Long-time student of Richard Moon Sensei and integral board member of Aiki Extensions, Chris Thorsen Sensei’s life is a remarkable testament to the power of intuition, embodied practice, and a deep commitment to true systemic change.
Spanning over 50 years, his incredible career path has been characterized by bringing the principles of Aikido off the mat and into the world, transforming organizational culture and leadership. For the better.
This will be a two-part episode. Considering the breadth and depth of Chris Sensei’s experience and the important work he’s doing. It was impossible to reduce mora than half a century of spiritual wisdom in action to a 72 minute conversation.
Chris Sensei’s journey is marked by a series of what he calls “intuitive jumps off cliffs”—unreasonable, yet profoundly guiding, decisions.
At age 12, his first break with inherited culture happened during a trip with the Episcopal Church acolytes to a park in southern Illinois. He discovered a brass plaque on a promontory that detailed how a village of Native Americans had been surrounded and starved to death by the “bluecoats” (Christians). This shocking realization led him to question his involvement in the church and marked the beginning of his distrust and questioning of societal structures.
This intuitive questioning reached a crescendo during his time enlisted in the military. A desire for education had led him to the Army’s language school in Monterey, but a moral conflict soon erupted following the Gulf of Tonkin incident. An intuitive flash that the (now proven to be a false flag) incident was not what it appeared to be on the surface, spurred his declaration for conscientious objector status, a period that included a profound three-week vow of silence.
This early act of non-cooperation and adherence to an inner truth became a foundational example of listening to the whispers of intuitive guidance, a theme that would later define his life’s work.
After his discharge, a solitary two-year period in the wilderness led to writing haiku and an introduction to Rinzai Zen, establishing a diligent practice of Zazen that served as a crucial precursor to his path in Aikido. This spiritual rooting, combined with his work as a creativity consultant and later a crisis counselor, brought him face-to-face with the human cost of dysfunctional corporate culture.
Seeking a grounded calm amidst the tumultuous melee of crisis work, he fortuitously found Aikido.
His Aikido lineage is central to his mission. He began training with Richard Moon Sensei, who was running a small dojo (in a former chicken shack) focused on a shared inquiry into the art, and crucially emphasized jiyū-waza (freestyle practice). This liberating practice heightened Chris Sensei’s ability to function intuitively, and viscerally.
His training deepened under Robert Nadeau Sensei, whose teaching focused on energy as the primary study of Aikido—the Aikido that cannot be seen with the human eye. These two teachers empowered Thorsen Sensei’s realization that he needed to get “upstream of the problems” by working directly with leaders, thereby discovering his bestowed mission to transform organizational culture.
This mission was realized when a former client, and Vietnam veteran, Jim Dixon. (You really gotta listen to the episode to hear how amazing Jim’s story is!) hired him as the cultural development consultant for the startup Cellular One, San Francisco.
This opportunity led to a whirlwind run with Moon Sensei at his side, building Cellular One and later Nextel across the country. Their core methodology was teaching “non-falling Aikido” partnered with David Bohm’s Dialogue.
Through the realization that “Dialogue is a verbal Aikido and Aikido is a physical form of dialogue”, they taught teams how to handle pressure and conflict and, critically, how to make intuitive declarations for breakthroughs by embodying the principles of centered, grounded, and flowing presence. This unique approach led to the construction of a national cellular system in record time, all while maintaining their cultural declaration to “not lose one family”, an unprecedented success in the industry.
Since 2000, Thorsen Sensei’s work has evolved beyond direct corporate consulting to handing off the kit of his methodologies to what he calls “free radicals”—consultants and internal change agents working in large organizations and nonprofits to make systemic level change.
This work is ongoing and deeply informed by his spiritual and martial arts background, and will covered at length in the next episode which will follow this one in a few days.
So stay tuned!!
To learn more about his amazing journey and the application of these principles check out his two websites.
For stories of the corporate work from 1985 to 2005, mostly covered in this first episode: quantumedge.org
For the current iteration of his ever-important work which will be covered in part II: inquiryintoconsciousness.com
Enjoy!
