Dear diary, I’m back from my trip to Berlin to visit my teacher Ido Portal. Here is how it went

Schedule

Every day started at 7:30AM with a one hour meditation. One day, he took it into almost two hours. This is a deep practice, and the offering was made - sustain it for one year, every day.

Then a quick breakfast, and the first session began.

Structure and Organization of the Body

The morning sessions were led by Ido, and touched on a few subjects. Usually we would start with a focus on structure and organization of the body. After doing this kind of work, your body transform in profound ways. This is unlike the sense of acquiring a skill, or improving an attribute. Instead, a more general capacity improves -  the way the body organizes itself in relation to all tasks.

It’s a massive development for the field of movement, and I’m eager to see the downstream effects on the movement culture, as has happened with so many of Ido’s other insights. As he has done countless times before, Ido has breathed fresh thought into something we take for granted - in this case, the way we see something as broad and encompassing as structure and organization of the body.

Boxing as Movement Practice

Most days we worked also with boxing. This process was presented, not to become fighters, but to use fighting to get what it is uniquely suited for - for example,  to work on emotional modulation and to cultivate presence and adaptability inside a chaotic scenario. (It has been my experience with this work that it’s some of the most important for me personally - for what it offers to awareness of emotions and working with distracting thoughts.)

This was a very LIVE practice, built from Ido’s own research and development in this field. It is telling how Ido can take a mixed group, including many who never put on gloves before, and take them through two weeks with nary an injury.

Learning to learn

We worked also on tasks for improving how a person learns, for example developing the ability to “chew” on complex patterns. Not in a cerebral analytic way, but solving the puzzle WHILE the puzzle is changing. Only one solution exists - to bring presence. You don’t get to take such riddles home to solve them; the riddle gets solved, here and now, or not at all.

Many other things were tackled, addressing strength, focus, touching the floor, etc…

We would take lunch for a short break, then back for the PM session.

A different route towards improvisation

Odelia would lead the second session. This session built up over 2 weeks in the direction of a very open and free improvisation, but it got there by way of a gradual process.

It began with creating a sense of differentiation in very simple movement patterns. This was reminiscent of Ido’s “transcription” model of learning skills  - whereby we do not learn things from scratch, but always use prior learnings to form them. If our prior learnings are unrefined, so too will be the outcome of learning the new skill.

So Odelia gave us very simple patterns to start, but the next step was the critical piece - she added elements to ensure  we not just perform reps of a warm up exercise, but that we invested ourselves into examining relationships in the body in the context of these patterns, sensing them, and through this BECOMING them.

With these basic pieces of genetic materials built up, we were able to create or revisit a vocabulary of groundwork in a completely different way. The approach is antithetical to the common approach to teaching skills, the “monkey see monkey say monkey do” approach.

The subtext: the concepts we worked with

Every day finished with a lecture from Ido, usually spanning about 2-3 hours. These touched on topics ranging from the origins of movement development and motor control systems, to working with negative emotions and distracting thoughts, to the power of parables and secrets for transmitting truths, and wrestling with models of the nature of reality to cultivate better work.

Throughout these 2 weeks, there was a major emphasis on observation of emotions, as well as noticing thoughts. Not in a wishy washy way, but in a direct concrete way. And this is something Ido brings to the space of inner work, that is often missing - application platforms, wet-tests, an actual DOING.

It makes me think of how a spiritual teacher from the past had his students perform hard manual labor as practice. If you look nowadays, you don’t see the current mantle-bearers of this teacher’s work doing the same. The work has become all talk, theory, esoteric knowledge. Ido is making sure that the DOING remains in place.

Concluding thoughts

As usual, Ido’s process is very innovative; not creativity for creativity’s sake, but engaging in honest problem-solving to solve the issues and limitations that come up in learning, or posture, or focus, or boxing, or dance, or acrobatics. It is, as in usual form, completely non-dogmatic, practical, and yet contained within a greater perspective. Hence, this is a process for those who truly wish to grow.

And in the end, though all this priceless knowledge was presented, nothing was “given”. Because nothing worth having can be given. They need to be taken, manufactured for yourself. Ido’s gift was his presence, his embodiment being capable of “taking” and presence.