Training the mind is as important as training the body; this dawned to me some time ago as a friend and I were walking through an area of Birmingham. It was a lovely summer day and as we don’t get many of these type of days people always use the opportunity to go out with families and friends to make the most of the limited sunshine we do get here in the UK. As we walked up the street ahead of us were a group of young men, who seemed excited by the sunshine and atmosphere of the day. They were loud, boisterous and very sure of themselves.

As my friend and I noticed them the atmosphere changed, maybe looking back they didn’t seem as nefarious as they did at the time. We were young and immature; stereotypes may have played a role in our view of the young people in our way. They looked bored and maybe wanted to have some fun at our expense.

My friend and I had been practising various martial arts for some time and he had been practising far longer than I. He was far better than I and I would consider him one of my teachers. A strange thing then happened which made me think and reconsider my view of training (and now teaching).

My friend held my arm as a child would when threatened by something and placed himself slightly behind me. It was a subtle gesture but I think I understood. It was a call for help, a call to say “this isn’t in my comfort zone and I need assistance”. Adrenaline can be confused for fear on many occasions and our fight or flight responses may manifest in many ways, but it seemed clear to me at the time – “please take charge”.

We carried on walking towards the group of people and they didn’t seem to want to get out of the way, standing confident as if to goad us into a reaction. It was a notorious area for trouble but most of it caused by boredom possibly or a sense of belonging to something which they felt was bigger than them, the collective.

As we came close to them it did seem like they wanted trouble staying in our path and now the shoulder were square to us staring and you could see their minds asking themselves a million questions. Calculating whether to stand down or act. I smiled at one that seemed to be the leader of the pack (Something I had learned from my brother) and said in my most confident voice “excuse me ladies”.

It was a calculation on my part; I didn’t want to have to physically protect myself. Most likely my friend and I would have come out far worse. I didn’t want that at all.

It worked they came out of the way and we walked right on to where we were going. Sometimes a show of madness is enough, everybody is afraid of a psycho.
When the adrenaline calmed down we talked about the incident and concluded the mind and body both need to be worked on.

One can train the body to do the most amazing things but if the mind gives up there is nothing the body can do.

How to train the mind?

Always push yourself that little further than you think you can.
In my Muay Thai training it wasn’t uncommon to puke up. This was seen as something to be proud of. It meant you pushed your body, trained that much harder than before and your body fought back. You felt nauseous, went to the bathroom puked up, rinsed your mouth out and came back for some more.

It does seem these days that we have lost this in our aikido training and some of my students will tell you that our training sessions and our drill work can leave you thoroughly worn out. The look on their faces when I start counting in halves on their sets when they have already given me what they thought was their limit. I want to push them to be the best they can be, and that means pushing the boundaries. This works though, the next week they give me more, now that their minds know that they are capable of doing it.
Get out of your comfort zone and do challenging things.

In all dojos there are always groupings of people that like to train with each other. They become friends feed off of each other. Although this is good, sometimes it is good to break these routines. I put people together that I know will find it hard to train and apply techniques on each other. This is sometimes controlled at first and I let them fail a few times until I see a little frustration on their faces and their minds starts to wonder about the technique and it’s applicability or the way they have been practising it. I then intervene and demonstrate and tell uke to be a good uke and not always let me get away with the cracks in my technique. I demonstrate and then they do, and I try to be patient as not everyone gets it the first time. This nurturing also I find helps their minds when they actually achieve what they thought was previously impossible. I am always very happy at the ecstatic look that comes on their faces.
Nurture, don’t destroy.

Some instructors take great pleasure from putting down students. It is expected by them that the students put the instructor on a pedestal. An ego stroked environment causes submissiveness and creates drones that hinder thinking. These instructors destroy or exclude any person that can think for themselves and even stop them from training in other dojos.

I feel as an instructor, I should never shout at the students, for it not a privilege for the student that I am teaching them. It is a privilege for me that the students have given up their time to learn from me. An instructor must be patient and wise when dealing with students so as to not demean them in any way. Respect is earned and if the instructor is worthy respect will come naturally.

This is from my observations of students and classes I have attended and taught at. I have made many mistakes in my time as an instructor and as a student. I hope I have learned from those mistakes.

By keeping in the forefront that we train the mind also we can develop the mind that doesn’t give up at the first hurdle; a mind that is even equipped for failure sometimes and learns from those mistakes, a mind that is disciplined.

Train well train hard.

I have been reading a book called “Barefoot Doctor’s Handbook for the Urban Warrior” by a man called Stephen Russell. In equal parts it’s a mix of ancient Taoist philosophy, chi kung and new age beliefs with affirmations and visualisation thrown in.

So you could say it’s like the curate’s egg: good in parts.
But one passage in it struck me particularly. It was called “four Ounces” and subtitled “In life, three ounces of pressure is too little, five ounces is too much; four ounces meanwhile, is just right.”

He goes on to say that a response to a thousand pound punch on the cheek is to turn, reducing the amount of pressure to four ounces.

This concept should be very familiar to us as aikidoka. Awase or blending is exactly the same idea, accepting the attack like a revolving door and turning with it to let it pass. In fact, it is so familiar that I really don’t want to address it in this particular blog.
I want to look at what he says further on in the passage, and it is the reverse side of blending which isn’t really talked about in aikido at all. After all, once we have turned and uke is off posture, we tend to take that as the point where we, as tori, perform the technique, and the more powerfully the better. Is there a better feeling than the sound of our training partner crashing onto the mat as we demonstrate the power of our technique?

Stephen Russell says:
… when you apply pressure in any situation, apply it in measures of no more or less than four ounces. When you wallop a child’s balloon with a ‘thousand pounds’, there’s less pressure exerted over a greater surface, causing the balloon to move only a short distance and stall. When you flick that balloon with your finger using only four ounces, you are applying more pressure pro rata over a smaller surface area, thereby enabling it to sail gracefully across the room …

When I started practising aikido there was a lot of talk about “leading” your partner, but no one ever really explained the underlying reason, which is to unbalance them. Consequently there was a lot of movement to no real purpose.

Kuzushi or breaking your opponent’s balance is fundamental to aikido as it is to all of the throwing arts. The nature of aikido is that a small person should be able to throw a big person, but you cannot do that if the big person has a solid, stable base and you are the small person. In fact, exactly the opposite is going to happen! But once the big person is off posture as a result of leading or a well-placed atemi, it should become easy to throw them.
And of course, breaking your opponent’s balance has the added advantage that he will probably be using his arms to keep his balance and is therefore less likely to punch you in the face!

So, once uke’s posture is broken and he is off-balance, even if he has attacked with a thousand pounds of pressure, it will only take four ounces to topple him.
The use of too much pressure shows up particularly in nikkyo. It is one of the hardest techniques for beginners to grasp (no pun intended) and when they start they always apply maximum force to get minimum effect.

In “Total Aikido” Gozo Shioda shihan has a number of “don’ts” in performing the technique (all of the italics are my emphasis):
• “It is not a matter of merely twisting uke’s wrist”;
• “Do not waste your power by merely turning uke’s wrist; it is important to understand the correct angle and line in order to unbalance uke”;
• “If at this time you relax your hold on uke’s hand, you will not be able to bend his wrist when the time comes to cut down”;
• “If you stand directly in front, you will not be able to bend the elbow sufficiently as you turn it over”;
• “ … make sure that you don’t change the distance between the hand that you are holding and your own body … make sure you don’t twist the wrist, otherwise the direction of the power will be wrong, and you will not be able to use the power that you develop by moving forwards”.

That’s quite a list of “what not to do’s” to bear in mind, and the first time that a beginner actually gets nikkyo right, they are still applying the same amount of force that they originally used and uke disappears through the mat in an effort to relieve the pain.
Little by little beginners learn to power back, until they can apply the technique with four ounces of pressure.

What makes Stephen Russell’s four ounce concept particularly interesting is that he extends it to the way we speak to people, the way we make physical contact with each other and even the way we touch the earth we walk on.

He recognises that this four ounce idea is a metaphor, but in encouraging us to be have lightness of touch he is also encouraging us to be more receptive.
After all, you are going to be far less aware of what is going on around you if you are striding down the street like an invading army.

He uses a tai chi image which I have often used in my class to encourage my students to maintain a vertical posture whilst practising:
“ … visualise a cup of tea in your tantien [one point]. Your challenge is to retain all the tea in the cup as you walk, without spilling a single drop.”

I tell them, imagine that your legs and pelvis form a table and your upper body is a vase filled with water. Try to perform your techniques without pouring the water away.
So what he is saying is maintain your open-ness and treat everything with care – not the kind of care with which you would treat a poisonous snake, but the care with which you would hold a baby or look after an old person. And this care works best when the recipient is unaware that they are receiving care at all. It is subtle and that to me is the nature of the best aikido techniques.

These two words translate from the Japanese word Shoshin. “Sho” means first or beginning and “Shin” means mind, spirit or attitude. It is generally taken to mean having an open-ness and not bringing any preconceptions to what is being studied.
It was popularised in the West by Zen monk Shunryu Suzuki in his book “Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind”. He wrote:
In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, in the expert’s mind there are few.
This seems a fairly simple concept. It is advice against thinking you know it all. And yet, as I say to my students, if a technique I am demonstrating looks easy, it’s probably quite difficult, and if it looks difficult, it will probably prove to be quite easy.
I think this concept is nowhere near as easy as it sounds. Within the Martial Arts it is generally assumed to be the attitude required to practise and encompasses the determination to remain sincere, open and prepared to sacrifice and endure with faith in the teaching.
It is then assumed that that same state of mind should be held onto with determination throughout every stage of training as one progresses from being a beginner to an advanced student or an instructor oneself .
However, this is another of those Zen koan situations. Lost innocence cannot be regained by trying to regain it. Knowledge has got in the way, and the harder one tries to find one’s way back to it, the further one moves away from it. This is the meaning of the story of Adam and Eve – once we have tasted the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, we cannot return to Eden.
The same applies to Beginner’s Mind. The moment you begin to practise, you lose it. You begin to interpret and compare. The possibilities we have to learn are reduced every day we step into the dojo. This is something that Eckhart Tolle addresses in his book “The Power of Now”:
… virtually everyone hears a voice, or several voices, in their head all the time … Even if the voice is relevant to the situation in hand, it will interpret it in terms of the past … so you see and judge the present through the eyes of the past and get a totally distorted view of it.
This is how we lose our Beginner’s Mind. But can we regain it?
Obviously there are ways. The title of Tolle’s book clearly indicates one: The Power of Now. Paying attention to the moment, our breathing, the way we are moving, the sounds and smells of the dojo as we practise.
As I’ve said before, I am fond of saying to students who have just done a good technique (and they usually register it with a look of utter surprise on their face), “You might as well go home now – you’re not going to do another technique as good as that all night!”
I know because I’ve experienced it myself. For whatever reason, without thought, everything came together perfectly and astonished both myself and my uke. And then I ruined the rest of the evening trying to recapture what I’d just done: “Did I put my foot there?” “Can I do it again with a different uke?”
This is, if you like, The Power of Not Now. And the harder you try to get it back, the more it slips from your grasp.
This sense of awareness of something lost is seems to be universal as is the yearning to return to it. Hermann Hesse said:
… we are scarcely conscious of all we could do, all that we might make of our freedom … if we ever think of the freedom we possessed and have lost … we may well feel the greatest yearning for those days and imagine that if we ever had such freedom again we would fully enjoy its pleasures and potentialities.
I found this story by Mary Jaksch on her website “Goodlife Zen”, which illustrated what it feels like to get another chance at Beginner’s Mind.
She is a karate 4th dan and had decided to return training after a gap of five years. With the agreement of her instructor she came back as a lowly white belt. She says that what she found was this was an opportunity to reconnect with her practice in a new way – she no longer had to be a senior black belt on the outside – only on the inside.
Starting back down at the bottom end of the mat everything became very simple: just this punch, just this kick, just this block. All the other stuff, climbing up the ranks, being better than the people beneath you and not making a fool of yourself, aspiring to be as good as the people above you or thinking you already are better than some of the people above you, was all let go.
She goes on to say that starting again with Beginner’s Mind meant that she dropped all thoughts about what she should be. The voice that provides a near enough continuous commentary in our heads was stopped for her.
Of course now she is beginning to face the difficulty of maintaining that silence as her teacher pressures her to take gradings and rise up the ranks again!
I hope she resisted the temptation of telling the white belts she practised with that she had been a black belt before. Her techniques should have demonstrated that very well for her .
I certainly find when I go to a seminar or a new club that I tend to drop into the conversation somewhere how long I’ve been practising, and who I’ve practised with. This is not Beginner’s Mind. This is shoring up my ego, and as a result trying to give someone else’s ego a knock.
So maybe that’s what we can try to move towards in achieving Beginner’s Mind. Trying to treat each technique we practise wherever we practise as something new that doesn’t need a commentary or comparison. It just is, and it just is now.
And if we can achieve it occasionally in the dojo, maybe we can achieve it occasionally in real life!