A New Training Initiative in Hungary

A New Training Initiative in Hungary

Report by Rüdiger Janisch, USA, 20.08.2019

After Nicoletta Kovacs and Ovidiu Recan had lived at The Camphill School in Beaver Run (Pennsylvania, USA) for a year and participated in the training of the Camphill Academy, the long-held intention and search to establish anthroposophical curative education in Hungary began to take on a clearer form. Returning to Hungary in summer 2018 they contacted all interested Hungarian teachers, educators, therapists, social pedagogues and others, who they knew were looking for such a deepening of their work. Thus, almost 40 people came together.

An explicit wish of the initiators of this educational impulse was not to introduce anthroposophical curative education as a specialized field, but to embed it in a general context of the cultural renewal impulse of contemporary anthroposophy.

Jan Göschel’s visit as a prelude in November 2018 focused on the introductory theme “Becoming relationship artists”. This was also the first opportunity for the participants to get to know each other.

The first module of the training, which will last until October 2020, took place in April 2019 in Budapest. Rüdiger Janisch from the Camphill Academy and the Camphill School community Beaver Run in the USA was invited as a lecturer. Using architecture, sculpture, painting and the motifs of the First Goetheanum, the participants encountered the building impulse for a spiritual-social Goetheanum as a source for the culturally innovative impulse of anthroposophy. The Foundation Stone Meditation of the Christmas Conference 1923/24 as a metamorphosis of this building will accompany the further work. It serves as a source of inspiration for the community-building impulse and curative education work.

Against this background, the group set out to practice a perception that was as non-judgmental as possible. The participants worked with many different areas of human observation, such as movement, language, senses, memory, etc., which one can encounter in a human being. They practiced self-awareness in mostly familiar everyday activities, which were carried out in connection with certain challenges. For example, in movement and sensory experiences with blindfolded eyes, what is otherwise taken for granted is experienced with new consciousness. This allows these activities to express themselves in a new and possibly more differentiated way, i.e. to communicate something of themselves.

After this preparation, the participants were given the task of bringing a person close to their hearts to the attention of the other participants through description, demonstration and illustrations, as if the person were present. These presentations were presented in an extraordinarily skillful, artistic and deeply touching way at the next module in July 2019, so that the circle of participants expanded with the imaginative presence of another person for each presentation.

This module was accompanied by Sonja Zausch with social-artistic eurythmy and Andrea Janisch with Spacial Dynamics and basal stimulation. The group tried to deepen their perception through many qualities of movement, modeling, geometry and language. In this way, the supersensible spiritual, soul and living creative forces working in the body and soul can wake up and be recognized phenomenologically. This expanded perception then also makes it possible not only to notice more clearly one-sidedness or disturbances, but also gradually to distinguish more clearly whether the disturbances and peculiarities of the human being we perceive are in the realm of the physical, etheric, soul or spiritual.

Thus, the seed was laid for an “inner re-creation”, an “inner hearing” and an “inner seeing”. In the second part of the summer module, these skills were brought into the context of therapies. The group first drew their attention to the afterimages, in Goethe’s sense. This exercise was then extended to other sensory dimensions, such as “after-taste”, “after-feeling”, “after-sound”. An extraordinary support for this was the musical work with Veronika Römer, a music therapist from the USA, who also teaches at the Camphill Academy.

With the series of Madonna pictures proposed by Rudolf Steiner we practiced “inner seeing”. The “inner hearing” was stimulated by the “listening space therapy” and “Tonstärketherapie” developed by Susanne Müller-Wiedemann. With the help of the Greek exercises standing, walking, running, jumping, wrestling, throwing discus and javelin we found the way to the impulse of speech, to the experience of the word, to the “inner creation” of the word.

This work also created the inner space for a Bible Evening that focused on the story of the healing of the blind and deaf-mute from the ninth chapter of Matthew’s Gospel. At the end of this module the words of the Sunday service for children were read in Hungarian.

In October, the course will continue with Leonard Schuster from the Rohrlack/Germany communities near Berlin and in December Bart Vanmechelen will be a guest on the subject of School of Spiritual Science work and esoteric training.

Between the modules, the participants meet monthly to deepen what they have learned and prepare for what is to come. It is a joy to experience the enthusiasm, the seriousness, the deep interest in anthroposophy and the motivation of all participants.

We all, the lecturers and the Leadership Team of the Council, wish this impulse all the best for the future, with the hope to have laid the seeds for a full training in Hungary.

The first anthroposophical curative education school in Budapest will open its doors in September 2019. For this we send our best wishes and supportive strength!