Introduction, by Uta Ruge

 Photo H.Mevenkamp ©

Uta Ruge: Questioning, We Move Forward

As long as I didn’t know the people involved – for instance those presented here – the IFF was just an abbreviation for me. Did it concern me? What did IFF stand for and what was it intended to achieve?

Nevertheless I felt curious about this international set-up when I returned to Berlin at the end of my Feldenkrais training after thirteen years in London. Scarcely had I been elected (in 2000) to the German Feldenkrais Guild’s executive than delegates were sought for the annual IFF assembly, so I made my interest known.

That’s how my love affair with the IFF got under way. It wasn’t only that I found here what I had to some extent missed in my training: such things as a striving for transparency and collegial work, open questioning and joint reflection. I also found a group of highly motivated colleagues from all over the world, devoting themselves to the Method’s constantly growing praxis. I discovered that the International Feldenkrais Federation is not some centrist organisation ‘up on high’ but rather a union of all the Feldenkrais bodies – Guilds, Associations, Training Accreditation Boards (TABs), and the Feldenkrais family – where people work together for the future. Two outstanding examples of that are the IFF Academy for Practitioners and the Competency Profile for application of the Method in professional work. Both are dedicated to improving the quality of our work and competency. Another emphasis involves safeguarding, archiving, editing, and translating the material left by Moshe Feldenkrais (such as the Alexander Yanai lessons).

I liked the interaction between theory and practice and felt inspired by the way in which we jointly endeavoured here to harmonise the Method’s high demands and grassroots’ strivings towards practical cooperation.

This entailed – and still does – ongoing shared enquiry, moving towards discovery of (approximations to) solutions to tasks both great and small.

However the problem was that whenever I talked enthusiastically about the IFF, I noticed that my colleagues quickly lost interest in our conversation. Time and again I heard people say they were ‘simply not interested in the politics’, and that they had enough to do with their own practice, etc. And time and again I thought and said: “Well, you simply must get to know the people who work here ...”

That is what led to the idea of interviewing as many delegates as possible and presenting their personal experience of the Method, how they operate today, and their involvement in a national Guild or the IFF – in the “Feldenkraisforum”, the magazine for members of the German Guild, whose editor I had by then become.

Most of the portraits here come from interviews I managed to do at the 2005 IFF Assembly in Berlin. The exception is the conversation with Barbara Pieper. I spoke to her in the context of the journal’s regular Work in Progress slot as a prelude to this Assembly. She’s a member of the IFF executive and we talked about this, so the conversation is very much part of this series.

I would like to thank all those who participated in these interviews, ready to give their precious time and to accept any necessary abridgement and adaptation – and also the Feldenkrais Verband Deutschland e.V.(German Feldenkrais Guild) for its generous support.

These portraits do not as yet amount to an organisational depiction of “the IFF”. Nevertheless the picture presented of the IFF is valid – at least if it is read as a snapshot of the professional spheres of activity in most member-countries. Even if next year individual representatives may have handed over to other colleagues, the basic working conditions within the various Guilds and Associations will probably remainthe same for some years to come. In my opinion, this picture of the IFF is also valid on another level. These diverse and rich potraits show that the IFF is upheld by the very same seriousness and curiosity, the greatdelight in investigation, action, and being, that fuels the lives of the human beings dedicated to this enterprise.

My wish is that reading these pages may bring to life the abbreviation IFF for many colleagues – andperhaps even help motivate them to play a part in this exciting and forward-looking venture known as theInternational Feldenkrais Federation.

Uta Ruge

Berlin/Germany April 2006

Copyright Uta Ruge