My first exposure to mind/body training was at a Rinzai Zen temple and martial arts dojo in the mountains outside of Honolulu, Hawaii. I was 19 years old and on a leave of absence from an elite private college after I began to question if my life’s purpose was really to be found in the intellectual identity I had constructed for myself.
The Zen and martial arts dojo in Hawaii was a world away from New England culturally and geographically, and I found an environment where brainy intellectualism didn’t go very far. My first Zen teacher instructed me, “If you want to find the meaning of life you won’t find it by thinking hard. I’ll give you a hint – look for it at the intersection of breath and posture.”
Over the next three years, I took that guidance to heart and applied myself to the daily rhythms of the temple training which involved minimal sleep, minimal privacy, lots of manual labor, lots of time sitting on a cushion, and swordsmanship practice late into the night. What I discovered is that when I allowed my “thinking self” to recede and directed my awareness, body, and breath to the present moment my way of being in myself and in the world changed – my senses opened up, my world became bigger, and I moved through it with more steadiness and presence.
Near the end of my three year residency, I had the opportunity to go through a series of deep-tissue bodywork based on the 10-session series of bodywork developed by Ida Rolf. In the third session as my bodyworker was working in the sensitive tissues around my ribs, I began to spontaneously shake and tremor in my legs and pelvis. Nothing like this had ever happened to me before, and I looked to the bodyworker in astonishment and asked what was going on. She was thoroughly nonplussed and simply said “let it happen – it’s some kind of release” and continued to do her work. This spontaneous tremoring experience was etched into my mind for the next 10 years as a uniquely strange and mysterious occurrence. I had no idea what had happened, but I knew it felt deeply important somehow.
A decade later, I had trained in and was practicing Structural Integration bodywork therapy myself and I began to see spontaneous tremoring happen in my clients as well. Sometimes there were big, dynamic releases as had happened with me, while other times I saw more subtle tremoring that the clients would often not feel until I pointed it out.
When a colleague introduced me to TRE in 2014, the mystery of this spontaneous shaking was finally solved for me. Reading Dr. Berceli’s books as well as those of Peter Levine and Bob Scaer, I finally learned what this spontaneous tremoring had been all about, and was thrilled that the neurobiology and therapeutic applications of it were beginning to be understood. I dove into TRE personal practice and professional training head first, and thus began a decade of personal and professional exploration of the ins and outs of what I finally had a name for – the neurogenic tremor mechanism as defined by Dr. Berceli.
I’d like to share some of what I have learned for myself and others as I have studied neurogenic tremoring in several different areas.
Zen Meditation
Because of my longtime connection to Zen practice, I have had the opportunity to introduce TRE to many Zen practitioners (as well as meditators from other traditions).
From a Zen Buddhist perspective, we look at meditation as a process of reclaiming one’s so-called Original Mind – the intuitive mind that operates prior to language and thought. In the process of long-term meditation practice the practitioner endeavors to move through and transcend layers of consciousness that are fixated on past experiences and the ego structure of the personality. I have found neurogenic tremoring to be uniquely effective in helping practitioners access and release these layers of fixation in the bodymind – seemingly bringing these past body memories into the foreground of consciousness where they can be effectively let go. I have found both for myself and with a number of advanced meditators that TRE practice often preceded major breakthroughs in our meditative journey and I attribute it to this ‘clearing’ aspect of tremoring.
TRE has also been a powerful way of working with beginning meditators to very efficiently bring them into embodied awareness. A barrier with many beginning meditators is they have been living exclusively from “the neck up” and have given very little attention to the sensations and qualities that arise from the body as a whole. Zen meditation is very much about dropping our awareness deeply into the body, and I have found that with beginners TRE can accelerate that process. During several years of working with TRE in 3-day beginning meditation seminars, I would ask participants to briefly describe how they felt after our first TRE session. The most common comments were “grounded,” “quiet,” and “like my thoughts have settled.” Another comment I kept hearing was “When I came in I felt like an individual in a shell. Now I feel a sense of connection or oneness with the group as a whole.” All of these qualities are deeply prized and cultivated in Zen meditation, so the fact that participants could so quickly move in this direction at the beginning of a 3-day retreat was remarkable and very conducive for the effectiveness of our program.
Athletic Training
As a Structural Integration bodyworker, I have had the privilege of working with many athletes along the spectrum from weekend warriors to professional athletes. What I have come to appreciate in the last decade is that the field of exercise science is rapidly evolving and athletes are becoming increasingly sophisticated and holistic in their approach to fitness. With the advent of biometric wearables in watches and rings, athletes are paying more attention than ever to how their body is responding to exercise using such metrics as VO2 max and Heart Rate Variability (HRV). The upside of this trend is that fitness trainers and athletes have become increasingly aware that programming and monitoring effective recovery is just as crucial for performance as programming effective exercise stimulus. This focus on recovery is allowing athletes to strike the right balance between productive exercise and over-training.
In pursuit of recovery, athletes have long embraced muscular recovery through things like foam rolling, vibration tools, and sports-specific massage. More recently, activities like ice baths and cryotherapy have become popular. In all of these recovery techniques there is a muscular and inflammation process component at work, but the science of the autonomic nervous system has helped athletes understand that promoting healthy parasympathetic response measured through HRV is critical for not stressing the body through over-training and becoming chronically sympathetic-dominant.
This is where a tool like TRE can play a vital role in athletic training. TRE has the two-fold benefit of both releasing excessive muscle tone in the myofascial system which can help prevent postural distortions and overuse injuries associated with athletic training, while also having a direct down-regulating influence on the sympathetic nervous system and an associated shift into healthy parasympathetic response. This is an incredibly efficient way for athletes to attend to both their muscular recovery as well as autonomic nervous system recovery.
I have introduced TRE to numerous athletes of all levels who began to incorporate TRE into their fitness and recovery programming. For many of these athletes, TRE quickly becomes their default approach to muscular and nervous system recovery. Many use it as part of both their warmup and cooldown process before and after training, and many also use it at night or on recovery days as well. What is reported back to me is improved HRV metrics, reduced muscular soreness (DOMS), improved sleep metrics, reduced rates of injury or recurrence of nagging musculoskeletal issues, and an increased capacity for workout volume and intensity without crossing over into over-training. In many ways, TRE is the full package for athletic recovery and it’s also free to do and doesn’t require any special equipment.
Feldenkrais Method
The most recent emphasis in my professional journey has been training and becoming certified in the Feldenkrais Method of Somatic Education. Developed by Israeli scientist and martial artist Moshe Feldenkrais, this is a system of somatic education that focuses on developing much more acute body awareness and using that awareness to refine and clarify effective neuromuscular patterning in the body. Its basic method involves evaluating a person’s performance in some functional activity – playing the piano, standing on stage as an actor, lifting something heavy as an athlete – and then breaking down the movement patterns into the slowest and most quiet expressions usually laying on the floor to reduce speed, effort, and reducing the overall muscle tone we use to support ourselves in gravity. This slow, quiet, sensitive approach builds detailed awareness of voluntary movement patterns at their most refined level. Sometimes, we even work only in imagination. The effect of this work is on sensory and motor learning, and Dr. Feldenkrais was a pioneer of intuiting the role of neuroplasticity in human learning at all ages.
Dr. Feldenkrais used the term functional integration to refer to the aim of his work, meaning the goal is to study function in any application and create a neuromuscular learning process to refine and integrate the activity in a more full-bodied way. Moshe Feldenkrais was a contemporary of Ida Rolf, who used the term structural integration to refer to the aim of her work (Rolfing/Structural Integration). Her view was that by mechanically improving the person’s skeletal relationship to gravity through deep hands-on fascial work could improve their overall function and effectiveness in all activity. Dr. Rolf and Dr. Feldenkrais deeply respected each others’ methods and considered the two approaches to be “two side of the same coin” in terms of promoting neuromuscular integration.
After my own study and application of Structural Integration, Functional Integration, and TRE I have been using a third term neurogenic integration to propose the idea that the neurogenic tremoring process from TRE represents yet another methodology to achieve neuromuscular-skeletal integration in terms of balance, function, and relationship to gravity.
The success of the Feldenkrais Method is very careful and sophisticated attention to the voluntary movement system, meaning that students of the method learn to sense and refine their voluntary movements in ways that promote health and functional effectiveness. But while students of the method become experts in voluntary movement, they do not become very familiar with the very wide and rich world of involuntary movements that get uncovered in TRE.
Just as long-term students of the Feldenkrais Method become increasingly adept and sensing and recruiting voluntary movement, long-term TRE practitioners learn that neurogenic tremor mechanism has the capacity of waking up and integrating all layers of the neuromuscular-skeletal system through an almost infinite variety of involuntary movement patterns that restore a person’s ability to sense and function from a place of true balance and responsiveness. This deepening and learning process that occurs over time with tremoring practice also has the result of integrating a person at the biomechanical level as well as at the level of optimal autonomic nervous system regulation. I believe we are still at the very beginning of discovering ways that neurogenic integration through tremoring can be applied in modern life.