Monthly Archives: April 2015

The ‘Aikido Priest’ by Mark Peckett

10854373_1531020327138234_3006510209861123564_oI remember an incident that happened many years ago when I was just starting out teaching aikido. I was holding my class in the local sports centre and we shared the changing room with all the other users of the centre. On this particular evening I was surrounded by a group of men who had just finished playing squash. My black belt was sufficiently new that I still got a thrill out of tying it on in public, but it was the hakama that drew the comments. One of the squash players said:

“Careful what we say, lads – we’ve got a priest in here!”

And we all laughed, me more self-consciously than them.

That happened over a quarter of a century ago and only came back to mind I set up my own organisation two years ago, because in that off-the-cuff remark, as with much humour, there is an element of truth.

I won’t deny that one of the motivations when I started practising aikido was to wear the hakama, because the dan grades certainly did look like priests. And that’s how we treated them; hanging on their every word as if they had not only mastered some techniques, but uncovered the secret of life itself!

Equally, when I started teaching, I was treated in the same way by kyu grades and I’d be lying if I didn’t say I liked it. As Koichi Tohei says in “Aikido in Daily Life”:

Sometimes people in the instructor’s seat want to swagger a bit. The truth is, just because someone is teaching he has not necessarily mastered all of the principles the universal has to teach … For an instructor to consider himself a perfected being is a ridiculous illusion. Conceit closes the eyes of the spirit and leads to regression rather than progress.

I believe you can see fairly clearly what a teacher is like by the way his students behave. Students tend to be a mirror. If the teacher swaggers, so will his students; but equally, bad habits I might find in my own students, may well be a reflection of my own.

Of course, I’m older now, hopefully wiser and less in need of quick ego boost. And being the head of an organisation makes you aware of your responsibilities in a way that teaching in someone else’s does not. And the greatest responsibility is to follow Bruce Lee’s dictum: “A good teacher protects his pupils from his own influence.”

As a teacher, I want my students to aspire be better than me. I don’t want them to think they can never live up to my example because I have some secret connection to the universe. I want them to ask me questions, because I want to test my own knowledge and skill. If I don’t have an answer, I mustn’t be afraid to admit it, or if a student comes up with a better answer than mine, I mustn’t be afraid to embrace it. My teaching must also be my learning.

Of course, it is easy to explain something without caring whether the person you are explaining to actually learns or not. But if a teacher wants to make progress they can do so through teaching, because that in itself is a form of learning. The author Richard Bach said:

We teach best what we most need to learn.

This is one of the reasons I am constantly returning to ikkyo in my own teaching! Again to quote Tohei:

A man does not have to be a good swimmer to be a good swimming coach. To be a good instructor one must kindly and enthusiastically teach others to the basic principles to the limits of his ability.

I encourage my students to go and practise with other clubs and instructors, not just to learn new techniques, but to see that my version is not the only one, and not even the necessarily the best one. To use an expression that Bruce Lee used in another context, “It’s like a finger pointing away to the moon. Don’t concentrate on the finger or you will miss all that heavenly glory.” It is important for the teacher to know that he is the finger and not the moon. And it is just as important for his students to realise that. O’Sensei himself said:

“Instructors can only impart a fraction of the teaching. It is through your own devoted practice that the mysteries of Aikido will [be] revealed.”

So we are all learning and growing together, and what we have learned, we should pass on. Koichi Tohei again:

Do not be stingy with a technique you have learned … If we give of what we have learned as much as we can we can learn still more.

This is why I study other arts, and go to courses and seminars run by other teachers. So that I can learn and then pass on what I understand, and in doing so deepen my own knowledge and understanding. When it comes down to it, we are all trying to make progress, and the best instructors are those who want to walk that path with others.

I have seen instructors who belittled their students verbally, or even struck them for delivering an incorrect attack. I suppose that they thought they were building character, although I believe students treated in this way will either lose heart, or they will make have to make themselves subservient to the instructor. They may think that in doing this they will gain access in time to the instructor’s secret teachings; in fact the only benefit going on here is to the instructor’s ego.

I know there is a Japanese proverb which says “the nail that sticks out gets hammered down” which is usually interpreted as “you should conform and follow the rules”, but it is not carte blanche to abuse one’s students. And anyway, if you chose to stand out in a crowd, that takes courage, so maybe the proverb is best translated into English as “Better to be hung as a sheep than a lamb”.

In short, I’m not a priest; I’m just someone who was fortunate enough to discover aikido and who wants to share some of the joy it has brought me with other people. I want students, not disciples, who will walk some of the aiki path with me before they discover their own.

Don’t Watch That, Watch This by Mark Peckett

mpIt’s always nice to see kids’ aikido classes.  Lots of smiles and lots of fun; but my experience is that not many juniors go on to study aikido as adults.  Why is that?  First and foremost, it’s not a reflection on the teachers; I have seen many excellent teachers of children and classes full of fun and learning.  And it’s also not a reflection on the students themselves; it’s not that they aren’t keen or don’t practise hard enough.

Obviously in your teens some things become very important: being part of the crowd, the opposite sex, and doing all the things your parents don’t approve of, but I don’t think these are necessarily the things that stop younger people doing aikido.

Conversely, I believe it is the one thing which has kept me interested in aikido over the years: that nothing is what it seems.

Let me explain: I attended a seminar recently where one of the instructors spoke of allowing uke to fall.  We were practising irimi nage: entering throw.  Over the years I’ve heard many sensei caution about being in a hurry to “get to the throw”, but this was the first time I had heard the throw being described as a point where uke has no option but to choose to fall.

This is what I mean about nothing being what it seems.  That hour with sensei Alan Morton of Ocean State Aikido made me revise my thinking about aikido –again!  I find that over the years much of my practice has been like this.  It is a series of Copernican revolutions.  When Copernicus said the Earth went round the Sun and not the other way round, nothing in the world changed, and at the same time it was a major shift in the worldview.  So I still go to practice, I still do the same techniques, but now I do them with a different feeling and for a different reason.

This is the reason why I think adults usually stick with aikido and children tend not to.  You need to be older and wiser, to have more life experience to appreciate how small changes can make such a big difference.

In teaching I have often likened aikido to a stage magician performing magic.   By subtle misdirection the magician causes you to look in the wrong place while he is doing something-or-other in the right place; you watch his right hand waving in the air whilst at the same time he is slipping a dove unnoticed from his pocket.

Now I am not saying that aikido is about trickery – although there are unscrupulous teachers out there who use this misdirection to their advantage, dressing up technique with the mysteries of ki rather than teaching good basics such as proper posture, timing and extension – but I am saying that aikido can fool us without the aid of a magician.

Or to put it another way: sankyo can be a hard technique for beginners to grasp – no pun intended!  This is for a number of reasons not least of which is that it is hard to appreciate that in order to make uke rise it is not necessary for tori to rise too; in fact, exactly the opposite.  But even when you get past these basic principles, you will hear people complaining that they “can’t get it to work”.

This is because their focus tends to be on the wrist, where the technique is apparently being applied.  In fact, the torsion of sankyo runs all the way up to the arm through the elbow into the shoulder, and brings uke to a position in which he can no longer move either his elbow or shoulder.  When I can’t get a technique to work, my first question to myself is: “Where is my attention?  Is it in the wrong place?”  And I find that very often I have been focussing too closely on what my hands were doing instead of what is or isn’t happening to uke’s body, or where my body is in relation to uke’s; in fact a whole world outside of my narrow focus.

Aikido is a long study.  It is only half-jokingly that irimi-nage or entering throw is called “the thirty year technique.”  Ikkyo is regarded as the simplest of the immobilisations and actually means, in one translation, “first basic technique.” Because of this it often the first technique taught to beginners; and yet I have always regarded it as one of the hardest to do well.

But I realise now, thirty years too late, that the reason it is taught first is because it contains so many of the principles I mentioned earlier.  GozoShioda says of the finish to ikkyo:

“Beginners find it difficult to apply pressure directly downwards from a seiza[sitting] position, but it is only through techniques such as this that the true power of aikido, i.e. using the focused power of the whole body, can be learned … it could be said that ikkajo [ikkyo] is the most basic of techniques and also the most difficult.”

There are three particular principles in Judo: kuzushi, or unbalancing the opponent; tsukuri, or the correct action for the attack; and kake, the attack itself.  It is very easy in aikido to see the attack, and since most practice is predetermined, one is very well aware of the correct action, but often the initial unbalancing is completely missed.  Perhaps there is an atemi, or strike, which has not been noticed.  Morihiro Saito says:

“Atemi are an essential part of basic and advanced techniques and should not be omitted from your practice.”

There is always something new to learn, or to be taught.  And this is what continues to thrill me and brings me back to aikido, and I suspect it applies to most other aikido practitioners too.    And all of those lessons are also lessons to be applied outside the dojo.

We can always try to extend our attention outside of our narrow focus.