Review of Acquiring the Feldenkrais Profession

Article Summary

Acquiring the Feldenkrais Profession captures Yochanan Rywerant’s thoughtful approach to teaching, learning, and transmitting the Feldenkrais Method. In this review, Eva Laser reflects on Rywerant’s role as one of Dr. Moshe Feldenkrais’s senior students and trainers, explaining how the book organizes decades of teaching into a practical framework for practitioners, trainers, and serious students. Although the book is now out of print, it remains an important historical resource for understanding the evolution of the Feldenkrais profession.

Editor’s Introduction

Editor’s Introduction: Acquiring the Feldenkrais Profession was written by Yochanan Rywerant, one of Dr. Moshe Feldenkrais’s earliest students and a senior trainer who played a significant role in preserving and transmitting the Method. Drawing on decades of professional trainings and advanced courses, the book presents Rywerant’s systematic approach to teaching the principles underlying the Feldenkrais Method. Although it is now out of print, it continues to offer valuable insight into the development of the profession and the educational philosophy that shaped generations of practitioners. The review below, written by Eva Laser following her experience studying with Rywerant in Stockholm, reflects both the significance of the book and the lasting influence of its author.

Acquiring the Feldenkrais Profession

by Eva Laser, Stockholm 04/11/2006.

In the summer of 1986, a small study group gathered on an island in the Stockholm archipelago to begin a process of acquiring the Feldenkrais profession. The trainer in question was Yochanan Rywerant (b 1922) who for the first time in an independent setting was able to implement the experience, knowing and understanding of The Feldenkrais Method^®.

The endeavor to teach in this setting and context received well and two more basic trainings came about in Stockholm before Yochanan Rywerant continued to teach the same framework in Tel Aviv. The Swedish group asked him in 1994 to set up a trainer’s training to get the utmost of his excellence for the future. A 40-day training came about where Yochanan Rywerant in his meticulous way laid out a scheme of approaching the method from a didactic and principal point of view. The enormous verbatim material often named as the Feldenkrais legacy was digested down to a touchable frame of reference and thinking also presented in the text. This trainer’s training is continuing in Tel Aviv.

In the fall of 2000 the book Acquiring the Feldenkrais Profession was published by the Feldenkrais Institute in Tel Aviv. Material presented at Moshe Feldenkrais three professionals trainings in Tel Aviv, San Francisco and Amherst, numerous advanced as well as Yochanan Rywerant’s own basic training and trainer’s training are the embryo of this book. Between the lines, Yochanan Rywerant is vividly present as an everlasting student, teacher and trainer. As a senior trainer, he gives clear direction by his own implementing and organisation of the material he learned and developed in cooperation with and from the founder of the Method, Dr. Moshe Feldenkrais.

In the preface, Yochanan Rywerant explains the 3-fold function of the book:

• Trainers might use it as a compendium for much of the material, which is to be presented in a professional training program.
• Practitioners might use it as a reminder and refresher.
• The general reader interested in The Feldenkrais Method will find here not only a general overview of the Method, but also plenty of items, which, on one hand, constitute an extensive definition of the Method and, on the other, show, by their mere structure and didactic processing, how a complex system like this Method could can be taught efficiently.

In the here published article, Envisaging the future of the Feldenkrais Method also published in the Feldenkrais Journal, Yochanan Rywerant expresses worries for the future of the profession, becoming a copy styled teaching instead of the original learning to think and apply the very matrix of the Method. The article asks for a closer study of the themes presented in this book.

The book thin by size and rich by contents and with the modest prize of 20 dollars is Yochanan Rywerant’s gift to all of us that cares about the Feldenkrais Method. Read it!

Yochanan Rywerant (1922–2010)

Yochanan Rywerant was one of Dr. Moshe Feldenkrais’s earliest students, a senior trainer, and the author of several influential works on the Feldenkrais Method. He played a central role in preserving and organizing Dr. Feldenkrais’s teaching for future generations.

Looking for the book?

Acquiring the Feldenkrais Profession is currently out of print and can be difficult to locate. Occasionally, used copies appear through secondhand booksellers or private collections. If you have the opportunity to read it, it offers one of the clearest windows into how Yochanan Rywerant understood and taught the Feldenkrais Method.