President’s address to open the 2011 iff assembly: Making the impossible Possible

President’s address to open the 2011 IFF Assembly: Making the impossible Possible

The end of the world is near! Or so say some people.

In the past year we have seen devastating floods in China, Bangladesh, Australia and North America. The have been massive earthquakes in New Zealand and Japan along with the Tsunami and the nuclear contamination. As recently as this week, tornados in America have wreaked their havoc, and now, Grimsvötn is threatening to close the sky. If these are the signs of the end times then we could ask ourselves the question “Can I make any difference?”

Maybe it’s just the natural patterns of nature reminding us of our place in the grand order of things and maybe we’re simply facing the end of the world of the Feldenkrais Method.

Recently I was approached by a trainer who wanted to express concern that we as a community are living at a critical time for the method. This trainer pointed out that in the last 10 years the number of trainers has only increased by 16 a total of 60. Of these several are no longer actively training or willing to travel. Many are approaching retiring age. This trainer was concerned that there are several very skilled Assistant trainers with 20 years or more of practice and many years of teaching in trainings, who have given up on the process of becoming trainers because it is just too hard. They will retire before they have the chance to become a trainer. While the first trainers had only 6 years of practice, now it takes at least 20.

In the last 5 years the number of members of our member organisations has only increased throughout the world by less than 12% to 4750. In almost half the Guilds the number has fallen.

We have no new members to the IFF for many years. The number of practitioners in central Europe, Asia, India and Africa can be counted on fingers. It seems increasingly impossible to find enough volunteers to do the tasks we want to do.

The percentage of practitioners making a fulltime living from the work is very small and the typical profile of a Feldenkrais practitioner is of a middle aged white woman who has an alternative source of income.

Our members constantly complain that nobody has heard of Feldenkrais.

The world is learning about brain plasticity and hearing from many other modalities about how they are working with this.

As a community we still disagree about whether we should sit with the medical model or the education faculty, or how we should describe what we do.

We have member Associations who have been desperate to have recognised trainings in their countries but cannot afford the current model and no-one is willing to encourage these Associations to try a different one. We have students who come to the end of the training who have no guidelines to know whether they have reached an appropriate level of skill or not. A competent student can find that she will not graduate because she has attended one day less than another who is less competent.

Our source materials are still only available in one or two languages.

Our professional Associations have now been in existence for some decades now, but many have not understood that they have not only the right, but the responsibility to make decisions about the way the Method is practised and how practitioners are educated in their country.

We have been discussing alternate models of decision making, accreditation and co-operation for many years but we seem stuck in a system that is not achieving the movement we desire.

How can this be when we have a model of thinking and working that is based on the idea that improvement is always possible, and when something seems impossible to explore another and another way to get there.

Now in our lifetime we have seen some amazing examples of where doing what we always did, does not work anymore. So for example the Swiss had about 80% of the world’s market of clocks and watches, some of us are old enough to remember Swiss watches. Amazingly enough it was a Swiss gentleman who discovered the quartz movement and thought it was an interesting toy and they gave it to the Japanese because they thought they knew how to make clocks and watches. They had been the experts for a long time.

IBM used to make typewriters and some of you may have seen the photo that has been around on the email of the President of IBM predicting that there would probably be at the most, a need for 4 or 5 computers in the world - that the home computer would never take off. They nearly went out of business.

Kodak though they were in the business of making film and they tried very hard to sell us film and they put off staff and kept trying to sell us film. How many people still use film?

So if we get caught into saying: Well we are Feldenkrais Guilds, Associations and TABs and we are going to continue to run the Feldenkrais world the way we always did, this is not consistent with the Method we are practicing. The method we are practicing is to listen to people. Sometimes it means listening with our mouth shut to hear what it is that they want; what it is that they need and then working with them to find a new, unique solution.

And so the Swiss managed to reinvent themselves and come up with the Swatch and so they are still there although not to the same degree that they used to be, but at least they are back in the market place because they listened to what people want. IBM kind of more or less caught up, but it looks like they are on the brink of slipping away again. Kodak has listened and discovered that people still want photos, digital cameras are great but people like to have pieces of paper to put in their albums and show their friends and so they’re starting to rethink what it is to be in the image business.

In this Assembly we will name our “impossible issues”. We will invite a facilitator to share with us a process for beginning to find movement in these impossible things.

The IFF does not make decisions for Member organisations to tell them what they must do. Neither can any other group.

What we will provide in the coming days is a safe space and process to explore ideas and options, to ask questions and play with “what if….?” scenarios. We have worked hard over the years to build an atmosphere of trust and goodwill so that this can be possible.

It is then the responsibility of each representative to take this experience back to his or her Association so that they can make their own decision about how they wish to work in their own countries.

So, now you might ask the question “How can I make a difference?”

Welcome to the 2011 Assembly.

Jenni Evans

May 26^th 2011