photo by Frank Hoefer
To Travel 4 or 5 hours for an FI
Aase Kvalvaag, Norsk Forbund for Autoriserte Feldenkrais Pedagoger
As an occupational therapist I am working in occupational health and I’ve been doing that for many years. Also I like teaching people in how to move. My experience was that when I told people how to sit f.i., they would say, “I know I’m not supposed to sit like that. But it is my habit.” I was wondering if there is a way of working with these habits. When I talked to somebody about this she said, “Have you ever heard about the Feldenkrais method?” I had not. So I went down with her to Oslo the following week and took part. I immediately thought: “This is what I’m looking for.” So I went to Italy for my training, which was almost the nearest place for me, because in Norway the first training ever will end this year (2005).
I have now incorporated Feldenkrais in my work as an occupational therapist offering ATM’s to people working in factories. We, that is a private company, a team of doctors, nurses and occupational therapists, set up by the businesses in our area and employed by them. We serve about 80 different businesses of different sizes. Some are building boats, others are working as cleaners or in offices in the oil business in Kristiansund, south of Trondheim on the Westcoast.
The membership of our guild consists of 53 people. That is not too bad when you think that there has never been a training in Norway. Since the guild is so small almost twenty percent of our members must take on volunteer work in the guild for it to function, sitting on the board etc. So it happened that our last IFF representative asked me, if I would consider to go to the IFF assembly this year… I feel very welcome here at the assembly. But to start with I was really nervous because I thought it’s difficult to understand what the IFF is, what the goals are, how does it work, what is expected from me… And because I’m not on the board of my guild and have never involved myself much with guild matters I was worried: “Will I manage to express what the Norwegian guild’s opinion is on all these issues? Do I even know it?” I don’t have any practitioners living around me and feel actually quite isolated as a practitioner in Norway. I’m in the position that I cannot go to a class or take FI’s without travelling at least four or five hours…
This is basically the biggest challenge our guild faces: That apart from the ones living in the biggest cities we live so far from each other and find it difficult to actually live as a community. To meet each other is expensive, it always means high travel costs. All this makes it extremely difficult for many people to take an active part in the guild.
It is also quite difficult for us to actually establish Feldenkrais as a profession in Norway because many physiotherapists, who do Feldenkrais, can’t say that they are actually doing Feldenkrais because then they would loose the state money which partly pays the costs for physio treatments. Those who are not physiotherapists might say, “I’m doing Feldenkrais”, but actually quite few people knows, what it is – and on top of it the clients would have to pay without any reimbursement from a third party. We are not even discussing this much amongst ourselves. I think that in Norway quite a few Feldenkrais practitioners are physiotherapists and that they are the strongest group. The nearest trainings have been in Sweden and most students there are physiotherapists. When I was in Italy there were nearly no physiotherapists at the training.
To be honest, before I came here I haven’t thought much about why it may be important to have an international culture of Feldenkrais. I always think one of the exciting things about being a Feldenkrais practitioner is that it is such a small community in the world. And because we are so few in Norway we are not strong enough to do much, so we kind of depend on what is going on elsewhere.
The challenge for me now is, after the assembly in Berlin, bringing this home, not only the feeling of it, but also practical knowledge about what it is the IFF does and that this organisation really is for the good of each and every practitioner. I got a feeling of this here, – like being part of a net work. One example to convince people will clearly be the educational material and the archive. If we don’t all help with this, the securing of the materials and the archive, it might just fade and be lost. So I feel that this is a really important work that is done here.
Copyright Ann Aase Kvalvaag and Uta Ruge
First published in Feldenkraisforum, volume 53, 2006
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