Another Intensive is in the books with my Teacher Ido Portal. Over the years that I have been following the teachings of Ido, people keep asking me the same questions over and over again, namely. ‘How come you keep following the same teacher for so many years?’. Isn’t it time to ‘move on’?
These type of question already hides some character trait about the questioner himself aside from genuine curiosity…
First of all. Many people mistake the ‘number of years’ of doing X for the ACTUALLY being present doing X. I have met plenty of people doing a Martial Arts for ’twenty years’ only to quickly find out in a friendly sparring session that they were doing it ‘here and there’, spreaded over twenty years. Meaning most of that work could be done in maybe one or two years of mindful, densified, consisted effort.
So yes, I can talk about this because I also slacked some of my beginning ‘Ido Portal’ years doing it here, and there, and when stuff / life gets difficult (think of injuries, lack of motivation, depression, ‘life’ problems) I quitted in the hope the diffulties will somehow go away and ‘one day’ I will have some stability (read perfect circumstances) from where I can now finally dedicate myself to a Practice….
When, in hindsight, reflecting about the above it’s ridiculous, almost absurd to realise in what kind of fantasy world I was living. A world full of delusions. A world of unfullfilled potential wounds masked/patched with hopes and dreams that in ‘some’ future moment I will be able to somehow elevate to some ideal self. The moment I actually realised and felt that hopes are just deferred disappointment, is when, on one side all the mental buildings and fantasies collapsed, which was painfull to witness, on the other hand this was also one of the most liberating feelings there was.
The person that could articulate the above was Ido. This was a relatively long detour to ‘answer’ the question above. Let me be more specific: I am not going for a ‘Movement’ Intensive to learn some new Movements. I am going to Ido. I could care less what he is going to teach. I somehow know what he teaches is needed, even though at certain times he speaks ‘Chinese’ I take note of it, trusting that understanding will follow somewhere in the future once effort has been put in.
The teachings of Ido always can be recognized by a certain fingerprint. He always puts huge effort in finding ways to get down to the core of things instead of beating around the bush and staying at surface level. He also expects this from his students. The teachings are basic and should not be mistaken for ‘easy’. For example the things I had the most diffuculties with, was going through some hard to grasp texts and make sense of it. This made me realise how poor my English vocabulary and conceptual understand actually is (even though I appear to speak and write it on some level), which is not necessarily bad news. To the contrary: what I thought I am is not actually what I really am (another illussion is shattered, which always goes allong with some pain). There is a ‘distance’ there, and now there is an oppurtunity to close this (like all other distances I’ve ‘closed’ during the years). It’s not about the result but about the yearning to change and effort you put in.
The magic happens in the effort. This trains ‘effort-muscles’ in such a way that meta skill is developed and not just skill itself.