In a previous blog I mentioned toddlers learning to walk, and also learning to fear falling.  The other thing to notice when watching about toddlers walking is how close they are to falling all the time.  They finally get unsteadily to their feet and then the wobble just keeping their balance, but those first few steps are hardly walking at all.  It’s more like controlled falling, and if there wasn’t a pair of adults hands out-stretched to catch them, that walk would probably end up on the floor.

And so it is with us as we get grow up; we mastered walking when we were toddlers so we really don’t pay much attention to it now.  But it is fundamental to developing a stable base.  If we aren’t aware, just like a toddler, we are one step away from falling, and there won’t always be a pair of comforting arms there to catch us when we fall.

Walking, like talking or eating, has become second nature to us and so we don’t notice how much of the time we are off-balance, swinging one leg after the other through quickly.  No wonder that we find ourselves stumbling.

An image I like to use from tai chi is that of a vase full of water, and a table.  If you imagine that your hips and pelvis are the table, then your upper body is the vase of water.  When performing technique, I try not to tilt the table and spill the water.  I find that if I hold onto the image and worry less about how well the technique is working out, often the technique goes much better.

In Zen Buddhism there is a meditation technique called Mindful Walking.  The intention is to keep one’s consciousness alive in the present moment.    Thich Naht Hanh, the Vietnamese Zen Buddhist monk says:

“In our daily lives, we usually feel pressured to move ahead.  We have to hurry.  We seldom ask ourselves where it is that we must hurry to.

When you practice walking meditation, you go for a stroll.  You have no purpose or direction in space or time.  The purpose of walking meditation is walking meditation itself.  Going is important, not arriving.  Walking meditation is not a means to an end; it is an end.”

 

This is a very important point.  One of the things that initially attracts people to aikido is the apparently spectacular, and effortless, throws.  We want to be able to throw people that far and that hard; but wanting to do that gets in the way of good practice of aikido, because it is focussed on an end result.  It is possible to take Thay’s words and apply them to aikido:

The purpose of aikido is the practice of aikido itself.  Practising is important, not throwing.  Aikido is not a means to an end; it is an end.

This is not to say that throwing in aikido is wrong, simply that it is not everything, and focus solely on that outcome is to lose sight of other equally important things, like your stability and posture.

Throwing spectacularly is more about ego, and ego and awareness are incompatible; being in the present does not focus on an end product.  Demonstrations frequently feature techniques that draw gasps and rounds of applause from the audience, but they are not really aikido.  Often you can see tori preparing to make some huge throw, and his mind is not on what he is doing; he is thinking how far he is going to throw uke or how hard he is going to crash him into the mat.  As a result, his body becomes tense.

Demonstrations can be a way to attract new students to a club, but when they discover that aikido is not all “wham bam thank you ma’am”, they can become disappointed and leave.

Look at old film of O’Sensei Morihei Ueshiba.  You will see a beautiful old man with beautiful posture, enjoying the moment (literally “in joy of the moment”, as he is usually smiling or laughing), with beautiful posture.  You will find you rarely pay much attention to what happened to uke.

One of the things aikido teaches you to do is to reconnect with your body, so that instead of falling involuntarily through your life, you consciously take control of your movement.  This is one of the reasons Aikido can be so difficult to start with and why beginners look so ungainly.  We are not used to moving consciously.

One of my first teachers, Shihan Ralph Reynolds, used to say we act without thinking and we should shake ourselves up by doing something differently; for example, if you are right-handed, try making your cup of tea left-handed (or vice versa).  Doing an everyday activity differently forces you to engage mindfully in the act.

The problem is that unlike walking or making a cup of tea, to learn aikido is to learn something new and unfamiliar.  Initially we become over-conscious (especially when we catch our sensei watching us) and every movement is broken down into steps instead of flowing.  The mind continually criticises what we are doing: “That foot should be there, you’re doing it all wrong!”  But it is not wrong – it is difficult to divorce being present from thinking about being present.  In fact, it is better to be thinking about technique than getting over-confident and performing technique without mindfulness; but ultimately, when being mindful it is important to be mindful of everything, not just whether a hand or a foot is in the right place.

 

As the Zen Master Shunryu Suzuki says:

“In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.”

So it is important to maintain an awareness of our posture and our stability, but not to obsess about it as if we were being watched all the time.  And ultimately, this mindfulness will still the mental chatter, the inner critic, and we engage fully with the technique.

 

 

 

 

Fear of Falling:

It has often been said (sometimes by me) that you only really start to improve at aikido technique when your breakfalls improve.

There are a lot of reasons for this.  The first, and most obvious one, is that you start losing your fear and relax.  It is hard enough to walk into a dojo for the first time without feeling nervous, where everyone knows everyone else and seem to know everything, or at least more than you do.  So to the basic fear of “will they like me?” is the added to the fear of looking stupid which in turn is compounded by the fear of doing something as unnatural as learning how to fall over.  All in all, a not a mix designed to induce relaxation, which is a key component of aikido technique.

As an aside here, I can add that,most people who have practised aikido for any length of time will say that looking stupid is something you have to get used to, because it will happen again and again: doing tai sabaki completely out of synch with everyone else, breakfalls that release unexpected wind, holding the bokken the wrong way up, tripping over your hakama.  The list is endless.  And any time you begin to feel you begin to feel a little over-confident, aikido is there to feed you a little humble pie.

Then there is the fear of pain.  Aikido is a contra-intuitive art.  When something hurts us our every instinct tells us to pull away.  It makes no sense to move towards pain or to move with that which is causing pain, and yet that is precisely what aikido teaches us to do.  Nikkyo hurts less when you move towards it, sankyo is less painful when you move with it.  One of the reasons why it is difficult to do these techniques on beginners without injuring them is because they tense up and try to pull or twist away, and at that point an experienced aikidoka will release the technique.  This leads to some beginners giving up before they have really started because they don’t think the techniques work, when in fact the opposite is true.  The techniques work just fine, but it’s hard to put them on people who can’t take a breakfall without injuring them.

And of course, there is fear of falling.  From the moment we learn to walk we are taught to fear falling.  Toddlers’ first steps are accompanied by many falls and few tears as they have not yet learnt to be afraid of falling.  In fact, a toddler’s falls look quite similar to the beginning of a backward breakfall.  It is only the first time the head gets banged on the floor that the link is made with pain and then the fear of falling begins to develop, reinforced by adults warning “be careful!” and rushing to snatch up and cuddle the crying infant.

And so on, into adulthood, unless it is trained out of us, leading to broken wrists when we are younger and broken hips in old age.

Most practitioners of aikido are asked at some point, “But have you ever had to use aikido in real life?”  And almost everyone has got a story, which ultimately disappoints the asker because invariably they are about how an angry situation was diffused by kind words, as the aikidoka remained relaxed in a tense situation and realised there was another way that didn’t involve fighting.  I recommend the book “A Way to Reconcile the World” edited by Quentin Cooke, 7^th dan, of Burwell Aikido Club in Cambridgeshire for many such stories by ordinary practitioners of aikido from all over the world.

A good ukemi story is from the book is Simon Collier’s:

“ … one day as I was walking along a street talking with a friend and not looking where I was going, I walked into a row of bicycles.  As the bicycles and I started to fall over, my ukemi training kicked in.  I sailed smoothly over the bicycles and then rather than crashing into the concrete I effortlessly rolled and came up walking.”

My two own stories are equally disappointing to anyone in search of blood and guts.  The first occurred when I was up a ladder, drilling into a wall about eight feet off the ground.  Since the ladder was on a laminate floor, and no one was footing it, when I put my weight on the drill, the ladder slipped from under me.  Because thirty years of aikido had taught me not to be afraid of the floor coming up to hit me it felt like I had all the time in the world.  I knew I couldn’t let go of the drill because it could have ended up anywhere, including in my body, so I held it at arm’s length and as I hit the floor, did a backward breakfall the way we practise when holding the jo.  The result?  When everyone came rushing to see what the crash was, I was already on my feet, assuring everyone I was fine.

The second story also involved a ladder and power tools; you would have thought I would have learned my lesson!  I was cutting the top of a hedge with a pair of hedge trimmers when the ladder fell through the hedge.  With more open space, this time I was able to throw the hedge trimmers forward and myself backwards, with the same result as my first story.  A little backward momentum, chin tucked in and legs up, like Simon Collier’s, it was the best ukemi I have ever done.

Aikido has allowed me to survive being stupid twice uninjured, so now ladders and power tools involve a second person at the foot of the ladder.

To quote again from Quentin Cooke’s book, to give heart to those who may be struggling with ukemi, here is Reesa Abrams:

“It took me six months to learn how to do a backward roll from standing and two years to do a front roll from standing, despite receiving the best mentoring from many of the sensei.”

Every instructor has a different way of teaching breakfalls and all of them work for some people, leading us to the moment when the fall itself is no longer feared.  It is a moment that we have to find for ourselves.

And that is the moment when we learn to love to fly.