March 2004: Letter from the Out-going President

 A letter the from the IFF President, Cliff Smyth

March 2004

The International Feldenkrais Federation IFF has now been in existence since 1992. It has been a remarkable twelve years achievement, but despite this there are many practitioners who ask: "What is the IFF for?"

The IFF as an Idea

In 1994 the founding President of the IFF, François Combeau, wrote "A dream was to believe that because the IFF was created... by people and groups who really wanted to co-operate and collaborate in a positive way, we as a community, were a federate body and that numbers of ‘issues’ discussed for so long during meetings and conferences since Moshé’s death would naturally find solutions because we were together... Let us just dream of reality and in reality the IFF will become what it represents in our dream." (From: IFF Journal No 1, May, 1993)

In many ways the original idea of the IFF is still one of the most important: for the Representatives of your Guilds, representing the practitioners of the Feldenkrais Method from all over the world, to gather together to talk about the things they have in common. To support each other in the activities that support you in your practice of the Feldenkrais Method — promoting the Method, encouraging continuing education and research, encouraging the highest quality of practice of our common work. In recent Assemblies, for example, we’ve spent much time sharing information about the demands being put on our new professional field by governments and how Guilds can respond while protecting the integrity of the work.

At the beginning of the IFF in 1992 many people felt the Feldenkrais community internationally was in some danger of pulling itself apart. The ability of your representatives to come together to talk about their concerns, differences — and especially their visions — has meant that that concern has faded into the background. And we know we have the tools to deal with conflicts should they arise.

Membership

At its founding, the IFF created ways to bring together all the guilds of accredited practitioners and those practitioners trained by Mia Segal and Yochanon Rywerant — reducing a major source of conflict within the European and Israeli communities. In addition, we have welcomed new members — the Australian TAB, and Guilds from New Zealand, Argentina and Mexico. So the IFF continues to bring together and represent almost all practitioners who are members of guilds in the world — around 4,000 practitioners in 17 Guilds and Associations, along with the TABs and the Feldenkrais family.

Informing the public

Although informing the public is mainly the role of national guilds, the IFF maintains a public website at www. Feldenkrais-Method. org — which contains contact information for each of the guilds around the world, information about the Feldenkrais Method, a short biography of Moshe Feldenkrais, the IFF Standards of Practice and the IFF’s current list of research into the Feldenkrais Method.

Vision

Over time the IFF has developed an ‘Assembly culture’ that has supported, encouraged and even inspired participants in their work for the community. One of the key tools the IFF has brought to the fore in our community has been to engage and develop visions of where we would like to go with our work. The day-to-day demands on Guilds — recruiting, finances, legalities, newsletters, etc. — sometimes make it hard to focus on where we would like to be in future. The IFF Assemblies created a space to imagine where we might go and what would help us get there. This culture of drawing our visions to carry us forward has spread through many of our organisations. It draws on that passion we know practitioners have for the Feldenkrais Method and its benefits for humanity. This process of visioning has led us to focus on promoting the quality and ability of practitioners as the vital way to move forward.

Moshe’s Materials

One of the most important things the IFF has done to support practitioners in their work, is the publication of some of Moshe‘s core teaching materials — in particular the monumental project of translating 550 Awareness Through Movement Lessons that Moshe taught the public in Hebrew into English (which is the most widely spoken language in the community) and making them available. I am pleased to announce that Volume 11 of the Alexander Yanai lessons in English is now in print. Many practitioners have told us that their publication is the single most important event in contributing to the improvement of their teaching of the Method.

Translation of Alexander Yanai into German is already in process, and there are discussions about translations into other languages.

The publication of these and other materials was made possible because of the successful negotiations of the IFF with the estate of Dr Moshe Feldenkrais represented by his nephew, Michél Silice-Feldenkrais. He deserves our special thanks. In addition, the IFF negotiated with the former Feldenkrais Foundation to receive the Amherst training and FI videos. It was by no means certain that they would become the property of the Feldenkrais community — it is possible they may have ended up in a university library and beyond the reach of practitioners. The videos were re-mastered by the IFF and are now available to be purchased by guilds for their libraries. They are now used by hundreds of practitioners, individually and in study groups, and in trainings, for the study and the teaching of the Method.

Projects for the publication of transcripts of several years of the San Francisco and Amherst trainings are now getting back on track. We will see the publication of more of these materials soon. We have also published two series of videos by the late and well-loved Feldenkrais Trainer, Gaby Yaron.

To handle the publication and distribution of these materials, the IFF set up the self-supporting, self-financing IFF Distribution Center Inc. Your purchase of these materials goes toward the protection and production of these materials — none of your guild dues goes to producing these materials. The costs of these materials are kept as low as possible to reduce the cost to you, even though the management of the IFF materials projects has of necessity become more professionalised. What you pay for materials covers only the developmental costs and the essential administration of the business.

More information about purchasing educational materials to the IFF DC’s new, secure website at iffmaterials.com.

Moshe Feldenkrais Archive

Two years ago, Michél Silice-Feldenkrais representing the Feldenkrais family, made available to the IFF over 800 individual audio-visual and print items which had been stored in the Feldenkrais Institute in Tel Aviv for many years. In addition there are 1,700 photographs of Moshe doing Judo. The aim is to digitally copy all these materials to create a Moshe Feldenkrais Archive of materials. The materials include a large number of audio and videotapes — of lectures, workshops, classes and FIs — many of them never published. They are now in safe, climate-controlled storage paid for by the IFF. Already we have digitised some of the older tapes, as well as scanning over 40 newspaper articles about Moshe’s life in many languages. We have also digitised over 1,500 photos from the San Francisco training donated by Bob Knighton. There is an enormous amount of work to be done — and we will need to raise funds to continue the work. The good news is that we will also be able to publish many of these materials to continue to help you in your study and teaching. Already we have made available some materials in the German language to the German Guild for publication, and we are looking at what other materials the IFF can begin to make available to you. As we publish these materials, the IFF Distribution Center will pay royalties back to the Archive project to help preserve more of Moshe‘s heritage.

The IFF also makes materials available to people producing documentary television programs (a new one was recently completed in Israel) and to researchers into Moshe’s life (for example, the Moshe Feldenkrais biography currently being written by Mark Reese).

Quality and Competency

Emerging from the visions brought to the IFF by your Guild representatives, it became clear that the IFF could support ways to achieve higher-quality and greater competence in the practice of the Feldenkrais Method. A first approximation was the publication of the IFF Continuous Learning booklet — a collection of ideas for individual practitioners and study groups exploring the Method. If you do not have a copy, it will soon be available on the IFF Practitioner Website (http://www.feldenkrais-method.org/iff/static-practitioner.html). Since then, the idea of an IFF Academy has been developed as a way for practitioners around the world to explore ideas for working together in study groups, exploring approaches to supervision and quality development, to discuss research, etc.

The IFF Academy aims to support the development of the professional field of the Feldenkrais Method. The IFF's quality and competency projects carried out by the Academy will help practitioners to discover more about their practice for the successful application of the Method. Through networking, teamwork and ongoing evaluation of these IFF Academy activities, we hope to activate, enlarge and enrich the body of practitioners engaged in actively practising the Feldenkrais Method. This will help ensure its future. You can go to the IFF Academy website (www.feldenkrais-method.org/iff/academy) and see what has been developed so far. The information pages include background on the Academy idea, how you can form a local group, information on the IFF's competency development project and much more.

In its early years, the IFF produced four Journals (they will soon be available on the IFF Practitioner Website). Coming soon to the IFF Academy website will be the new IFF Research Journal (with articles in French, German and English). It is planned for this to be an ongoing project, where we will continue to publish new Journals on research into the Feldenkrais Method on-line. (If you’re not on-line ask a colleague, your local library or your guild to help to get copies of the articles of interest to you.)

The IFF‘s competency development project has now completed its pilot phase — with a very successful workshop in Stuttgart, Germany to test out and validate our research tools. With the agreement of the Assembly, the IFF will go ahead with this project. We hope, within two to three years, to have a good competency profile that members can use in their relationship with government and the public, as well as the tool for practitioners to reflect on their own practice, etc. This is a complex but important project that the members have expressed is beyond the resources of any individual Guild. We hope it will contribute much to the development of our professional field.

The IFF Academy is designed to grow organically in response to practitioner interest and need — a way of thinking and acting locally and globally to improve our work in the Method.

For Practitioners

The IFF Board decided a couple of years ago to end the IFF Newsletter. The Newsletter did not meet our communication needs anymore, as it was only in English and very slow to produce. The costs and benefits were too unbalanced. Therefore the IFF Information Bureau took over the communication, installing a future-oriented, Internet-based exchange of information flow. We will continue to work with your guild on improving this and other modes of communication.

As you can see, the fees you pay to the IFF via your Guild are being spent effectively. We know that many practitioners, especially when starting out, struggle to make a living from our work! The IFF‘s non-profit activities cost only 100,000 Euros per year — the equivalent of the income of two full-time practitioners living in a Western country. The IFF really has worked only through the tens of thousands of hours of volunteer time provided by your Representatives, members of the IFF Board, committees and working groups over the years. I am sure you will continue to support the IFF in its endeavours to support the practice of the Feldenkrais Method into the future. For a very young professional community, we have really achieved a lot — both in our guilds and internationally.

Fare well

Twelve years ago, I joined the IFF Board as a newly graduated practitioner living in Australia and more than a little bewildered by what I had got myself into! I now finish my six years as President with a great deal of hope for the future of the Method, the IFF and the professional community. Along the way I’ve worked with a group of extraordinary and extremely dedicated colleagues from the Guilds, the TABs and on the IFF Board — some who are no longer with us, such as the late Patrice Auquier. My special thanks go the members of the Board with whom I have had the privilege to serve; to François Combeau for his support though my term as President; and to my wife, Deborah Bowes, without whom it would have been impossible to commit myself to this task.

We saw that the IFF was possible. It was not always easy to have international co-operation in our community. Now sometimes it seems easy, or even elegant! Together and individually we have learned a lot. More than that, I sense the steadily growing maturity of our whole community and in our work in the Feldenkrais Method. At the end of the second year of the Amherst training Moshe concludes with the words, ‘God bless us’. I leave you with the spirit of his words.

All very best,

Cliff Smyth, Feldenkrais Practitioner.