About Academy Hands/Global Academy Themes

The IFF has been an incubator for a number of projects with the intention of developing practitioners and improving the professional field of the Feldenkrais Method. These projects have been considered by the IFF members to be of general significance to the Feldenkrais professional community. The projects are multi-year activities involving international teams of volunteer Practitioners. When the IFF Members realized that these projects had many qualities in common, they were brought together into the concept of the IFF Academy.

What Academy Hands/Global Academy Themes do

The IFF’s intention and task has been to develop and attract different kinds of approaches, concrete projects and activities to address these overall or global functional themes. By now the IFF Academy has identified four areas of general significance: “Competency”, “Research” including the “IFF Academy Research Journal”, “Educational Materials Review” and “Supervision”.

About the Labels

The labels refer to the IFF Academy’s concept: “Hands”: these projects are like hands indicating the projects’ reaching out and acting into the world; intending and showing the enhancement of the quality of the Practitioners in their Professional Field and its environment. Hands, too, are connected to the whole of the body, in this case, the IFF Academy, and thus the other parts, as well.
“Global… Themes”: For some practitioner, the direct metaphor to hands may have slightly different connotations. Thus, the alternate, “Global Academy Themes” indicate that the themes are global in nature, circling the globe; of a sufficient global content to be potentially of interest to each practitioner.

About the interrelationship between the Hands

One function of the Hands/Global Themes is relating to each other, to other parts of the Academy and the world.

Connection with the Local Academy Feet/Local Academy Teams

Outcomes of the Academy Hands’/Global Academy Themes’ projects enrich the Academy members’ work done on the local level by presenting workshops or providing workshop designs to Local Academy Feet/Local Academy Teams. Further, there might also be outcome on a Meta level through description and reflection including developing a language on the Method; or acknowledgment in the public by scientific exchange; or political acceptance through a better picture given about the method and its applications.

In common understanding hands belong to the same unit or system as feet; and the global implies to the local. Analogous to the Academy: Academy Hands/Global Academy Themes and Local Academy Feet/Teams can be regarded as two interrelated levels which are only different in functioning.

In the long term Feldenkrais Practitioners working within the IFF Academy’s Hands’/Global Academy Themes’ and Local Academy Feet/Teams will create together a tapestry that grows and shows the enhancement of the quality of the practitioners in the world.