Feldenkrais Volunteers Needed for the TAB
ANNOUNCEMENT: Please Distribute Immediately.
The training and accreditation boards (TAB’s) of the “Wiggle Your Butt, Make A Buck” Guild-Certified Feldenkrais Trainer Monopoly are looking for volunteers. TAB volunteers play a very important part of maintaining trainer control of curriculum, teaching and the monetary rewards of running certified trainings. As a member of the TAB your service is crucial in helping to maintain this monopoly.
In particular you will:
1) Help limit the number of certified trainers. This helps keep the work from being “diluted” (by criteria we have not yet specified, but we can assure you that the criteria do exist.)
2) Keep the costs of trainings high: By virtue of #1 above which limits competition, new ideas, and the creation of competing trainers and training programs.
3) Use the Amherst training as the “end all be all” of Feldenkrais training. You will do this by having an extreme eye for detail and making sure that newly approved trainings have the exact number of hours, days and seconds that Moshe taught in Amherst.
*A TAB sub committee is currently counting the number of times that Moshe said “oi vay” during Amherst and will likely require future Guild Certified trainings to use “oi vay” the same number of times. We welcome your suggestions of how we can further imitate Moshe to preserve and protect his legacy and make sure that trainings will neither be diluted nor evolve in any meaningful way.
TAB Application Process
How to become a member of the feldenkrais training and accreditation board.
1) You must affirm that you believe in one holy and apostolic guild. In particular, attest publicly that:
“The TAB through edict of The Feldenkrais Guild of North America is the only flock of which Moshe Feldenkrais, the Son of Sheindel, is the only Shepherd.” (Feldenkrais Guild Book of Prayers, Pg. 666: “One Guild, One Method, One Guru”).
2) Submit a 10,000 word essay on why Anat Baniel (that bitch) is dangerous to everything that Moshe stood for and write a plan on how her success and independence can be avoided in future generations of Guild practitioners.
*Preferential treatment given to those who can show evidence that Anat was spawned by demons from the lowest depths of hell.
3) Create and submit a video on YouTube demonstrating your knowledge of the “Prayer for the Feldenkrais Guilds” (Sample YouTube video forthcoming), as well as your affirmation that you will say this prayer at 8:01 am, 10:02 am, 12:03 pm, 2:04 pm, 4:05 pm, 6:06 pm, 8:07 pm, 9:08 pm and 11:09 pm, seven days per week. You further acknowledge that failure to provide evidence of your prayer service and total devotion to the TAB may result in termination of your TAB privileges.
4) You must have never commented on Ryan Nagy’s blog nor said anything positive about him. And as absence of evidence is not evidence of absence you must write and 16,432 word essay on why technological savvy and the open sharing of information is inherently dangerous to Moshe’s legacy and the development of the work. Please explain what you will do to stop blasphemers like Ryan from doing their evil deeds.
5) Three letters of recommendations from people who knew Moshe personally, were blessed by him, can tell really cool stories about him – preferably involving Amherst, San Francisco, or Esalen, and who have been members of the FGNA or another guild for at least 250 years.
I am well aware that there are trainers who feel just as trapped and stifled by the system as do many practitioners. And yet they still submit, don’t they? Think not of what Moshe did at Amherst or San Francisco but what got him there. In his actions, you will find the genesis of your method.
Hi Ryan -
As usual, lots of interesting and provocative things in your post. Many of which are indeed significant questions worth looking at.
I’m someone who thinks we need to, and can, always look at how we manage ourselves so that we ensure we have a useful, relevant, valued, and effective professional organization and structure. And what I keep on asking these days around stuff like what you have raised is: are the constraints that we have created (i.e. the structures we have created and imposed upon how we do things) necessary to keep as they are? Or, like in ATM and FI, could we consider them more as constraints we have placed upon our organization (temporarily) so that we could go explore and discover a clearer base of support and more effective way to function?
In the Continuing Education discussion forum on Yahoo, Jeff Haller wrote the following:
“In 2000, during the Baniel lawsuit in which we got hammered on the point that we
could not prove the efficacy of our trainings based on hours of attendance, it
was decided we had to look at training from the point of view of the competence
of the beginning practitioner. Carl Ginsberg, Beatriz Walterspiel and I sat on a
committee and with the help of Roger Russell put on two programs in Europe to
really define and come up with materials such as evaluation of students and of
training programs, curriculum development, on going training of training staff,
defining awareness from a Feldenkrais point of view, and developing competency
profiles for the graduating student. It was thought if we had this material we
could move training programs away from being tied to time and use competencies
as a basis for developing competent beginning practitioners with a greater
knowledge of how to provide training. Little came out of those long, long
meetings. It was great to go to Europe to see my friends but man we worked hard
for little if anything that came out of it. Fortunately on a good note Chris
Lambert of Australia, brilliant as she is still is working on the competency
stuff. I just got their latest draft and look forward to reading it.”
THAT’s the kind of stuff I think we need to be creating, so that we in our professional organization CAN function with a better, clearer base of support and greater ease and freedom, with fewer structural constraints. I would LOVE LOVE LOVE to see what was generated through that work, and I would LOVE LOVE LOVE to bring that work forward and help make it happen in our community.
Thanks Violet. I realize that I will be in the minority, but professionalization is not on the top of my list. I want the work to go out into the edges of society – to the homeless, and the drug addicts, to the oppressed and hopeless. To do that will require a different kind of organization. I will write more on that later.
I have read that piece from Jeff before, but I don’t understand why it was discussed during the lawsuit. How is competency related to the legality of the service marks? Something else that I am fascinated by is that fact that the guild settled out of court. According to George Krutz FGNA spent:
“…we still owed probably around 300.000 dollars after we got the final bill, after we had already paid a few hundred thousand dollars.”
http://feldenkrais-method.org/en/node/1053
That’s a great deal of money to spend to settle out of court.
As to this:
“so that [we] CAN function with a better, clearer base of support and greater ease and freedom, with fewer structural constraints.”
I can only agree. I take it as a given that we can. But I don’t see how the current system can evolve with so many constraints. If I could blow it all up tomorrow, I would do so.
- Ryan
Hi Ryan -
I agree this work warrants getting out all over the place and is needed in all those places, in the edges as well as the mainstream. We need to look at ways to get it into all those places. Maybe there is some way of doing things that can support the full spectrum… (I can dream!).
You said “I don’t understand why it was discussed during the lawsuit. How is competency related to the legality of the service marks?” I see a very direct link.
My understanding of this (which I ask anyone to correct if my understanding is incorrect) is that at present, the characteristics used to identify and distinguish what is a Feldenkrais training are primarily a description of the structural elements: the number of hours, the teaching of things similar to how it was done for the Amherst training, etc. But what we don’t have is a description of the expected competencies of a beginning practitioner, or what skills, knowledge and competencies a training ought to be teaching – and teaching in a way so that graduates in fact know that stuff and work that way. And so, we accredit trainings (and thus restrict the use of the services marks) based on the structure of the trainings – which relies on the argument that only this structure can do the job. But if one cannot specify what “the job” is, this can be a tricky argument to make.