By Mark Peckett

This is not a blog about aikido technique. There are already plenty of those. This is a blog about what I think about aikido. It is about what I feel about aikido and how I feel when I am doing aikido.
When I first took up aikido I was always desperate for my next grade, always counting my classes to see if I had put enough time in for the next grading. It was always push, push, push and sometimes I passed and sometimes I failed. I remember how excited I was whenever I passed a grading; I would rush straight to Woolworth’s and buy a tin of Dylon because this was in the days before the internet and martial arts shops, and I would proudly sport my newly-dyed belt (and hands) at the next class and move further up the line to the coveted black belt position. And I remember how disappointed I would feel when I failed, how angry I got with the grading panel and how resentful of others who had passed. I failed a lot, and I nurtured that anger and resentment to motivate myself to go back to practise and grade again
And then one day I was kneeling near the top of the line with the other black belts and suddenly first dan did not seem enough. I wanted to be a second dan, I wanted my own club, I wanted to be called “sensei”.
I do not know when I stopped wanting these things so badly, but I do know that since I let go of wanting them and waiting for them, what I need has come to me when I am ready for it.
Naturally my aikido technique has changed as I have gotten older. When I first started practising I wanted to throw people further, higher and harder. Then I wanted to throw them better. Now I want to allow them to fall. But that is not to say it is how I will feel a week, a month or a year from now. Aikido teaches us that all things change – even aikido. But it also teaches us how to respond to that change. Aikido changes you over time – not just physically, but mentally and spiritually. Not only does aikido change, and is changed by each generation, but it also changes us.
Technique itself is easy – it just takes practice. In his book “Outliers: the Story of Success”, Malcolm Gladwell quotes the famous study by Herbert Simon and William Chase, published in “American Scientist” in 1973:
There are no instant experts in chess—certainly no instant masters or grandmasters. There appears not to be on record any case (including Bobby Fischer) where a person reached grandmaster level with less than about a decade’s intense preoccupation with the game. We would estimate, very roughly, that a master has spent perhaps 10,000 to 50,000 hours staring at chess positions…”
It is the intention behind the technique that is hard to find. Once you know technique it is easy to throw someone with force; in fact, most beginners do. This is why you will often see beginners over-balance, or even fall, the first time they accomplish a technique without force, or rather, using their partner’s force instead. It also usually produces a look of astonishment on the face of tori and the rueful question from uke as he gets up: “What did you do?” To which the answer is usually: “I have no idea!” Of course, they will usually spend the rest of the class becoming more and more frustrated as they try to replicate the effect. This is why I will often tell students, only half-joking, who have just performed a good technique, “You might as well go home now – you’re not going to do another technique that good tonight!”
In Chinese this act of not-forcing is called wu-wei, which translates roughly as “not doing”. It does not mean “doing nothing”, but rather “not forcing”, and applies equally well not only to technique but to trying to recapture a good technique over and over again.
Bruce Lee said something similar in response to a letter sent a Black Belt magazine reader in gthe late 1960s:
… jeet kune do is interested in feeling what is and not ‘doing’ what was or what might be. In other words, the here and now, the direct experience with one’s opponent, the two halves of the whole … while what is is constantly moving, constantly undergoing a transformation, never fixed and always alive.
But if aikido is “a way to reconcile the world and make all human beings one family” as O-Sensei Morihei Ueshiba said, I believe we have to go beyond astonishing and effortless technique. We have to move to no technique. By this I do not mean like those samurai who could adopt a ready stance which allowed no opening to attack and their opponents would admit defeat without a blow being struck because to me this still seems to be an assertion of domination or force of one man’s technique over another and cannot be regarded as “wu wei”.
So I suppose I would say that – at the moment – I aspire to the “technique of no-technique” where there is no attack or defence because there is no desire to attack or defend.
I am not saying there is anything wrong with a good old-fashioned slam-bang around in the dojo at the end of a long hard day. In fact sometimes, it is the best possible thing, and if I tried to tell you otherwise, I am no longer practising wu-wei; rather, I am trying to force you to think my way, and if it was an aikido technique, it would produce a very unpleasant, un-aikido-like clash. After all, we have to practise our technique so we should always be trying to achieve the best possible aikido technique we can do at that particular moment in time, without trying to achieve the best possible aikido technique we can do!
Many of the major world religions recognise the need to act without an end in view. In the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna says to Arjuna:
“Abandon absolutely all concern for the fruits of the action – to the work alone are you entitled, never to its fruit … he who knows the way that the way of renunciation and the way of action are one, he verily knows.”
This is what makes aikido be endlessly fascinating. Ten different aikido instructors will teach the same technique ten different ways and every one of them will inform your own technique in some way, either as something you want to use, or something you decide does not work for you. And this is a good thing, because if aikido was simply just about repetition then we would fall into the trap of simply training muscle memory and aikido must be more than that. After all, it is a “do” – a way or a path and not a destination – the trick is to keep practising without wanting to get anywhere or wanting to stop too long at places along the way.