Ido Portal Berlin Intensive 2026

I came back home one week ago, from the Intensive with my teachers Ido Portal and Odelia Goldschmidt.

MATERIAL

Ido shared a body of work that can serve an athlete, a geriatric patient, an injured person, or a generalist movement practitioner.

We worked with rhythm, agility, improvisation, strength, connection, focus and attention. The tools were games, illusions, fighting, dancing, singing, sitting, and more and more.

But this was no gallimaufry. We were cultivating a “state” that cuts across domains - a state of openness, readiness, coherence. This was an operating system update: bringing the body into unison, creating the flexibility to respond to chaos (whether it’s somebody punching you in the face or chasing you with a stick or dropping a ball), learning to direct attention…

Each morning began with stillness practice, percolating like espresso through the rest of the day. And each evening culminated with a lecture, providing a scaffold of concepts to support practice.

THE EXPERIENCE

You are essentially stuck in a place where you are guaranteed to fail. The good news is that success is not dependent on not failing, but on transforming how you respond to failure. This event was one more angle on that overarching principle.

People ask if it was “fun”. There are moments of fun, but there are also moments at the other end of the spectrum: moments of great discomfort and frustration. What I find so valuable is this: the intensity offers the possibility of changing HOW we go about movement, practice, and life.

Some people want to draw a neat little dividing line between movement practice and any sort of talk of psychological effect. How could it be possible? How can you work on movement without asking how you deal with frustration, without working on your relationship to failure? When you’re working with things that demand attention and presence, you are dealing with the matter that infuses your entire life.

PEOPLE OF THE PRACTICE

The practice cannot be separated from the community. Some of the people I see just once a year, but I love them strongly. For these days, we live together, we work together, we eat and share and laugh together. I also find it precious to practice alongside my online coaching students.

I’m always inspired by Odelia, who lives inside a superhero cape. She did the morning sessions alongside us and then guided the evening session. She was a superconductor - no, I mean a super conductor.

As for Ido - he’s like some fissile material. He has an eye for critical yet nearly invisible details and the ability to pull more out of people than they believe they can. And the teacher is still radically a student, embodying the archetype for the aspiring student to learn from. If you go for platitudes, be ready for disappointment - what you get is far more valuable: keen, piercing insight into where your weaknesses lie and supportive guidance for working through it.

And there is a silent presence that I experience like a floating smile somewhere in the back of my skull as I practice… Yigal.

PERSONAL TAKEAWAY

I come home from this experience with a broader understanding of movement, and many specific practices to work on for my own development. It exposed weaknesses in my own movement, and flaws in my practice - in the how of things. It’s a gift to receive - painful but as precious as it is aversive.

Shall I wrap this up with a tidy sentence, some neat closure? I think I’ll leave it incompl…