About Flynn Disney
How did I go from teaching parkour and training dogs to working with emotions? The honest answer: I fell.
Beginnings — Inspirations
When I found parkour, I spent the first couple of years quietly convinced I was the worst in the world at it. I jumped around, climbed around, explored, with no real sense that progress was something available to me. Then one day I watched two people moving in a way I had never seen.
They were attempting jumps that were enormous, high off the ground, and missing them — bouncing off walls, laughing, playing. The joy coming off them was unmistakable, and it shocked me. One of them, Daniel Ilabaca, later became a mentor to me: someone who challenged and inspired me to the see movement as a reflection of beliefs, values and internal states.
Archway, London. 2013.
A step up in ability that changed my self-image.
Hints at the path ahead
It was terrifying, impossible and beautiful. I fell in love with it.
I was inspired. For the first time in my life, I started putting real effort into my training. I went from being the “worst in the world” to pretty skilled. Daniel’s effortless control at inspired me to train precision jumps — landings on small surfaces over big distances.
Later, I met the Hougaard twins from Denmark, and I saw movement at a new scale of size and technicality. This was my introduction to the lache: swinging on a bar and releasing for distance. It was terrifying, felt impossible and I fell in love with it.
I spent the next four years applying a new kind of effort: frame-by-frame analysis and technical research, gaining precise knowledge of the physics of the movement.* And after a while, I really started to pick it up. *It was Daniel, some years later, who alerted me to the limitations of this approach; saying that life was not meant for dissection, but relationship.
It was around this time that I started coaching. Working as part of a larger parkour coaching organisation, I was exposed to thousands of learners across London, the UK and Europe. This was a period of intense observation. I noticed many surprising things, for example — that people would generally get worse with more instruction, and that some people radically progressed where others never transformed even after years of practice.
First steps along the path
Dogs are simple. People are complex.
After seven years of coaching parkour, I felt an impulse to do something else. The limits of the profession began to weigh on my shoulders, and I didn’t see a path forward. I began to study animal training, first taking courses and later doing my own study.
I was inspired by David Deutch’s words that anything that can be done can be done with the right information. This was my first real intellectual endeavour — to understand animal behaviour and how to control it.
It worked. Sort of. I became skilled at operant conditioning, the manipulation of rewards to produce desired behaviour. I began to offer my services locally and affordably. But I began to notice something unexpected. Dogs are simple. People are complex. And I had no idea how to address the kinds of things I was seeing with dog owners; how their own presence, communication and organisation was affecting their animals. I felt unprepared.
The background of this period was personal loss. The end of my professional relationship with parkour; the end of a romantic relationship and the loss of my own dog, who I had cared for and trained myself. I was carrying a sadness that I didn’t recognise.
This period came to a dramatic end. I miscalculated a jump and shattered my wrist. It was my ego that brought me to the jump, and my lack of self-attunement that let me do it. I had heard a “less skilled” practitioner had made it. Instead of checking in with myself, I rushed the process — not checking how to land or how to fall. Standing on the edge of a two story rooftop, I made the leap and missed my hands.
Without the escape of training or knowledge of emotional processing, I fell into a state of anxiety that lasted several months. This was deeply unpleasant. Social interactions felt painful. Parkour felt nauseating. Life itself felt heavy and without direction.
Chainstore, 2017.
Days before my accident. Moving well, not doing well.
Between bodies and ideas; philosophy and physiology
I recognised how emotions shape the way a person thinks, moves and relates to the world.
Slowly, and with support from friends and family, I came out of this experience. Carrying a new empathy, I recognised how emotions shape the way a person thinks, moves and relates to the world.
I became interested, even fascinated in this topic. I read anything relevant I could find — physiology, psychology, philosophy… Each new framework filled my imagination with satisfying explanations, and a feeling of control.
This intellectual period reignited my interest in parkour. One idea in particular inspired me: exploration. The notion that uncertainty is a universal experience, and that organisms have in-built reflexes for navigating that ubiquitous context excited me to no end.
Into the future
Weaving elements of parkour with urban exploration, the sessions were remarkably popular. I’d landed on something interesting.
The London Explorations Sessions began in 2018, directly inspired by this research on uncertainty and exploration. Each week, I would take a small group of interdisciplinary movers — dancers, parkour practitioners and climbers — on an improvised adventure. Weaving elements of parkour with urban exploration, the sessions were remarkably popular. I’d landed on something interesting.
When COVID hit and classes shut down, I began studying strength training with an online group called Ascending Strength. I was inspired by their knowledge, and the medium of sharing. As the furlough period ended, I had the idea of trying my own online offering.
This led to the Online Exploration Group. With a foundation of scientific “first principles”, the OEG asked: how can I observe and leverage these principles in my teaching and personal practice? From 2020 to 2023, I held eight different topics — each exploring aspects of learning, movement and relating.
One of those topics was Joy. I recognised its popularity, and doubled down — studying, exploring and iterating on the course for the last four years. Now, that work has become the Joy Study Teacher Training — a longer and deeper study of joy in the learning process. The work has come further than I could have imagined — all through an inspired learning process.
Now, I live in Istria, Croatia — in a small village close to the sea. I live here with my wife and my young son. We jump on the trampoline. We swim together. We eat together. Life is very simple and beautiful.
Where my mid-20’s were about exploration and novelty, this period appears to be about consolidation and commitment. Going deeper into the science and practice of emotion. Going deeper into strength and athletic training has also been a theme of the last two years.
This shift brought to the idea of writing a book — a look at a missing piece of the pedagogical puzzle. I’ve found a conspicuous absence of research on emotion in most movement teacher trainings, coaching manuals and sports science books. Starting this process has already greatly expanded my viewpoint, and I hope it will be of benefit to many others.
Thanks for reading my story — Flynn