Shut up and move!

A conversation with movement master and thinker Ido Portal

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Life is movement.

From one state to another. Order to chaos. Stillness to action. The flow never ends.

But still, we work to contain it inside static models: tasks to be ticked off a list, a bucket list of achievements, one fixed state like “happiness” we try to grasp and own.

We encapsulate and define. Slowly, we become fixed. Our self-imposed walls get more rigid.

Movement stops.

Enter Ido Portal.

Tabbed “the world’s foremost expert on human movement” by Stanford neuroscientist and podcaster Dr. Andrew Huberman, Ido has sparked what many consider to be a revolution in the field.  

His work with professional athletes fed a wave of media interest, as he fascinated with his original and virtuosic training routines.

But from his earliest interviews, it was clear that Ido’s approach transcended the physical.

His creed was one of inner exploration, an art of pushing back against fixed conscious goals and dogmas. Ido frames learning as neither the “filling of a cup” nor the “lighting of a fire”, but as a peeling back of layers. He challenges us to get closer to who we are - not by better defining ourselves, but by moving more intuitively:

“The entry point can be very simple. It can be the shape of your body, it can be a certain beautiful movement, it can be a technical approach, it can be improvised. And (then) you start to unpack. Thinking about movement in this general way will (eventually) take you deeper and further, and it will start to pull you into the deep waters. We start experiencing life closer to the nature of the nervous system, closer to the nature of life itself, rather than words, which is more predominant (today). So, for me, that is movement.”

In this conversation, we discuss the various aspects of Ido’s philosophy: his original take on developing personalized movement practices, the tension between mastery and novelty, how the mind can imprison the body, the benefits of different forms of walking, and much more.

Ido invites us to think about movement in the manner of the philosopher, rather than the coach (let alone the “fitness influencer”!).

He calls for people to give themselves permission to move and explore their way to a fuller version of themselves, instead of fitting into any number of moulds coming from the outside.  

Because all movement eventually comes to a stop.  

Only to begin again.

You can start by checking out Ido’s thoughts about transcending our limitations below: