In our organisation there is an instructor who does a lot of work teaching aikido to young people.  These are often teenage boys who, like most teenage boys, have the potential to get into trouble, only with in their case there may also be the opportunity.

He says that aikido is about control.  First of all, aikido teaches self-control and from that comes the ability to choose what degree of control it may or may not be necessary to use on other people.  Interestingly, I found out recently that that the word “intelligence” derives from two Latin words: inter meaning “between” and legere which means “to choose”.  So you could say he is teaching intelligence.

The first choice he says that aikido offers them is that of self-discipline.  When their friends may be out following around it is the choice to turn up every week rather than follow their lead.

That echoes the scene from the original “Karate Kid” movie where Mr. Miyagi says to Daniel:

“Walk on road, walk right side, safe.  Walk left side, safe.  Walk middle, sooner or later, get squished just like grape.  Here karate, same thing.  Either you karate do yes, or karate do no.  You karate do ‘guess so’ [he makes a squishing sound] just like grape.”

He is offering them the choice to accept instruction, rather than just doing what they want, because they see some benefit in the future that fooling around and getting into trouble in the present just won’t give them.  It’s a simple Yes or No choice, and one in which he doesn’t interfere.  Simply those that turn up get taught and when they work hard they get praised.

Once they start to get proficient in the art, it begins to offer them choices: remember, these are teenage boys who could get into trouble and fights (and, honestly, watching them on the mat as they tease and goad each other only half in jest, I would say confrontations outside the dojo would be almost inevitable when all it takes is the wrong word or the wrong look to the wrong person on the wrong day).  Aikido offers them a range of options in a confrontation that they would not have had before.  Rather like the old TV series “Kung Fu”, in which Master Kan says:

“Avoid, rather than check. Check, rather than hurt. Hurt, rather than maim. Maim, rather than kill.”

This not to say for one minute that they are being taught, but rather that there are options other than fighting, not least of which is avoiding trouble in the first place.  And if these young men feel confident in their ability to defend themselves, they may well feel more confident about walking away from a confrontation.

It is simply the hook with which to catch them, because the more you practise aikido the more choices it gives you; but I doubt you could tell a fifteen-year old boy that one of his choices in a confrontation is to “relate” to his attacker.  But you can tell him that principles of awase (blending or agreeing) and the movement of tai sabaki (sometimes called irimi tenkan) gives him the option of avoiding an attack and escaping from a dangerous situation unscathed.

In “Going Postal” the late Sir Terry Pratchett wrote:

Not doing any magic at all was the chief task of wizards – not ‘not doing magic’ because they couldn’t do magic, but not doing magic when they could do and didn’t.  Any ignorant fool can fail to turn someone into a frog.  You have to be clever to refrain from doing it when you know how easy it is.

Swap the word “magic” for “aikido” and I think you have an idea of what this man is teaching.  And it clearly is intelligence!

And intelligence is what we need to use in making our own choices because aikido itself also offers a variety of styles to study, broadly speaking from “hard” styles like the Yoshinkan Aikido of Gozo Shioda to the “soft” style of Koichi Tohei’s Ki society; although anyone who has studied aikido for some time knows that soft styles can be hard and vice versa!

There are those who believe it is possible to throw someone without touching them by manipulating their ki and those who take pains to be absolutely technically correct: you place your foot here, you move your hand this way.  And everything in between.

Usually in the course of an aikido lifetime you will touch on many styles and, to quote Bruce Lee, “absorb what is useful”, but it will be what is useful to you at that particular stage in your journey.  Some will find a style, or a teacher, that suits them completely and remain there.  Others will move on from teacher to teacher and style to style, absorbing what is useful to them and discarding what is not.  And one of the most difficult choices is to discard something that was useful at one time, but no longer is.  Because we stand so close to our art, it can be hard to stand back and see the complete picture.

Aikido also offers choice in the variety of teachers.  Most of them good, some average and a few bad.  And they’ve all been through the same process of making choices and many are continuing to do so.  One or two become stuck, Western sensei who choose to become more Japanese than the Japanese sensei themselves, speaking in pidgin English, barking out criticisms at them and demonstrating techniques on them to the point of injury – and students who choose to the regard the injuries so received as an honour or a “teaching”.  And the occasional one who becomes a virtual cult leader, giving the impression they are holding back “secret teachings” for “special students” and students who choose to do anything to gain those secrets.

But for the most part, there are teachers who regard themselves as fellow travellers on an aikido path that never ends, who are prepared to share all they have learned, are open to learning more, or even unlearning.

There are many paths in aikido, and perhaps we would be better off translating the “do” as “a way” instead of “the way” because then we might remain more open to possibilities rather than insisting on the rightness of our interpretation of Kotegaeshi or irimi nage.

If we don’t, we’re not a lot different from the boys who choose not to come to our instructor’s class and we reduce our choices instead of increasing them.

Unlike martial arts with kata like karate and Iaido, taekwondo and styles of kung fu, Aikido cannot really be practised on its own.
Nor do we use a wooden dummy like wing chun practitioners or a makiwara (striking post) like karateka.
I know that Terry Dobson says in his book “It’s a Lot Like Dancing” that after he discovered aikido he didn’t have anyone to practise with so he started practising with the apple tree outside his window, learning to be gentle and not break the branches.
And certainly there are jo and bokken suburi, tan ren uchi (striking practice with a bokken, traditionally on bound bamboo and now often on car tyres), and even the famous 31-count jo kata which teach us something about footwork, hanmi, balance, extension and correct use of the hips, but ultimately aikido requires a partner for practice.
In aikido we practise kumi waza which translates roughly as a couple (kumi) and technique (waza). This means two human beings in relation to each other. Aikido is all about relationships.
First of all there is our relationship with ourselves. As Wendy Palmer says in her book “The Practice of Freedom – Aikido Principles as a Spiritual Guide”:
One of the first steps that we take in our journey toward happiness and freedom is to develop a relationship with ourselves.
If a technique is going badly I know that first and foremost I am not relaxed. For whatever reason, I am not at ease with myself, or in myself. I am thinking about the past, some aspect of the technique I think I have learnt or been taught by some other sensei and I am trying to apply it that teaching to what is happening now.
Or I am thinking about the future and imagining how it will turn out. The one thing I am definitely not doing is being present and doing the technique Now.
In order to do a technique it is important not to be divided. If you have been practising long enough it is possible to do a technique without being present, relying on muscle memory alone whilst you think about something else, something that happened before practice or what you are going to do afterwards – your shopping list, or a project at work, or that worrying little rattle in your car. But when you practise like this, you are not having a relationship with yourself.
So to start with it is important that you are not ignoring yourself. Today are you happy or sad, irritated by something that happened at work or pleased by something that happened at home? Do your knees ache or is there no suffering in your body today? When you walked in the dojo did you feel a connection with something greater than yourself, did you have that feeling already or have you never experienced anything like that?
You must learn to pay attention to yourself; not necessarily trying to fix what you perceive to be wrong or feel smug about what is going well, but to accept that how you perform your techniques today won’t be the same way you did last lesson or how you will in the next.
This acceptance, not forcing the technique to be what it is not, is one of the steps towards experiencing ki.
Gozo Shioda kancho once said that on a day when you feel right, the dojo feels right and the technique feels right, ki is flowing.
I don’t think this means that ki is only attainable infrequently. I believe its meaning is that when you are fully present, and not engaged in an internal monologue, even if your technique is not perfect, then ki will flow.
Of course, having established what sort of relationship you have with yourself, you need to consider your partner.
Bruce Lee once said if he was attacked and injured or killed someone in the course of defending himself, then his legal defence would be that he didn’t do anything, but that “it happened.” He had trained himself to such an extent that he would have reacted instinctively, and without thought.
This denies an important part of our martial arts practice – our relationship with uke, our attacker. We should be able to respond, and not react to the attack, and this gives us an important tool. It allows us the choice of what to do – how much or how little.
Because everything that you are experiencing, your partner is experiencing too – thinking about that shopping list, or a project at work, or that worrying little rattle in the car. They feel happy or sad, irritated by something that happened at work or pleased by something that happened at home. Either their knees ache or today no suffering in their body? They may have a feeling that they are connected with something greater than themselves already or they may never have experienced it.
Added to all this is the feeling they have about the technique that they are about to receive: will it be applied sharply, barely giving time to adjust for a breakfall? It may be that this is a technique they hate to receive and so their attack is a little tentative, or one which they find it difficult to breakfall from, so they stiffen up midway through the technique.
You must be aware of all of this as tori. You are never applying the technique for your sake alone; it is always a shared endeavour. As Newton points out, for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Everything we do affects everything else.
This is relating to your uke on a physical level. Your extended awareness is sensitive to changes in your partner’s body. This ensures that you can maintain their unbalancing in order to perform your technique effectively with causing unnecessary pain or harm.
And as the physical body reflects the mind, you can sense what your partner is feeling, provided you remain relaxed and open. Then you respond to the attack rather than attempt to impose yourself on your partner.
Shioda says “Total Aikido – the Master Course”:
The meaning of ki in the phrase “harmonise your ki,” refers to sensitivity to your partner, and covers all of the elements that come out of your partner’s state of being … how your opponent is going to attack you, which direction he is going to move in, and where he will focus his power.”
As you come to accept yourself and your state of mind and all of the emotions you are feeling, so through touch you become aware of those thoughts and feelings your partner has which are reflected in his or her body.
Finally of course, there is the relationship between you, Life, the Universe and Everything. In his book, “The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are”, Alan Watts says:
As the ocean ‘waves,’ the universe ‘peoples’. Every individual is an expression of the whole realm of nature, a unique action of the total universe.
That is to say you, your partner, everyone in the dojo, and everyone in the world is a manifestation of the universe, so it is important to learn to relate to it, rather than live in isolation from it.

This is the flip side to my last blog, the yin to its yang. Or perhaps it demonstrates how completely aikido has permeated my life.
Often I will find myself reading something, watching television or having a conversation with someone and once again the light bulb will go on. It happens so frequently now that I carry a little notebook with me to jot down a couple of words that will help me remember later what had caught my attention and how it might apply to aikido.
Once again, I’ll give you a couple of recent examples and one older one:
1. I was reading an article in a magazine about the satirical cartoonist Wally Fawkes, and something he said made me note down “satire – irimi”. That was enough for me to be able to come back to the article later and pick out what I wanted. Fawkes illustrated the cartoon strip and it was written by the infamous jazz musician George Melly. Sometimes, Melly’s satirical barbs became a little too sharp and Fawkes would say to him: “Don’t overdo the satire, George. The best way of jumping on a target is to appear to be walking past it.”
Initially I thought the phrase pretty accurately describes how to do a good irimi-nage, but on reflection it is a good general description of how to perform aikido.
Webster’s dictionary defines satire as “a way of using humour to show someone or something is foolish, weak, bad, etc.”, but Jonathan Swift said it better: “Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody’s face but their own.”
The best satire is a rapier not a bludgeon, it is subtle, and the best aikido techniques are the same. Ideally uke shouldn’t be aware of what you’ve done until he hits the floor. It’s easy to overdo aikido; we all get carried away with an energetic practice, but what we really want to learn is how to appear to be doing nothing.
After all, if aikido has a self-defence aspect surely it will be most effective if our aggressor is unaware that we are going to do anything.

2. The other note I want to talk about is one I made because I caught a piece on a radio news programme about an auction of old musical instruments. One of them was a very old clavichord, one of the oldest keyboards in existence. The presenter was asking a musician what it was like to play it. She said it gave an insight into why composers wrote music the way they did. With half an ear on what she said next I scribbled down “clavichord limits throwing.” She went on to explain that there were things clavichords could not do back then and composers had to write to the limits of the machine.
It seems to me that this can be applied to the way we perform our techniques. Sometimes we get so fixated on how we do techniques that we forget who we are doing them on. Some people have stiffer joints than others, and yet we still attempt to do shiho nage on them as if we were practising with someone who is almost double-jointed. We feel the tension in uke, and yet we keep going because “This is how you do the technique” and we don’t stop until we hear them shout out in pain.
When we practise, we are the composers, aikido is our music and uke is like that old clavichord. We must be aware of what they can and can’t do and adjust our technique accordingly. This is one of the reasons why it is a good idea to change partners when doing the same technique, and where possible, to practise with children. They are delicate, their bones are soft, they are not yet fully-formed and are easily damaged; also, they are not pre-conditioned like us adults and do not fall where they are supposed to. Unless you are sensitive to them, it can be very easy to hurt them.
After all, when practising, is it such a bad thing to regard uke as a precious musical instrument that you want to play to their limits without damaging them? Just as there would be no music with instruments to play, so there would be no aikido with uke to practise with.

3. When, against the odds, Steve Davis beat John Higgins to make it through to the quarter finals of the 2010 Snooker World Championship, he said something very interesting in the post-match interview. All young snooker players are told to keep their head still when making a s shot, because when you move your head you move your spine and thus your whole posture which disrupts your cue action. Experienced players usually do this automatically, but Davis said a friend had texted him after watching him on TV to warn him that he’d developed a bad habit of moving his head on a shot, so during the tournament, and in this match in particular, Davis kept focused on this very basic point of technique, rather than all the other tiny things that affect cue action.
It got me thinking about the how way we move our head affects our aikido. Balancing on top of the spine and held in place by a complex system of muscles and ligaments, the head has a centre of gravity all its own. When attempting to break uke’s balance (kuzushi) ultimately we are trying to pull the spine out of alignment by destroying the head’s centre of gravity. And at the same time we are trying to maintain the stability of our own head and upright structure.
It reminded me once again that there are two people in any technique, and my first thought should be about my own stability, before I start trying to interfere with anyone else’s!

So there you have it. It turns out that everything is aikido, or to slightly misquote the teacher I mentioned earlier:
“When you’re doing aikido, you’re not doing aikido. When you’re not doing aikido, you’re doing aikido.”