Mindful Intuitive Movement

Vince Fakhoury Horn introduces Mindful Intuitive Movement, the bottom-up practice he built from years of letting his body teach him how to move—the ChiRunning focuses that give the thinking mind something small to hold, the day his body refused the cushion and won, and why the only injury this practice ever gave him came from moving with aggression.

💬 Transcript

Vince Horn: I’m excited to share with you this practice today called Mindful Intuitive Movement. It used to be called Spontaneous Movement. This is a technique or approach that I’ve developed, although I can’t take very much credit for it.

I feel like it’s more that I started listening to my body, and trusting my body, and over many years of doing that, I sort of reflected on what my body taught me, and I’m trying to share those lessons with others in this practice. That’s just sort of essentially what it is. So really, this practice arises from the wisdom of the body.

It’s a bottom-up practice. It’s not a top-down practice. That said, sometimes it’s hard to get into a bottom-up practice, right? Where you’re just trusting the wisdom of your body. Sometimes we have ideas about how our body should be moving or about what it should look like, and those ideas stand in the way of the body’s own wisdom.

So a lot of the things I’ll offer with this approach are really just simple things we can focus on while we’re trying to allow the body to move us, that help us get out of our own way and get out of the way of the wisdom of the body. That’s the purpose of any sort of top-down instruction in this approach, which you’re always welcome to jettison if it then gets in the way.

So that’s the invitation. I came up with this approach in part inspired by a program that I edited when I was a producer at a company called Sounds True in my 20s — it’s a spiritual media company. And I would just basically spend all day editing programs that we had recorded, and one of those programs was a program called ChiRunning by Danny Dreyer.

Danny’s a longtime Tai Chi practitioner and also, like, a hardcore long distance runner, and he combined those practices together to form this thing called ChiRunning. What was interesting about his technique — ‘cause I edited every single minute of it, believe me — was that he offered these particular, what he called focuses, these little things you do while running because you can’t think too much and still run. You know, if you’ve ever run before, and I used to be a runner, so I really en