Lena Brännström (English)

Photo Frank Höfer ©

There are only three books on Feldenkrais in swedish language, IFF 2006

Lena Brännström, Svenska Förbundet för Auktoriserade Feldenkrais®pedagoger, Schweden. 

After having left my job as a teacher, my first profession, I have for the last 20 years worked as a professional theatre director, freelance. I used to work with kids and adults on big amateur productions and small professional productions in Stockholm and Southern Sweden.

Although I was doing well I wanted something more. In Stockholm there is a drama institute where they have professional five-day-courses for directors and actors. I went to many different advanced courses for theatre there. I once applied for a course in the Feldenkrais method, and I remember writing that I had no idea what it was, but was very curious to get to know it and would like to know if this could change my way of living. After the first one and a half day of it I told the Feldenkrais practitioner, that I’m going to do the training starting later that year.

Because in one and a half day there was something happening with me… I have always been a bit of a fighter, but now I realised that here something very rare was on offer which might help me in different ways. So I started the training in Sigtuna 1995 without really knowing much about the method. I myself do many evening classes and weekend workshops. Although I live in Stockholm I go up north a lot, where I come from, and offer weekend workshops; I want to explore this more and help spreading the method to places where it is unknown. I’ve also joined up with a friend and we’d like to work with people directly in their offices about, the whole issue of sitting the whole day in chairs… etc.

I have gone back to teaching again and will also incorporate the Feldenkrais method more in my school. I teach Swedish in small groups to immigrant children from difficult backgrounds with heavy social problems. We are very much concerned with health in my school, do a lot of sports, educate about good, healthy eating etc… And in the autumn I will change the massage hour to Feldenkrais hour. I love working with children and I do some drama work with them… But altogether I’m now at a stage where I want to improve my Feldenkrais work, it is more interesting to me than theatre work.

I became active in our guild already during the training, because someone asked me if Iwanted to do it. Working in organisations and on boards wasn’t new to me. The third year of the training I joined the board and the last five years I have been president. Our Guild has 130 members, including students and was set up in 1988. We still have no office. I am the office, my private computer and flat. We have seven board members, two of them living very far away. And because travelling is costly and takes so much extra time we started  experimenting with computer meetings using a web-camera. That was kind of interesting. But we have to get used to it.

The most important challenges we are facing in Sweden? There are many… I think one of them is this gap in working possibilities between the Feldenkrais practitioners who have a medical education, like physiotherapists, and those with other backgrounds. About 80 to 90 percent of our members are physiotherapists and they are really doing a lot for spreading the method in Sweden. If you are not part of the medical system your clients have to pay about 90 percent more for an FI and not many are ready to do that.

To come back to the guild… We have now formed a working group in the guild to support those outside the medical system. One task is finding a way of getting rid of the VAT, which is 25 percent, and only those non medical practitioners have to pay it. But most important is to find new inroads in society for other ways of working with the Feldenkrais Method, not only in the health service. We have many ideas, working with golfers, horse riders etc...

It is now the fourth time that I’m representative of my guild at an IFF-Assembly. You get a lot of inspirations, a lot of new ideas here. Sometimes I just want my whole guild to be here and listen to the all the possibilities and all the discussions that are going on about Feldenkrais world wide. To be part of something bigger is particularly important for a medium sized or small guild; up north we live far away from the centres of discussion… If we were just by ourselves and not member of the international organisations it would limit the Feldenkrais profession in ‘Sweden. There have only been three trainings in Sweden. And the last one finished in 1999. After that there has been one training in Norway, which had a lot of Swedes in it. And now Beatriz Walterspiel is coming back and starting a new training in February 2006. We are very much looking forward to it and have actually formed a kind of working group for practitioners who are interested, perhaps becoming assistants in the future. There are no Swedish trainers and there is only one Assistant Trainer. But there are lots of very experienced Feldenkrais practitioners, who have worked for 15 years or so. It is important for us to have assistants in a training speaking our own language. It is not easy to have been trained in English or in German and then on coming home to have to explain the method or teach ATM or FI in your mother tongue.

Next year at our annual general meeting we will make a point of inviting more experienced Swedish practitioners to actually teach – before and after the actual assembly – workshops or just ATMs in Swedish, in order to actually once hear Feldenkrais taught in Swedish and also to give an opportunity to the more experienced practitioners to teach their colleagues. The language problem is actually quite severe. We cannot afford to do translations into Swedish of any materials. The Yanai-Lessons would be wonderful to have in Swedish – but how can you do it for 130 people? Most foreigners think, Swedes speak and understand English well enough, but that isn’t really the case… Most are struggling, and also, you have to be quite good to understand the books written by Moshé. There are three books about the method in Swedish, one written by Swedish Feldenkrais practitioners and two books by Moshé Feldenkrais translated into Swedish, “Awareness through Movement” and “A case called Nora”. That’s it, nothing else! If the international community could help us here, that would be wonderful.

Copyright Lena Brännström and Uta Ruge
First published in Feldenkraisforum, volume 51, 2005