Photo Frank Höfer ©
How can a group of people actually apply the Feldenkrais method to themselves as a group of people?
Rupert Watson, NZFG, New Zealand Feldenkrais Guild
I started off as a teacher, and worked at various levels, including special needs. I also travelled quite a bit in my 20's. I lived in London for a few years and met a lot of Africans doing the same thing as lots of New Zealanders and Australians do: They go abroad and experience. My special interest was on international issues and cultural movements, and this concentrated around the Africa Centre in London. Back in New Zealand I worked for seven years on New Zealand's international relationships, especially Africa and ran a small education centre for a few years in New Zealand with a close relationship with the centre in London. I was closely involved in Southern African liberation questions – this was still Apartheid times –, but also helped set up cultural exchanges from other parts of Africa too. I was close to our Prime Minister, the late David Lange, at that time, and since we had a lot of diplomatic crisis with our relationship with African countries in the 1980’s, I got myself involved on a government level in trying to mediate. That was very interesting thing.
After some time looking after small kids at home I started working for a local city council in Wellington. I came back to my backyard, to my area, newspapers, media, for the city council and for the mayor’s office, writing speeches and things like that. I had injuries from running and my daughter had an accident and was troubled with pain. So I was getting more into health issues and started going into a massage course. This opened that world to me and I wondered: what’s this and what’s that, what’s a chiropractic? What’s this? You lie on the floor? I was reading things and just getting interested. And I loved the Feldenkrais stuff. I got more out of it than of any of the other things. I thought it was incredible – a very formidable way of helping people to really improve their lives. I thought I would just do massage and go to Feldenkrais for myself. But then in 1999 I jumped into doing the training; with that a mid-life career shift was done and I dived into being a practitioner. I take several classes a week. They are all quite small but I get a very good sense that I and the other new practitioners in New Zealand are building a good base for continuing growth of our work.
Practitioners from my training often work together, even doing workshops or a regular class. And slowly, slowly, slowly I’m beginning to do more FI’s. I just gently build up the Feldenkrais studio, do massage and take writing jobs like writing speeches. It’s freelance work. But the core part of my week is when I’ve got my classes.
The New Zealand guild is very small and new, set up in 1995. We have about 35 members of which only three or four have been practising the Feldenkrais method as their main income. When I realised that it was quite a shock for me, but I think the penny dropped about halfway through my training. In Wellington we have one extremely successful practitioner. She is German, Elke Dunlop. She is organising the next training which is going to start in New Zealand in 2007 with Petra Koch. There have been two trainings in New Zealand as yet, one training in the early 90s. About eight of that first training group did an enormous amount of work to get the guild started and they did the groundwork for a small but effective professional type of organisation. But they burned themselves out somewhat and finally handed it over to students from the next training… some of us were to put our hands up to just help keep the guild going. Since then I’ve been working on the board, for three or four years now. After I became president we did some strategic planning, looking at our resources and what we could do and what we couldn’t do. One of our members is in strategic planning and she led us through some workshops. The question was, how can a group of people actually apply the Feldenkrais method to themselves as a group of people?
Of course we don’t have an office or staff but we have a monthly phone meeting between us. We have got huge things we need to do but we want to make it really easy and comfortable to be part of the guild. So we do a lot of work on this strategic planning, the areas we want to go into and we don’t expect to do it all over night. But various people got skills and we just encourage them. There is one person who worked in the area of public relations and she is looking after a huge update of our website.
Most of our members still have their ordinary jobs. They are trying to do classes one or two days a week, and they need personal support, motivation. I do a lot of that. And the last six months I’ve done a bit of travelling, visiting the practitioners. We are really strong on the thing about community.
We’ve also hammered out continued education requirements, revised a lot of things. We just renewed service marks and we are quite strict with our licensing. We have strong links with Australia and the Australian training board, which means we’re making financial commitments to the IFF and to AusTAB at the same time. Some people grumble or they say, “Oh look, we should work with only AusTAB, as it is close”. And it is true, our links around the Pacific area are important. We’re trying to develop more Australian links, getting more Australian training people over. There are a couple of Australian assistants who we invite. But we also try to work out something which keeps us linked to the international community as a whole. I think it is important for the guild and our members to feel they’re valued by the international community and to see that the situation here is very similar to what other guilds are facing. Basically it is the question of how we can get the message about the method across or how can we present ourselves, given that there are so many wacky models around, including some pretty interesting ones, all claiming to be the promised land.
At my first assembly in Soesterberg (2003, for financial reasons we are taking part only every second year) I was still very anxious about being such a recent practitioner. But then I saw there is no need to worry and was very impressed by the whole thing: the lack of bureaucracy, the lack of hierarchy, acknowledgement of people who do fantastic work on a volunteer level. So I went back to New Zealand and said very positive things about the IFF, which was a new thing, because the president before me was not so positive.
Meanwhile we’ve had IFF-Academy-workshops in New Zealand which Janie Randerson organised. I went to one she did in Wellington last year (2004). It was a very nice experience moving from one perspective to another. It was a beautiful, peaceful day and I had a sense of real engagement with everyone. The idea of the IFF academy, this encouragement of a co-operative learning culture, came to life also for the others. Afterwards everybody was a little bit more aware that the IFF is more than a one year meeting – that it is about improving the quality of our actual work, ourselves supporting ourselves professionally and encouraging participation at all levels.
Copyright Rupert Watson and Uta Ruge
First published in Feldenkraisforum, volume 54, 2006
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