Photo Frank Höfer ©

Are we a profession or are we a group of people with a hobby?

Jenni Evans, Australian Feldenkrais Guild Incorporated, IFF Board of Directors, secretary (from March 2005)

I trained in communications engineering at the time before computers and internet, so I learned about telephones and television. My work was mainly noise measurement and I enjoyed going to factories in different places to measure noise and to see how it affected people. But from there I moved more into facilitation and training and helping people to learn how to do things; and I studied Judo, when I was a teenager.

The first I heard about Feldenkrais was in my NLP training class. There was a practitioner who talked about how the Feldenkrais method was a way of learning and learning how to learn. And he talked about some of the ideas of what’s comfortable which was very different from what the rest of the world was saying at that time, which was that you can’t learn unless you go to some place that’s unfamiliar and uncomfortable. Some of these ideas of doing things in small amounts, reducing the effort, moving attention between the parts and the whole, made a lot of sense. My interest was already at the time to understand how do people learn and what is the difference between the people who work hard and get good results and the ones who also work hard but are not getting such good results.

This is what we could see at a university in Melbourne, at which I taught business and communication subjects. There were students, who seemed to be contributing in class doing the work but then getting very poor results in their exams. We were concerned about them and wondered, if we can pick up the difficulties quicker or if we can facilitate their learning in a different way that helps them to be more successful. As we helped the students, through interviews, to start paying attention to their own process, of course it began to change. They increased their awareness of how they were moving intellectually and they started to have more choices about how to do things differently. This also led in turn to teaching staff becoming interested, because they could see the changes in the students.

At the time my colleague and I went to some ATM classes and when we received information about a training to be held in Melbourne I picked up on it only a little later – in time for a make up entry program – because I suddenly remembered that many years ago I used to have the idea that there was something in my hands that I could use to connect with people and work to help them feel better in some way. So I thought “Well, maybe I’m going to be a Feldenkrais practitioner.”

Nowadays I’m working as a practitioner in Melbourne in a small but growing practice.
I’m at the stage where I do both, that is still working at university.There have been many changes in educational policy at university, and budgets didn’t support our work of the early 80s anymore. But now there seems to be a little more interest again in revisiting some of those ideas. So, I hope we will be able do some more research taking these ideas that we understand in the Feldenkrais world more into teaching things that have nothing to do with movement.

Our national guild currently has around 240 full members. In Australia we have seven different states or territories, and there are five divisional guilds, which operate independently with their own constitution. They are strongly linked to the Australian Guild, who provides some central services like collecting the fees, organising insurance, etc. I joined the Guild almost as soon as I joined the training. It seemed to me that being a student observer on the board was the easiest way to be connected with what’s happening in my community and to get to other people to be part of the community. About a year later the ‘job’ as newsletter editor came up and that seemed a wonderful opportunity for me to start to influence the community. So I became the editor. We were making five newsletters each year in our local division and we have also in Australia a national newsletter, which is published about three times a year; that takes in more the whole country and discussions that are more at that level. I did the editorial work for three years. And again, at about the time I let go the newsletter the opportunity opened up to representing our local guild at the national guild.

What is the biggest challenge for us in Australia? The issues to be discussed we brought to the Assembly here in Berlin were: making a living from the work, a decline in guild membership and finding volunteers to serve on boards and committees. I think they are all linked together and probably they fall into that area of discussing the professional field. Are we a profession or are we a group of people with a hobby? And we have people who have come from a background of physiotherapy, who are working strongly in the Feldenkrais method. We have a few people, who have come from other backgrounds, who’ve managed to build their classes and their lessons to a point that they can make a living from it. We have some recognition from health insurance funds, so some people can get repaid on what they pay. But for the majority of people it costs the full amount to come and see a practitioner. We also have a VAT kind of tax that has to be added to our services unless we are physiotherapists. So, again there are a number of small challenges that people perceive as difficulties. For me it is an issue also that practitioners, after finishing their training don’t feel confident to start a practice. They don’t have a background in running a business. They maybe do a little bit at first and then a little less. And then their confidence decreases and they go and get another advanced training and hope that will help. They get caught in “I’m not earning anything from the method. It costs me to keep my training. It costs me to belong to the guild. Maybe I don’t want to belong to the guild anymore.”

My sense in coming here to the IFF-Assembly is that we very much have something in common. It feels like a support, when we see all those different issues in some countries relating to the regulations and the government – some countries have the taxes and some don’t – but when we lie on the floor, we do the same thing. And we basically seem to have the same problems to describe the work to our customers… In a way it is reassuring to hear that all around the world the issues are very much the same.

Copyright Jenni Evans and Uta Ruge
First published in Feldenkraisforum, volume 54, 2006