Meeting will be November 10, 2020 at 2:00 PM EDT. It would be great if the USTA could report a growing list of Trager Practitioners on ISMETA’s international directory of Registered Somatic Movement Educators and Therapists by then. The application for RSME or RSMT membership is available at www.ISMETA.org/join. If you need help or encouragement filling out the application, or if you would like more information about the USTA’s new relationship with ISMETA, please contact me at rogertolle@gmail.com, or Elisa Cotroneo, RSME/T, Executive Director, International Somatic Movement Education and Therapy Association, elisa@ismeta.org.