Naomi Doron (English)

Feldenkrais was really a genius. He was a professional physicist, but in many things which are part of the method, he was autodidact, he studied by himself. And he created the method according to his abilities in self study. He told us: “I will show you this and that, and until the next time you will study yourself different things and expand your mind. When you come back we will continue together”. If all people were so brilliant there would be no need of schools. Brilliancy is an interesting thing, and it is not a question of social or educative background. You are brilliant, or you’re not. I for example had a brilliant father. We were four children at home. He was a doctor and very, very intelligent in a lot of fields, for instance he spoke, read and wrote seven languages. But we went only to elementary school because after that, he thought, we can already study by ourselves. “Israel has to be build and we have to work; you can study by yourselves.” And we did. We went with the family to concerts, to theatreplays, to lectures, exhibitions, etc. My father was from Poland. We all argued with him. But he didn’t understand that I
also needed diplomas. I was already a mother when I went to university. And when I finally got my BA from university, he said: “Wonderful, now you have something for your CV. But are you are more clever than you were yesterday? You couldn’t read all these books without university?” You see, what I’m trying to say is, I’m not brilliant, but I know what brilliancy is. I taught physical education for 35 years and still taught at school, when I did the training. Now I’m retired. At some point I took ATM lessons with Chava and I told her, that I had written down Moshés lessons from Alexander Yanai and that I planned to start working at home, giving Feldenkrais lessons. But she convinced me that it is not enough to have these lessons, that I better learn the method, and I’m really grateful I listened to her. I finished the training in Tel Aviv with Chava in 1991.

It’s a shame what is happening in Israel. We are more than 700 practitioners in the country, but only 230 of them are members of the Israeli guild. Only 230! I think, it’s impossible. We are forever trying to explain, how much more we could do if all 700 were part of the guild…
The Israeli guild usually organises a lot of workshops. Last week a doctor was invited, who explained to us about Parkinson. We often invite specialists to give lectures about problems we come upon in our practice. For those workshops usually many people come. But those who are not members have to pay. It is a great pity that not all people are members. How much more could we do! I hope very much that we proceed with a licensing process and then everyone has to be a guild member, otherwise they won’t be licensed. There is a group now working on this proposal.

In my opinion we have too many trainings in Israel. Israel is a small country and there are always five to six trainings going on at the same time, all in Tel Aviv and Jerusalem, all very close to each other. Usually there are now 20 to 40 people at a training. What I find worrying is, that people finish a training and then they don’t feel competent enough to start working. They look for another training, and start another one from the beginning. Yochanan Rywerant is working at my place – also in Tel Aviv. He is 84 but still running a training and 40 day-work-shops, like advanced trainings. People come to him who have finished already a full training with somebody else, they come from all
different quarters. They graduated – and then they do the whole training with Yochanan again. I think it’s a failure of the trainings that people feel this to be necessary in order to be confident enough to teach the method…

I`ve been on the EuroTAB-Council, and am now here in Berlin as representative of our guild to the IFF; I am also a member of the International working Group on Training Policies. I’m working on this international level because I am concerned about the future of the Feldenkrais method. I believe it is a very important and very good method. I studied education. I had to do a lot of courses about the psychology of learning, about pedagogy and methodical questions. And I have a lot of experience from my work at school. I feel that many who graduated from a Feldenkrais training don’t know how to even start teaching. One problem is their language. Often they can’t give examples, they have no words to explain something, there is no imagination. One practitioner told me, that Feldenkrais lessons are very difficult and that she can use only a part of the lessons with her students. Another one reads the lessons to her students. Some of my clients are telling me sometimes, that friends of theirs are leaving Feldenkrais classes because it’s boring. When I hear this gossip I’m afraid of what’s going on. I’m not sure if the international community can help to remedy the situation, because there is also a lot of economic interest at stake. My feeling is, that trainers are very stubbornly holding on to the way of teaching they are used to. Maybe they are afraid of encouraging their students to also learn with other teachers and go and study about, say psychology or physiology, because it would take from them some power, and also part of their business. But for me it is a fact that we need to know much more. What might be helping in this could be a licensing process which would have to be implemented internationally. I believe it will come. It’s impossible to keep on working without standards of quality and competence. So it is a sense of responsibility to the method that brings me here.

Copyright Naomi Doron and Uta Ruge
First published in Feldenkraisforum, volume 53, 2006