Photo Frank Höfer ©

One always needs to seduce people into trying to do a little bit of research of their own practice

Rose Eisenberg-Wieder, Asociacion Mexicana del Método Feldenkrais

My professional background is being a doctor and I also did a masters degree and PHD in Science Education. I came to Feldenkrais in Paris when I lived there with my family; we went to France for my husband’s job.

When I was only 14 years old I began to have very bad back problems. I had to wear corsets and special shoes, take lots of pills, it was terrible. But it was my life. Once I broke down – just having my normal check up at a gynaecologist in Paris – and she asked me: “Why don’t you do Feldenkrais?” Well, I began to take lessons each week from 1981 till 1985 when we returned to Mexico.

Although I had studied medicine myself I had no idea about myself anatomically or physiologically. Janine Mars, my first teacher for 4 years, took me also to Myriam Pfeffer’s workshops, and when we went back in 1985 to Mexico I started a small group.

There was a wife of one of my husband’s colleagues; she was a chemist and couldn’t turn her head to the left. She told me that she had gone to many doctors and also a psychiatrist, without results. So telling her my case she just asked me to work with her. Most of the lessons we worked with the eyes and to our own surprise one day her head turned to the left again. She was followed by many others, who had heard about me. Also she became a student for the first Mexican Training in Feldenkrais method.

Finally I found Marilupe Campero, a physiotherapist by profession – and she had gone to the first Feldenkrais Training in the United States. She did a Feldenkrais workshop in Mexico City. She lives in Colima, nine hours by car from Mexico. I was very happy to find a colleague, and I went to almost all her workshops;most of the time Stephen Rosenholz taught us. Finally Marilupe Campero with very much patience and great dedication organized the first Feldenkrais Training in Mexico. It started in 1998 in Colima under the guidance of Stephen Rosenholtz, who speaks also Spanish.

I continued practising as a professional doctor, nowadays with Feldenkrais, working a lot with people with Parkinson, Multiple Sclerosis and all those kinds of chronic illnesses, but also just people from University, which is still my main place of work. My work there is doing research on health and environmental education. With my medical students I do sometimes little ATM sequences, five, ten minutes, not more. But they are curious and happy to do it. I practice Feldenkrais, but I also research it. I recently wrote an article about my research into the phychocorporal recuperation of academics. They are always in their heads and they have a lot of problems with stress (editor’s note: see also IFF Research Journal II).

Our Guild in Mexico is very small and very young. It was set up in 2002 during the last month of the training. At the beginning we were around 25 people. There was also good colleagues that came to learn from Canada or France or Switzerland. Our training is cheaper than many others – but on finishing the training the foreign students leave the guild and at present we have only 14 members.

Right now the second training is going on in Mexico, mostly taught in Spanish with translators for the English and French speaking teachers. The first training in Mexico was around 40 participants, the second is around 35, but, as I said, many are coming from abroad. The trainings take place at the university in Colima a State of Mexico as part of the medical career organisation. The organisers have to hand in the whole program and I helped to put it in a way that it is acceptable for the curriculum of the university. Part of the training is for instance dynamic anatomy, physiology – not so much psychology or sociology, that’s still lacking; but sometimes there are talks and Yvan Joly really puts the work quite beautifully into the sociological and psychological frame. The students don’t have to have a medical background; we have colleagues that were artists – dancers, sculptors – psychologists, therapists, doctors, pharmacists, engineers. All of them have a profession. In Mexico you have to have a profession before you actually enter to a Feldenkrais-Training.

The biggest challenge right now for your guild? It is myself, I think (laughs). I’m on the board as research committee and it is difficult to convince people of the importance of doing research… One always needs to seduce people into trying to do a little bit of research of their own practice, which would mean to write about it. In the IFF I found the PRISMA workshop invited by Barbara Pieper. I met Barbara in Seattle Congress where Barbara Pieper and Daniel Clenin were teaching. I felt wonderful in it. We have the same methodological approach (research action).

In the guild we need to seduce people into meeting once a month, to learn, how to work together. We have monthly meetings encouraged now by the President, but often we are only four or six of us. So you have to make it interesting that people actually come. Of course, there is also a financial problem, because the economy of the country is very critical at the moment and we cannot pay people to help in research at the guild. Personally I don’t have this problem because I have the university. There I tried – and succeeded – to interest more people, but I have to pay myself the assistants I have. Two colleagues from the University that took Feldenkrais lessons loved it, and they are doing the training now. But it’s very expensive, really very expensive to go to the training. And not easy to get permission from university or your employer to leave for a whole month. Money is a big problem and the guild could only help me to a bit go to the Seattle-Conference last year (2004). Everything is now earmarked for translation. We are negotiating with the IFF to be allowed to translate some of the Yanai-Lessons into Spanish. We desperately need more educational materials in Spanish.

Our president Graco Posadas has done a great deal of work in order to get a proposal together to get permission from the IFF to translate the Alexander Yanai lessons into Spanish. Two lessons have just been translated, 25 lessons are planned, it will take us 11 years, two per year, we are going little by little. Marilupe is supervising the translation and we are also working with our Argentinan colleagues; their Spanish is different again and we have to be very precise and take great care with the translation. Also, we will put a glossary at the end to incorporate the differences. You know the distance between Argentina and Mexico is huge; it is twelve hours by plane! And for our Argentinan colleagues it is all even worse in financial terms. We are also translating “The Case of Nora” into Spanish.

The importance of the international community for us is, I think, paramount. We can’t really exist without communication, without having these relationships, going to meetings like this or congresses. Yes, we can read the lessons or talk to colleagues in our own meetings, but I think, we need also to see the diversity of the ways of thinking. And for any kind of research we need the widest possible exchange of data and experience. It is only here that we meet others who also do research in Feldenkrais.

I bring home a lot from these meetings, for all of us. I brought all the journals, I started translating materials, I shot pictures to show them all. Not many would go. One reason is the lack of money, but also the fear of not speaking English well enough. One day they will have to experience it in order to value it. The assembly here in Berlin is a different way of living democracy. Really, it is!

Copyright Rose Eisenberg-Wieder and Uta Ruge

First published in Feldenkraisforum, volume 55, 2006