Monthly Archives: October 2016

Mens Sana in Corpore Sano – by Mark Peckett

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10001392_600051626755332_109218248_nIn a previous blog I talked about the importance of the stability of the head.  That is, maintaining the stability of your own, and de-stabilising that of your uke’s. There is a nice image used in tai chi.  You must think of your legs and pelvis as a table, and your upper body as a precious vase full of water resting on that that table.  The object is not to spill the water from the vase.

Morihiro Saito shihan believed that the basis of all empty-handed, sword, and staff techniques was the mastery of aikido’s basic posture (hanmi).  In his book “Aikido”, the previous Doshu, Kisshomaru Ueshiba states that all the flexible and natural movements of aikido originate from correct posture.

He writes interestingly hidari (left) and migi (right) hanmi. “The entire body should be flexible without tension and ready to counter any changes.  In Aikido when you assume this position, your body needs to be in sankakutai (triangular form).  (An equilateral tetrahedron is the most stable form, and one which changes into a sphere when turned.)” Standing in a triangular stance, you have a stable yet flexible base to move from.

Obviously, in the end there are no stances in aikido, as you are in continuous motion, but in order to learn the principles and techniques it is necessary to learn from static forms. So you have a relaxed stance, knees slightly bent and weight evenly distributed between the feet.  You are balanced.

This is external or physical balance, which could be characterised as relaxation in the body and a lowering of the centre.  This stability on the outside should reflect an internal balance.  On the inside there is a quietness in the mind and a stillness of the emotions which means that the mind is open and receptive, able to receive the attack, blend with it and return its energy to uke.

There is an interesting passage on this in a book called “Living Aikido”: This scenario holds true for all practices … It is a good practice to study a technique and find the points were uke is soft and nage [thrower] is soft, where these roles begin to shift, and where they are fully reversed.  What is important is to maintain the balance of positive and receptive between partners within the technique.

It is interesting to note that the word “receptive” is used  as the opposite to “positive” rather than the more common “negative”.  I think that receptive is a more accurate translation of the concept of “yin” in the famous Taoist “yin-yang” symbol. A stable base thus becomes that from which all things are possible.  It is infinite.

Now this must apply equally to uke – again, it is interesting that the word “uke” derives from the verb “ukeru” which means “to receive”.  A good attack must be made from a stable base.  For example, if the attack is tsuki (punch), then it must be made with intent and energy in order that tori can practise their technique; if the punch is weak and does not even make contact, or is actually aiming to miss, or if the attacker over leans, on these occasions, the attack is very yin and has no value.

Linda Holiday, chief instructor of Aikido of Santa Cruz, and direct student of Motomichi Anno sensei, teaches that throughout the technique uke should continue to maintain a connection with tori by trying to keep their centre connected with the person throwing them.

This is not to say that they should actively resist the technique, but rather that they should turn towards tori rather than away from them.  This reflects the understanding of the word “uke” as “receiver” or “receptive.”  It is very difficult to receive something from or be receptive to someone or if you turn away from them.

Terry Dobson’s book “Aikido in Everyday Life” (which when it was first published in the 1970s was given the less attractive, but more self-help style title “Attack-tics – the Art of Giving in to Get Your Way”) addresses the same issue of inner balance. He applied the principles of aikido to the conflicts we experience around us all the time.

Usually they are not life-or-death, but our body through the autonomic “fight-or-flight” reflex behaves as though they are, and we automatically go into full-on confrontation mode instead of handling those conflicts in a way that is positive, humane and mature.

If you treat a friendship, job or marriage like a contest, and try to score points until your friend, colleague or spouse admits defeat you might win in the short term, but the long term damage to the relationship may prove to be a loss.

Not all conflicts are a zero-sum game where one side wins by making the other side lose. To some extent the writing reflects the psychoanalytical approach which was prevalent in the 1960s and 70s; the ideas of Freud, Jung and Adler that problems could be solved from the inside out.  People came to them with physical symptoms which were regarded as external manifestations of their inner problems.  Solve these internal conflicts and the external problems would go away.

I would suggest that working on stability in the body, an upright posture but relaxed posture, with a lowered centre and attention paid to the breathing can have a calming effect on the mind and emotions. To explain the title to this blog: the Latin phrase “Mens sana in corpore sano” is usually translated as “A healthy mind in a healthy body”, but sometimes as “sound mind” and “sound body”. Sound in the sense of “whole”, or mind and body as one.

So next time someone irritates you by asking that tired old question “Yes, but have you ever used aikido in real life?” you should breathe, find your balance and say “I’m using it now.”

Twitt

How to Bounce Back By Mark Peckett

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In 2009 the Pentagon rolled out a multi-million dollar programme called “Comprehensive Soldier Fitness.” In the words of the programme’s promotional video, the aim was to teach American soldiers to “take control of your emotions, before they take control of you.”

Essentially, they are teaching how to respond instead of react.  Or to put it another way, giving soldiers a choice.  Before its introduction, what was basically required of a soldier was that he could kill on command without hesitation.  This training, the first of its kind in the military, was meant to improve performance in combat and head off the mental health problems, which included depression, post-traumatic stress disorder and suicide, that plagued about one-fifth of troops returning from Afghanistan and Iraq.

It attempts to defuse or expose common habits of thinking and flawed beliefs that can lead to anger and frustration by mentally disputing unexamined thoughts and assumptions.  Quoted in the New York Times article by Benedict Carey dated 17 August 2009, one veteran of several deployments to Iraq, said he was out at dinner the night before when a customer at a nearby table said he and his friends were being obnoxious:

“At one time maybe I would have thrown the guy out the window and gone for the jugular,” the sergeant said. But guided by the new techniques, he fought the temptation and decided to buy the man a beer instead. “The guy came over and apologized,” he said.

The training is based in part on the ideas of Dr. Aaron Beck and the late Albert Ellis, the Founder of Cognitive Behaviour Therapy.  The concept behind CBT is that we: (a) experience an event, then (b) interpret it and finally (c), experience an emotion in line with our interpretation.

This in itself refers back to the philosophy of the Greek Stoic philosopher Epictetus born in C.E. 55 who said: “Men are disturbed not by things, but by their opinions about them”, and his belief that it was possible to remain calm and mentally strong in times of trouble and uncertainty by reminding ourselves what is in our control and what is not.  And essentially he only thing he regarded as under his control was his beliefs.

Basically he devised an intellectual process for the examination of his emotional reaction to external stimuli, which is broadly also how CBT works and what American soldiers returning from combat were being taught.

So what does this have to do with aikido?

Well, there is an equally compelling argument that emotions can be worked upon from the outside in, through working on the body.  The mystic Gurdjieff said:

We do not recognise to what extent the intellectual, the emotional and moving (body) functions are mutually dependent, although, at the same time we can be aware of how much our moods and emotional states depend on our movements and postures.  If a man assumes a posture that corresponds, in him, to the feeling of grief or dejection, then within a short time he will actually feel grief or dejection.  Fear, indifference and so on may be created by artificial changes of posture.”

If we think to a time when we became extremely emotional about something, we will probably recall how our physical body also became contorted.  It’s also true to say there are days when we turn up for practice feeling lousy, and by the time the class is over we feel better.  And vice versa.  And these bad classes are just as valuable, if not more so, for they allow us to work on our problems in a controlled environment.

Wendy Palmer, sixth dan aikido black belt and senior instructor at Aikido of Tamalpais writes in her book “The Practice of Freedom – Aikido Principles as a Spiritual Guide”:

Training allows us to see our aggression and fear, so that we can begin to examine … how the patterns affect our daily behaviour.

She goes on to say that training has taught her that when she is relaxed, she is more powerful and natural: “A calm and settled state allows a natural, organic power to move through us without interference from our mental agenda or biases.”

In aikido, a lot of time and talk is spent on centring, that idea of putting your attention on your physical centre of mass, and point in the abdomen about an inch or two below the navel in the centre of the pelvis because in any conflict situation the natural response is one that has evolved over hundreds of thousands years: the so-called “fight-or-flight response”, although technically I suppose it should be called a reaction as it is an instinctive response triggered by the autonomic nervous system.  Lots of physical things happen as a result of the reaction being fired, including increased heart rate and breathing, release of adrenalin, and blood routed to the muscles and away from the skin, the stomach and frontal lobe.  In martial arts imagery we might say our inner energy travels upwards, and we “blow our top” or we “lose our head”.

So by working on this exercise of moving towards the centre and developing a strong connection there, we counteract the upward movement of fear in the body.  Which brings us back to resilience.

According to the Stoics, the world divides into two parts – that which we can control and that which we can’t, and mostly it is everything outside ourselves over which we have no control.  Where aikido empowers us is that it teaches us to take control of ourselves, our thoughts and emotions, and then gives us a little bit extra: it shows us how we can control some of the outside world.

In the dojo we provide, in graduated practice, a simulation of the chaotic world outside which allows us to practise our centering, which leads to mental and emotional calmness and in turn allows us to perform an appropriate response to the level of attack.  We start with paired practice, moving up to multiple and continuous attack, from basic ai-hanmi katate dori to randori where we don’t know what’s coming, and then gradings, which may come as close to the simulation of true conflict that most of us will ever experience.

There is an old Japanese saying Hobo Kore Dojo which means “The world is my dojo”.  While we train in aikido, we are also training our minds and bodies to respond calmly to whatever the world throws at us.

Twitt