Although this was said to me over quarter of a century ago, I still remember it, even if I can’t remember who it was who said it.
“Are you coming training on Friday?”
I probably agreed, but there was something about the question that didn’t sit right with me and for a long time I couldn’t think what it was. It wasn’t the question itself; the very idea that I wouldn’t be training. Finally I realised that it was the word “training” itself.

I was not what would call a sporty child. For me, it was reading books not playing football, writing not running and certainly not training. Training is what you do in sports, and I didn’t do sports. That was for “the flannelled fools at the wickets or the muddied oafs at the goals” to quote Rudyard Kipling.

This is, I suppose, what attracted me to, and continues to fascinate me about aikido. It is not a sport. It is an art, an art which I practise. I don’t train to be faster than someone or to be stronger or better than they are. I practise the same way, and for the same reason, that an artist paints. I do it to express something I feel inside. I want to interpret the internal externally.

Aristotle said “The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.” So the artist doesn’t paint what he sees, he paints what he feels. In this way he takes what cannot be perceived by looking and makes it visible. This is O’Sensei’s “profound truth that the manifest and hidden are one.”
The artist, Michelangelo, writing of sculpture, expressed it this way:
“Every block of stone has a statue inside it and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it.”

Aikido helps us to do this through technique. Of course, in the same way that Rembrandt, Van Gogh and Picasso all used basically the same materials and yet their interpretation of what they saw was completely different, if you put twelve aikidoka in one dojo they will perform twelve different types of shiho-nage, for example – the essence will be the same, but the form will be different.

I like to think of aikidoka practising together as musicians. They practise for hours and hours to improve, so that when they perform they are (hopefully) in harmony. Graham Nash of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young said of their practice:
“Our voices had range and pinpoint control, which allowed us to locate the tension in the harmonies. We experimented with melodic dissonance, modal chords and irregular arpeggios, using flexible notes that combined in unusual ways.”

It’s the same with aikido; once you have mastered, or begun to understand the basics, then you start experimenting, and ultimately, like CSNY you ultimately find your own unique style of aikido which will hopefully be harmonious. Interestingly, when Nash took up painting he found that there were similarities between art and music:
“Having in paintbrushes in my hand, I discovered, was the same energy as having a guitar in my hand. Just a different tool.”

Of course, aikido can be regarded as self-defence only, and there is nothing wrong with this; but I do think that it gives a restricted view of the art if you only think this way. The techniques themselves are very effective, and have been tested on the battlefield. O’Sensei himself, and aikido masters such as Koichi Tohei and Kazuo Chiba had wartime experience, and the Yoshinkan Aikido of Gozo Shioda is taught to the Tokyo Riot Police. The Dalai Lama highlights the problem of this one-dimensional view:
I’m sure all of us agree that we need to overcome violence, but we first need to examine whether it has any value. From a strictly practical perspective, on certain occasions violence appears to be useful. We can solve a problem quickly by force. But this success is often at the expense of the rights and welfare of others. Although one problem has been solved, the seed of another has been planted.

At the age of 61, I am looking ahead to the next ten or twenty years of practice that I hopefully have left. I cannot condition my body in those ways any more, so I must look for deeper forms of practice. But as an instructor I can see a danger here that I have to be careful of. If my students copy me too carefully, or I try to make them too like me in my instruction, they will end up practising like an old man. The adjustments I have made to my technique to accommodate my painful knees or arthritic toes aren’t necessary for young students.

When young people start Aikido, or any form of martial art, they are looking for more than a discussion of whether we practice or train. They want action!
Thus, as Dave Lowry says in “Moving Towards Stillness”:
“ … budo begins with a training of the gross muscles and then advance to the education and strengthening of the smaller, finer ones and then on to conditioning of the sinews and ligaments and reflexes and nerves themselves. Attitudes, feelings and emotions are all brought into harmony in the process … and all of this occurs under the aegis of movement and struggle.”

So perhaps what I should be saying that aikido encourages us to move from training to practice over time. Irimi nage is sometimes called the thirty-year technique as it will take you thirty years to master all the subtleties of it. Ten years to learn the physical side, ten years to understand the mental side, and ten years to grasp the spiritual aspects. When we start aikido maybe we do “train”; train the muscle memories so that we can perform tenkan and tai-sabaki without thinking, so that our hands will automatically find the right place on uke’s body, but the purpose of the training must ultimately to be to move us towards the practice.

People talk a lot about patience in the martial arts, about patiently waiting for an opening in an opponent’s defence during combat, saying of their next grading “I know I’m not ready now, but I’m prepared to wait”, or the patience an instructor might have with a particularly slow student.

As I see it, the danger is if patience is regarded as the sacrifice of the fulfillment of our immediate desires or needs in order to do what is necessary to produce a desired outcome in the future.  Patience then becomes a focus on the future and a neglect of what is happening now.  And if the martial arts teach us one thing, it is to be present in the Now.

There is a famous Zen story called Pot Lid Zen, the essence of which is this:

A young man went to a great teacher called Banzo to learn swordsmanship.

“How long will it take me to learn swordsmanship?” he asked.

“The rest of your life,” was the reply.

“I can’t wait that long. I will accept any hardship, and will devote myself completely to the study of swordsmanship.”

“In that case, ten years.”

“What if I train twice as hard?” tried the young man.

“In that case, thirty years.”

“Why is that? First you say ten then thirty years. I will do anything to learn, but I don’t have that much time.”

“In that case, seventy years.”

In the end the young man agreed to work as long as it took, and do anything he was told. However, for the first year all Banzo had him do was to perform simple physical tasks such as chopping wood. After a year of this he demanded that Banzo teach him some swordsmanship. Banzo merely insisted that he chop wood.

He returned to the woodpile, inwardly furious, but while he was chopping Banzo crept up behind him and struck him painfully with a wooden sword. “You want to learn swordsmanship, but you can’t even dodge a stick,” he said.

From that day on Banzo would creep up on him and attack him with a wooden sword. As his senses became heightened, Banzo changed tactics. Now he attacked, even when the young man was asleep. For the next four years he did not have a moment’s rest from the fear of unexpected attack.

One day, when he was stirring some food on the fire, Banzo crept up and attacked him by surprise. Without thinking the young man fended off the blow with the lid of the pot without taking his mind off stirring the food. That night Banzo wrote out his certificate of mastery.

 

The young man’s success was achieved not by deferring instant gratification for some reward down the road.  It was achieved through continual practice in the now without thought for the future.

I also like to think that when he finally received his certificate of mastery, the young man did not think he had arrived.  He continued to practise, improving his skills and expanding his knowledge.

The martial arts in general and aikido in particular, are not a means to an end.  As Eckhart Tolle says “When work is a means to an end, it cannot be of high quality.”

Patience implies judgement on the part of the person being patient.  “I’ve been very patient”, “I’m running out of patience” are phrases that we are all familiar with.  We’ve either used them, or had them used on us.  They mean that a standard we are judging against, or being judged against, is close to not being met.  It brings us back to the idea of some desired outcome.  Margaret Thatcher once said “I am very patient, provided I get my own way in the end.”

So perhaps we need a new word.  Acceptance is too passive.  There is a suggestion of agreement with what is happening; it’s one step away from resigned acceptance of a difficult or unpleasant situation.

It is important to be more than simply stoical.  Stoicism can help – when your practice is going badly it is useful to remember that it will get better.  And when it is going well, it is also useful to remind yourself that there will be times will be times when it will be terrible.  It is a reminder not to be caught up in an emotional response to what is happening now, because emotions are temporary: one day up, the next day down.  But to me, this is not enough.  One doesn’t want to be simply “toughing it out” when things are bad.  We shouldn’t want fixate on a future where things will get better or worse.

So I would suggest Openness.  There is no judgement in openness, but neither is there acceptance.  It acknowledges a situation and deals with it as it is.  The poet Rainer Maria Rilke, who linked patience with openness, said it this way:

“ … try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very   foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.”

In this way you are responding to what is happening Now.  In the same way that you shouldn’t force an aikido technique to make it work but, responding to what is happening to uke and yourself, allow the technique to happen at the right moment.  Nor should you cling to the feeling of that technique and try to reproduce the next time.  Each time it will be different, some good, some bad, and we should remain open to them all.

But a much wiser person than I said it much more simply:

“Rivers know this: there is no hurry. We shall get there some day.”

Winnie-the-Pooh.

And of course, that is the most useless piece of advice you can be given, because trying is the very opposite of relaxing. The more you try, the less relaxed you become. You can’t force yourself, or anyone else, to relax. Relaxation comes when you are doing something else, and yet aikido requires you to be relaxed in order to practise it well.

If any tension creeps in the techniques jar – I feel that jar most of the time. Afterwards I might say to myself, “Ah, my shoulder was too tense. Next time I need to relax my shoulder.” But next time the technique jars again and I find that in trying to relax my shoulder, tension has crept in somewhere else: my arm, my back, even my jaw!

Perhaps that is why in Japanese arts like calligraphy or the tea ceremony, so much attention is paid to preparation. In calligraphy or sumi the grinding of ink is considered a great way to prepare the mind and wrist for the forthcoming writing. Water is poured into the inkstone and the inkstick is ground against it, mixing the water with the dried ink to liquefy it. In the tea ceremony, chanoyu or chado, the preparation of the tea by the master and the preparation to drink it by the guests stills the mind and draws attention to the present moment. But to simply focus on the present moment is very difficult.

As the 16th century tea master Sen Rikyu said:
Tea is nought but this:
First you heat the water,
Then you make the tea.
Then you drink it properly.
That is all you need to know.

John Lennon said, life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans. I think the same can be said of relaxation – it is what happens to you when you are doing something else.
So the preparation is not the boring bit before you can “do” the art; it is what you do before you can “be” the art. In aikido, these are the warm-ups; not things simply to be gotten out of the way before we do the interesting bit, but the necessary steps you must take in order to relax the body and the mind.
Koichi Tohei, 10th dan, is one of aikido’s greatest proponents of relaxing. In “Aikido in Daily Life” he says it is easy to relax when nothing is annoying you, but much harder in the hustle and bustle of everyday life. He devised four techniques to help us relax, two physical and two mental:
1. Keep the one point
2. Extend ki
3. Keep weight underside
4. Relax completely

These exercises are designed to unify body and mind. Essentially numbers one and two are exercises of the mind, and three and four are physical, but ultimately, according to Tohei, they cannot be separated. They are equivalent. If you can achieve any one of the first three you will achieve the fourth, and then your mind and body will be co-ordinated.

To explain the exercises in simple terms:

1. The one point or seika tanden is located approximately two inches below the navel and two inches into the pelvic girdle. Physically, it is the body’s centre of balance; what one of my instructors called the power triangle. Tohei states it is the place where mind and body intersect – but certainly if you pay attention to the one point, you find your neck and shoulders become less stiff, your centre of gravity settles in the lower part of your body and you relax.

2. In order to “keep the weight underside”, Tohei simply says “Because the mind moves the body, its workings will be reflected in the body. If you think that the weight of your arm is underside, it will become so.” Once again, by imagining (or image-ing) the weight of your body moving to the undersides of your arms and your feet, you achieve the same results as stated for exercise Number 1.

3. Ki is assumed to be the universal energy that flows through all things. Tohei says there is only one kind of ki and it is strong because it is extended strongly and weak when it isn’t. The standard test for extending ki is the exercise known as Unbendable Arm. By opening the fingers and imagining the arm to be like a fire hose and ki flowing down the arm and out through the fingers the arm becomes “unbendable”.

So practising any of these three exercises, leads to “relaxing completely” and thus to Tohei’s “unification of body and mind.” A number of aikido’s warm-up exercises are used by aikido organisations such as The Ki Society are used to test whether or not their practitioners are keeping their ki at the one point – exercises such as the Rowing Exercise, Shomen-uchi Ikkyo and Happo Undo.

They can equally be used simply as aids to relaxation prior to the start of practice. By keeping the one point, keeping the weight underside or extending ki whilst warming-up, the body naturally relaxes because you are not forcing it to. Relaxation has happened while you were busy thinking about something else.

What is difficult of course is to carry that sense of relaxation forward into practice. As soon as someone has seized hold of your wrist or punched at you, it is perfectly natural to tense up, physically and mentally. When a technique doesn’t go right, we become angry with ourselves, and once again tension creeps in – in our own bodies and also in uke’s as we try and force the technique through in an aggressive way.

All we can do is take Koichi Tohei’s advice, and return to his four principles again and again.
And what is even harder, after a good practice, when you leave the dojo feeling relaxed, is to carry that relaxation with you on the drive home or on the bus, when people around you all seem to be doing their best to upset you. As that good feeling dissolves in a wave of irritation, we try to cling onto it, and the harder we grasp at it, the more it slips through our fingers.
And that is one of the reasons we practise aikido. So that it becomes easier to relax in difficult circumstances and the feeling stays with us for longer and longer – to our benefit and that of people around us.