Letter from the President

Concretizing Our Visions: There Is No Limit To Improvement
Following are IFF President Cliff Smyth's opening remarks made at the May 2000 IFF Assembly.

Now I want to talk about change. Sometimes I hate change. I know it is not fashionable to say this in the Feldenkrais world. When I say I like change, I really mean incremental change; change that I can control. Really deep change can be painful, slow and challenging. It is a thief of identity. It takes a lot of time.

For a while now, in the IFF Newsletters I have been saying that the Feldenkrais community is changing. A lot of the change that is happening is through the actions of individuals, and the consequences of their actions.

I think that there is a deep desire, that as a community, we have as much say as we can about the direction of our profession. It is important that we are not having to constantly react and make little corrections to the system. Moshe's words echo this: When you give someone a correction the person needs to keep making corrections for the rest of life.

Change can be good or bad. What I think we are looking for as a community is improvement, hence the title of this Assembly, a quote from Moshe: There is no limit to improvement.

With the Feldenkrais Method we have powerful tools for improvement. As a Board, we ask: How can we use the Feldenkrais Method, Feldenkrais ways, and Feldenkrais principles to guide our work? How can each of us achieve congruence in our work, our lives, our practices and our organisations.

Differentiation and integration

Differentiation and integration are apparent paradoxes, but we need both for a system to function well. Today we are meeting on a border. Borders are also a paradox. They are places where countries separate and meet. International organisations are places where countries have their own identity and sovereignty, but also where they meet to discuss, and depending on the model of internationalism, have common projects, create common treaties or conventions and even create bodies to do some functions for all members. We need to be clear about what kind of internationalism works for us.

Immigration is also a big question in many of our societies. It is important because the presence of minorities forces us to think differently.

What is our identity? It is not always a question of right or wrong, but how we differentiate and how we integrate. The IFF was formed in 1992 out of a desire for unity, as an umbrella for those in the Feldenkrais world, an integrative role. We are still working out how to do this.

Deep listening

In the Feldenkrais Method we really listen with our ears, eyes, hands and hearts to our students and clients. This is one of the things I hear from practitioners and Guilds about the IFF, that the IFF is a place in the Feldenkrais community where people feel listened to and heard. Lack of dialogue can lead to suspicion. There is a need to challenge our assumptions about "the other." Sometimes there is tendency in our community to "shoot the messenger" if we don't like what we are hearing.

By really listening and talking honestly, we give the system the information it needs to reorganise itself. The IFF was founded, as the Preamble to the Purposes states, out of a "desire for fruitful cooperation." Sometimes this has meant accommodation, compromise, and even contradiction. At the early Assemblies when we were working on the purposes and creating the IFF processes and structures, we were constantly asking each other, "Can you live with this?"

At this Assembly we will probably spend some time talking about ideas and concerns in the community; the issues that we have not discussed as a body in some time. I would hope that we can do this in the spirit in which the IFF was founded: respecting our common agreements and really listening to our common disagreements, remembering that each of us, just like our clients, represents a different body of personal experience, and the experience of the bodies and organisations we represent.

Constraints

Constraints lead to learning. Often in the Feldenkrais community, as in the wider world, the emphasis is on freedom from constraints. Being in a community provides constraints, but creates the possibilities for having the freedom to do many things. Often we can achieve more by working together.

Productive community

We need a productive community. This is not just an ideal, but requires:

• Hard work, discipline and commitment
• Clarity of purpose
• That issues are dealt with
• Dealing honestly with each other
• High standards of performance
• That leaders are the servants of the members.

In a productive community, as one gains, so another gains.

Quality

In the Feldenkrais community we use attention to quality as a tool to know better what we are doing and how we are doing it. One vision from the last Assembly saw a unified community with high standards. I believe this is the real challenge that could help us meet the incredible potential of the Feldenkrais Method in the world. Personally, I would like to see much higher standards in basic training in the Method and the practice of Feldenkrais.

Again, our discussions over the next few days, especially of competencies, standards of practice, supervision and continuous learning can take us further in this direction. And the idea of quality goes beyond this. The development of a quality culture, I believe, will affect the development of our work in a profound way. I believe that attention to quality is the key to altering the self-image of the practitioner and releasing the potential of the Feldenkrais Method.

Self-image of practitioners

This is already changing through our action in the world. We hear of successes. At the Assembly we hear new stories of how the Method is being used in clinics, universities, schools, etc. Many practitioners now have as much experience with the Feldenkrais Method as many of the Trainers did when they became Trainers. As we move further from our basic training, we have less dependence on that experience in our self-definition.

The IFF has been part of that improvement in self-image, by empowering practitioners to learn from each other, to think about competence by giving guilds tools to explore this vision. The work in the IFF on visions for the Method allows us to get in touch with our avowed and unavowed dreams, as practitioners and as a community. The vision of quality helps us to realize some of those dreams.