The other night in class I was explaining how many aikido techniques there are. One or two students were quite disappointed when I came up with only about sixteen main ones – five immobilisations and eleven projections. “Is that all?”
And to be fair to myself, the number of aikido techniques has been distilled down to even less than that by some practitioners. Here are what they consider the five essential forms:
1. Ikkyo
2. Shiho-nage
3. Irimi-nage
4. Kokyu-nage
5. Koshi-nage.
After that, the class turned into a lesson in mental mathematics. First of all, all of those techniques can be done either as an irimi or a tenkan move. That takes us up to sixteen times two: thirty-three. Then we multiply that number by the number of attacks which is generally listed at about twenty three (this was where I would normally have reached for the calculator, and I have done now to check my reckoning for this blog): it comes out at three hundred and sixty-eight.
Then there are suwari waza (sitting techniques) and hanmi handachi waza (one sitting, one standing) versions of all three hundred and sixty-eight techniques. That takes me up to one thousand, one hundred and four! Then we have henka waza or changed techniques. Not all techniques are suitable to be changed to any other technique, but if you assume about fifty percent of them do then you are now up to one thousand, six hundred and fifty six techniques.
Then there are multiple attacks and there are kaeshi waza or counter techniques. And we haven’t even got to weapons techniques yet! After jo projections and immobilisations there’s knife-taking, sword-taking and jo-taking.
And kokyu techniques.
And then all the different circumstances in which the attack can take place – whether you are standing or seated, have a lot of room to move, or very little, uneven ground, in the dark. It never ends.
The point I was trying to make was that there is more than enough in aikido to last us a lifetime if all we’re interested in is collecting techniques. After that there’s another lifetime required to polish them, and several lifetimes after that to learn the different ways that different people have of doing them.
So really, within certain basic principles, the techniques and variations are infinite.
I suppose some people could regard it as depressing that there is so much to learn and so little time, but I find it exciting.
In a lecture given by the Founder himself, called “The Harmony of Love” O-Sensei said:
Aikido is none other the manifestation of the workings of love. Love gives form to the universe and purifies all things. The universe scatters the seeds from which all things grow; it contains the infinite [my emphasis] power which nourishes and allows them to prosper.
He goes on to say:
The actual forms of the universe are revealed within the human body. We must begin to see the universe within us and awaken to the principles of balance and love … the universe unfolds in a never-ending mosaic of many forms; each one a different aspect of its fullness, each one in balance with all others.
What he seems to be saying is that aikido is an opportunity to look beyond our small lives and connect with the infinite. And the best thing about this is that it is not a mystical process, it is very practical, and each improvement in our practice is reflected in our daily lives.
For example, one of my teachers used to say to me, when my techniques were too small and fussy, when I was staring at what I was doing with my hands, “you must try to touch the walls and the ceiling with your hands.” And when I thought my movements were becoming bigger, “touch the trees outside, touch the sky, touch the moon.”
There aren’t many things we do in our everyday lives that encourage to become so big we can touch the sun. In the Buddhist Metta Bhavana meditation practice, a similar thing happens. In the first stage, you think with unconditional loving-kindness of yourself; then a good friend; then a person towards whom your feelings are neutral; then someone you actually dislike; and finally, all four people together, and then allowing that feeling of unconditional loving-kindness to spread on throughout the world to all living beings everywhere. This meditation encourages us to touch the infinite with love.
Buddhists do it by sitting, aikidoka do it through their practice of techniques. I find myself now telling students of my own to reach out beyond the walls of the dojo, to try and touch the sky.
I also see improvements in my students’ performance when I tell them to do something as simple as turning their head during a technique. From a purely mechanical point of view, the head leads the body and generates greater momentum, just like a ballet dancer. But sensei like Morihiro Saito and Shigemi Inagaki emphasise that in aikido every attack should be consider a multiple attack, and therefore you should always be turning to face the potential enemy behind you.
This awareness is commonly called zanshin and translates roughly as “remaining mind”. It is a state of relaxed alertness. But the just-thrown uke is only a small part of one’s surroundings. There’s the dojo, its walls and ceiling, and outside there are the trees, the sky, the moon and the sun.
This means that when we are practising aikido it is constantly putting the infinite in all of us, if we’re prepared to explore it. It doesn’t mean we have to be trying to touch the sky all the time, just acknowledging the potential.
So we might be working on ikkyo, possibly that aspect of it which some practitioners call “connectedness”. There is the connection between you and your partner and then there is the connection you have with yourself. You have to be able to harmonise with yourself in order that you can move in harmony with someone else.
And this is enough to be working on – the infinite can wait. But because the infinite is implicit in aikido, we don’t have to seek it. We can keep on working on the details and aikido will lead us to the infinite anyway.

Many years ago I knew an Alexander Technique teacher who was also a Buddhist. He once said something which I have pondered on and returned to many times over the years. He said:
Stress is not a bad thing. Everything needs stress to stop it falling apart. It’s when stress becomes distress that things go wrong.
The image he used to explain this statement was a bridge. Two forces keep a bridge up: tension and compression.
Tension is what happens to a rope during a game of tug-of-war. It undergoes tension from the two sweaty opposing teams pulling on it. This force also acts on bridge structures, resulting in tensional stress.
Compression is what happens when you push down on a spring and compress it, and by squishing it, shortening its length. Compressional stress, therefore, is the opposite of tensional stress.
When compression overcomes an object’s ability to endure that force buckling occurs. When tension surpasses an object’s ability to handle the lengthening force then snapping happens.
Compression and tension exist in all bridges and they are both capable of damaging part of the bridge as various forces act on the structure. It’s the job of the bridge designer to handle these forces without buckling or snapping.
The best way to deal with these powerful forces is to either dissipate them or transfer them. With dissipation, the design allows the force to be spread out evenly over a greater area, so that no one spot bears the concentrated brunt of it. In transferring force, a stress is moved from an area of weakness to an area of strength.
So you can see that it is balanced stress that actually keeps the bridge up. The same tension and compression keep us standing on our feet. There is, for the most part, no actual “rest state” in the body. The extensor and flexor muscles are involved in the maintenance of a constant tone while “at rest.” In skeletal muscles, this helps maintain a normal posture.
This got me to thinking about the etymological origin of the word “distress”. It’s over 600 years old and derives from the Old French “destresse” meaning “circumstance that causes anxiety or hardship”, which in turn comes from the Latin “districtus” which means to “draw apart or hinder”. It was only in the late 13th century it started meaning “anguish, suffering or grief”.
As discover means to un-cover so distress must mean to unstress (a word which is not recognised by Spellcheck by the way!) when forces are not in balance and therefore things fall apart.
In the same way, when all those stresses and strains which we are dealing with in our daily life get out of balance, that’s when things fall, or draw, apart. And that’s when we can’t cope, so perhaps the first thing that is in order is a little reframing, to stop looking on all stress as bad or debilitating.
It is interesting to note that what is stress to one person is not stress to another as each person’s response is going to be different. Some people suffer post-traumatic stress disorder in the wake of a terrible incident or a battle in a war whilst others survive mentally unscathed. Some even thrive, experiencing what is now called post-traumatic growth, which helps develop the four resiliences:
1. Physical resilience;
2. Mental resilience;
3. Emotional resilience, and;
4. Social resilience.
Or to put it another way, those who are under stress do not necessarily collapse. For example, American World War II hero, Admiral Edward Rickenbacker said:
Courage is doing what you are afraid to do. There can be no courage unless you are scared.
We all have to find balance in our lives and, because we are not bridges, what is balanced for one person is not the same for someone else. So perhaps for all of us, a little bit too much stress is not a bad thing. It helps us find our edge and just maybe our edge is a little bit further away than we thought. We all need to test ourselves a little to see where the edges of our stress are so that we don’t get too comfortable.
And although she is talking about Buddhist meditation, Pema Chodron makes a similar point about being careful not to get to comfortable with where we think we’re balanced because:
[Her] strict practice is still pretty relaxed … so strict practice is good for me … Very relaxed practice doesn’t show me as much because it doesn’t show where I’m out of balance.
And the flip side of this is true; that someone who is militant and precise in their practice might need to practice in a relaxed, loose way. “Everybody is different,” she says.
This also accounts for the fact that sometimes in what you think is a perfectly innocent conversation with a friend, you suddenly find your head being bitten off. You don’t know what’s going on in that person’s life – the things that have happened to throw the delicate balance of tension and compression off-kilter.
Aikido helps us with this as it teaches us to appreciate good and bad stress. In our practice we know when we are “leading” our partner, if we get too far ahead, we start pulling and then we feel an unpleasant tension in our arm, as well as a pain in our shoulder.
We also learn that when there isn’t enough balanced tension between ourselves and our partner and our arm collapses and uke doesn’t move, or worse, takes control of our centre.
And of course, it also shows us that everyone is different! The tension we use that is effective with one person, is completely ineffective with someone else, so we learn to adjust.
This, I think, is a very positive attitude to stress. To start with, if we recognise that it is necessary, that it exists to hold up bridges and our bodies and that it makes our aikido techniques work, it may stop us getting sloppy at work and in our relationships. It makes us pay attention. And if we stop fearing it, it will challenge us to push ourselves further than we thought we could go.

There is a quote by John Greenleaf Whittier, the American Quaker poet, which goes:
“Of all sad words of tongue or pen, the saddest are these, ‘It might have been.”
I’m sure we’ve all thought it at one time or another. “If only I hadn’t done this,” or “If only I had done that, or done it differently”. That poem was written in 1856 and is a nineteenth century version of the twenty-first century truism, “Live every day as if it were your last.”
Which is, of course, a nonsense. If you lived as if you were going to die tomorrow, you could rob a bank, kill your worst enemy or run off with your neighbour’s husband or wife. It’s usually attached to those inspirational posters you see hanging on the walls of offices, featuring someone scaling a sheer cliff, surfing or base-jumping. It seems to be used as a call to live a life fuelled by, and filled with, adrenaline.
Now there is another, more Buddhist way of looking at it. Indeed, there is a whole fable attached to it with which you are probably familiar:
A man is being chased by a tiger. He runs until he reaches the edge of a cliff. The tiger is still behind him, so he climbs down a vine. The tiger reaches the top of the cliff and paces back and forth, snarling with hunger. Halfway down the cliff, hanging onto the vine, he sees another tiger below him, also pacing back and forth, licking its chops. As he’s hanging there, two mice come out and start gnawing on the vine. He tries to shoo them away, but they won’t go.
If he climbs back up, the tiger will surely devour him, but if he stays where he is then if the fall doesn’t kill him the other tiger certainly will! The slender vine begins to give way, and death is imminent. Just then he notices, growing out of the face of the cliff in front of her, a wild strawberry. He picks it and pops it into his mouth. How sweet it tastes.
I think this is a better way to live every day as if it were your last – indeed every moment as if it were your last. By paying attention. And we spend an awful lot of time paying attention, not to the present, but to the past and the future.
Again, this is reflected in another Buddhist teaching – in fact, the first of the four fundamental Buddhist teachings, the Life is Suffering. Many people interpret this as a bad thing, but the Buddhist nun Pema Chodron reframes it in a more positive way, and poetic way, in her book “The Wisdom of No Escape”:
The first noble truth recognises that we (also) change like the weather, we ebb and flow like the tides, we wax and wane like the moon. We [her emphasis] do that, and there’s no reason to resist it. If we resist it, the reality and vitality of life becomes misery, a hell.
So what’s the point of regretting what we haven’t done or things we did in the past. We can’t change them, and to continue to reflect on them, to obsess about them, will only make us sad.
Why am I writing this? Because last time I was in Santa Cruz I was talking to Linda Holiday, 6th dan Chief Instructor of Aikido of Santa Cruz, and a student of Motomichi Anno sensei. I was looking a younger people practising … all right, now I’m sixty-one most of the people I see practising are younger, but these were people I guess were in their early twenties. And I said I felt I’d come to aikido comparatively late in life, at the age of about twenty-eight, and I wished I’d started much earlier; I felt like I’d lost at least ten years.
Linda pointed to an older man, clearly a beginner, who was practising and said “He’s sixty and he’s only just started. You should be grateful for all the time you’ve had studying aikido that he hasn’t.”
This re-framing is very important. It is inevitable that things are going to go wrong in our lives, no matter how careful we are, no matter how decent, kind and honest we feel we are, life is going to treat us unfairly. In that respect, Life is Suffering and there is absolutely nothing we can do about it, unless we stop wishing for “what might have been”.
Everything that has happened in our lives has brought us to the place we are now, and if it’s a place where we can feel content, then we should be grateful for all the things we didn’t do, or got wrong, in our life.
And if we’re not happy with where we are, again there is some very good Buddhist advice, this time from the Dalai Lama. He says:
“If a problem is fixable, if a situation is such that you can do something about it, then there is no need to worry. If it’s not fixable, then there is no help in worrying. There is no benefit in worrying whatsoever.”
Obviously, although the principle is a very good, but it’s very hard to put into practice. One way to do it, is to do what the man being chased by a tiger did, which is to pay attention. In my aikido practice, I shouldn’t be planning how the technique will end; I shouldn’t be complaining because I can’t pick up a technique as fast as the eighteen-year old next to me, or regretting that I can’t go to a seminar in Belgium because I have to do something with my family.
I should be grateful for thirty-odd years of aikido, I should be grateful that my bad knees make me think around how to do a technique more efficiently, and more than anything, I should be grateful I have a loving family that have supported over those thirty-odd years in my practice of aikido.

I was watching the comedian Reginald D. Hunter’s documentary series “Songs of the South, which was a trip into his childhood, looking at the music of the Southern States of the United States from Kentucky to Louisiana. I was particularly interested in an interview he had with a zydeco musician called Geno Delafose.
Hunter asked him to explain the difference between certain types of Cajun music, and Delafose said words to the effect that it was like Cajun cooking. There was dirty rice – which is basically white rice which gets a “dirty” colour from being cooked with small pieces chicken liver or giblets, green bell peppers, celery and onions, and spiced with cayenne and black pepper.
And then there were the people who added more salt to their rice; but whether it was dirty rice or salty rice, it was all still rice. It was just that some people liked dirty rice and some people liked salty rice.
And of course it struck me that people think the same about aikido.
Considering that we practise an art with the word “harmony” in it, there are endless disagreements, heated discussions, and knock-down-drag-out fights about which type of aikido is best.
A lot of this debate ranges around pre- and post-war aikido.
1938 is regarded as the heart of the golden years of Aikido Founder Morihei Ueshiba’s Kobukan Dojo, known as “Hell Dojo” for the severity of its training. There were approximately twenty uchideshi (live-in students) in the dojo at that time and they trained from five in the morning until nine in the evening. The most famous student from this time is probably Gozo Shioda, who began training in 1932 and stayed on as an uchideshi for 7 years.
After the war he went on to found the Yoshinkan style of aikido which emphasizes self-defence applications and has a reputation as a tough, systematic martial art which is taught to Japanese riot police.
At that time O-Sensei was ensconced in Iwama, and although he later started travelling and teaching again he did not teach at the Hombu Dojo in Japan on a day-to-day basis. When he was there his instruction often centred on philosophical subjects. It was Koichi Tohei and Kisshomaru Ueshiba who are the persons most responsible for the technical content and development of aikido within the Aikikai Hombu system in the post-war period, when aikido seems to have been characterised by a “softer”, more flowing style.
It has been argued that this emphasis on aikido as “The Way of Peace” was a necessary in order to overcome General MacArthur’s ban of the martial arts after the war, but regardless socio-political reasons, people who study aikido seem to fall into one of two camps – hard aikido or soft aikido.
There are those who insist that aikido should primarily be a means of self-defence. They are fond of quoting Ueshiba’s dictum, “My technique is 70 percent atemi (striking) and 30 percent nage (throwing),” which is echoed and expanded on by Shioda:
“The founder, Ueshiba Sensei, said, In a real battle, atemi is seventy percent, technique is thirty percent … Atemi is virtually omitted in Aikido training on the ground that a preliminary blow should not become a matter of predominant concern. However, there are quite a few cases in which the meaning of a technique becomes incomprehensible if the attendant atemi is left out.”
There are others like George Ledyard of Aikido Eastside, who studies under Mitsugi Saotome sensei, who argue that the purpose of atemi is generally a means to facilitate another technique. I was told to refer to this kind of atemi as “taking the mind” as it distracts the opponent, shifting his attention to the strike instead of the technique that is being performed. Ledyard argues that:
1. A strike that is itself the technique and designed to cause damage, as in striking arts such as karate, boxing and types of kung fu is contrary to Aikido principles as its intent usually involves serious injury to the opponent and is only to be used as a last resort, and;
2. Atemi based on causing pain is unreliable against a determined attacker, who will expect to get hit, but just ignore it to continue with their attack.
So the argument would go that too much attention to atemi takes the practitioner’s attention away from the key element of aikido, which is well-performed technique. And one of the foremost proponent of getting the basics right was Morihiro Saito shihan. He placed particular emphasis on the relationship between the armed and unarmed aspects of the art, leading as it does to an understanding of ma-ai (combatative distance), developing good posture and a strong centre as well as strengthening the arms and shoulders.
Saito was committed to carrying on Ueshiba’s legacy, following and preserving Ueshiba’s teachings as he had learned them. I can recall at seminars he usually had a flipbook of photos of O’Sensei, and when he was emphasising a particular position he expected us to take in a technique, he would produce a photograph of Ueshiba in the same position.
You could argue that Saito occupies the middle ground with his emphasis on correct technique, but even he believed that strikes were a “vital element” of aikido.
This brings us to the third aspect of atemi that George Ledyard highlights; what he calls “the not striking of striking”.
Essentially the strike is just fast enough that the attacker cannot avoid or block it, but is just slow enough that the attacker can only respond to it by breaking his posture and taking a fall in order not to be hit. It can give the impression that the attacker is throwing himself, but if one tried it with an untrained partner it result in that partner being hit. Ledyard argues that it is the timing and intention that differentiates the “Not Striking of Striking” and “Strike as a Technique itself”.
And of course this leads to what might be called the “ultra-soft” styles of aikido which involve no-touch throws as a result of the manipulation of ki. There are those who would argue that a genuine no-touch throw is a result of good technique and possibly George Ledyard’s “not striking strike”, but there are others who insist that it is something more. And that debate will go on for as long as aikido practitioners get together.
In a book I have referred to before, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, the author, Robert M. Pirsig says that even if Quality is not defined, we all know what is good Quality and what is not. And I think it would be fair to say that after practising aikido for a while and being exposed to a variety of teachers, we can make judgements about what we think is good or bad aikido.
Some of us like our aikido salty, and some of us don’t, but it’s all aikido.

When I started this blog a few months ago I promised myself that I would write a thousand words a week. This doesn’t seem much when you remember that Jack London wrote one thousand words by hand every morning.
About writing he once said: “The three great things are: Good Health; Work; and a Philosophy of Life. I may add, nay, must add, a fourth—Sincerity. Without this, the other three are without avail. With it you may cleave to greatness and sit among the giants.”
Now I don’t claim to be sitting among giants, but given that I have retired from working life, my health is good! And certainly blogging like this has helped me pull together a lot of the ideas I’ve acquired over my life into some sort of philosophy. And as a result of that, everything I’ve written is what I believe or I know to be true – at the time, because if aikido teaches anything it is that we should be open to change.
But back to the blog, and already you might be getting some idea of why the title is what it is.
To start with I was quite concerned that I wouldn’t have enough to write about. The first piece I wrote probably took a week from the initial idea to the first draft and the re-writes to get it sounding close to how it was in my head. And when I was finished, I instantly panicked that I wouldn’t know what to write about next.
I felt like the New York Times columnist David Brooks who said in an interview:
“I once had lunch with a prominent American columnist – I won’t say who – and I asked: ‘What’s your next column about?’ He pulled out an index card from his wallet, and the next 13 columns were on there. I wanted to take my knife and ram it into his neck.”
Because, he said, he describes himself as someone who finds it hard to generate opinions on demand.
Strangely, an idea appeared, as a result of the first blog, or from something I read or heard, and the second one was much easier to write. And before I’d finished it the third one was already shaping up in my mind.
The author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, Robert M. Pirsig, describes a similar thing happening in the generating of scientific hypotheses:
… what might seem to be the hardest part of scientific work, was invariably the easiest … even when his experimental work was at a dead-end in every conceivable way, he knew that if he just sat down and muddled about it long enough, sure enough, another hypothesis would come along.
He then goes on to use this phenomenon to attack the whole scientific methodology. He quotes Einstein as saying, “Evolution has shown that at any given moment out of all conceivable constructions a single one has always proved itself absolutely superior to the rest”, and interprets this as Einstein saying absolute truth is a function of time, which he does not regard as very scientific.
Personally, I think it all comes back to choice, which is something I discussed in a previous blog. When I started writing these blogs, my choices were fairly limited. I knew I had to write it, it had to have some content which people would want to discuss, and I had to finish it within a certain timeframe.
And that is much like learning aikido (or anything else for that matter). I can’t remember the first technique I was taught, maybe ikkyo, but I was shown a beginning, middle and end. And probably for the next twenty minutes that’s what we practised; perhaps the attack was varied, but it was ikkyo over and over, and I certainly wasn’t very good. I forgot what to do at the beginning, which foot goes where, or stopped dead in the middle because I didn’t know what to do next, and my finish wasn’t much better!
But over time, I got better at ikkyo; particularly if we learned a new technique and then went back to ikkyo. I was able to make comparisons, and start to see why this time my foot had to go here, and with the other technique it had to go there.
When you’re first faced with a tsuki attack, you tend to freeze (at least I did); you watch the fist coming in and forget all about technique. But there also comes a time where you seem to know too much and you freeze – you don’t know whether to do kote gaeshi, irimi nage or ikkyo, and consequently you do nothing.
But there comes a point where all of that knowledge in your head comes together, and you find that you have all the time in the world to pick the technique you want. Rather like Einstein searching for the right hypothesis, at a given moment out of all conceivable techniques a single one will prove itself absolutely superior to the rest.
I found this expansion of choice when I was writing happened when I relaxed; or as Robert Pirsig said, “if he just sat down and muddled about it long enough (relaxed) … another hypothesis would come along.”
Presumably this is why the New York Times columnist found it so hard. He was being paid to produce two controversial columns a week and he had to deliver. No one is going to fire me if I don’t produce a blog one week, or send death threats if they disagree with me (I hope)! It’s very hard to relax under those kinds of circumstances.
But back to the title of this piece, and how it applies to my aikido – and maybe yours. As I’m writing, all of these choices are appearing to me about what to write next, and I have to jot those down in a notebook. But at the same time I find that the point I’m trying to make at the beginning has often changed by the end – sometimes a little, sometimes a lot, and occasionally completely.
And those are aiki moments that I experience sometimes and would like to experience more often. When I start a technique and at the end I find it’s something different, and I think, “What happened there?” So I go back over everything, and I can see all those moments in the technique where choices were made, and “a single one proved itself superior to all the rest.”
I want to practise Einstein aikido!!

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.”

 

One of the problems I have with aikido is that it makes me think too much.  And I don’t just mean about techniques and I don’t just mean on the mat.

On evening in the dojo, someone will so something or someone will say something and a light bulb will go on and I will think, “Ah, that relates to something that’s going on in my life.”

For example, I might say when to an uke when teaching about sankyo, “I know it may not make much sense, but it will hurt a lot less if you relax and move towards the pain.” The first reaction of uke, particularly beginners, when they receive sankyo is to tense their arm up and try to move away from the pain and this only generates more hurt.

And while this is going on, I might find myself thinking, “You know, that’s actually quite true outside the dojo.  In our interactions with people, in our arguments and disagreements with friends, colleagues and family, the first thing we find ourselves doing is tensing up, physically and mentally.  We become rigid in our thinking and rather than trying to see the other person’s point of view, we walk away from them or withdraw our emotions.”

Next thing I know, I’ll be trying to apply the sankyo-pain principle to my everyday life.

Interestingly, Douglas Harding, the author of “On Having No Head”, describes a similar idea in his book “Head Off Stress – Beyond the Bottom Line”:

To an amazing extent, our troubles, our stresses and distresses, are the result of keeping our distance, or actually running away from them.  When we go up to them they vanish like a mirage.”

He goes on to document and exercise where you identify a pain or stress in the body and really examine it: where is it in relation to the room you are in, how big is it, what shape, what colour, does it move, does it pulse?  It is quite an effective technique, although he adds the caveat:

Of course, having ‘disappeared’ the tension or pain, you may very easily ‘reappear’ it by thinking aboutit, which means retreating from it.  You have to coincide with trouble to for it to go.

Like aikido, it is not a short term fix, but isn’t it interesting to see that a man who has a chapter to himself in the book “20th Century Sages and Mystics” as well as “Douglas Harding Song” written about him by the Incredible String Band should use a phrase that sounds so aiki: you have to coincide with trouble for it to go.

Now I am not suggesting that aikido is unique in this transference of practice into everyday life.  For example, people who play football might say it teaches you teamwork and discipline, or a surfer “always paddle back out” or “there will always be another wave”.  In short, if you enjoy doing something enough, if you enjoy something enough, pretty much everything in it will become a metaphor for life.

So what else has aikido taught me, that I have brought outside the dojo?  Here are just two examples off the top of my head (I’m sure you can find more):

1. Don’t force it.  It’s a common beginner’s problem (and a not so uncommon problem amongst experienced practitioners) that when a technique isn’t working we try to muscle it through, when there are other options.  We could remember to breathe, or to keep the weight underside, or we could change the technique, or stop and start again, or even decide to leave the mat and try again in another class (I’m not recommending that last suggestion – we need to develop the “gumption” to stick at things – but giving up is an option).   And yet, how often in the outside world when faced with a piece of home maintenance that isn’t going the way I want do I reduce all of my options to just trying to muscle it through, usually making things worse than they were to start with?  How often has it taken my wife to restore my harmony by telling me to pack up my tools and come back to the job another day? Or when involved in a disagreement, I just dig my heels in and hold my position without considering the other person’s point of view (awasemeaning blending or agreeing in aikido), or whether there is another way that works for both of us.  And a disagreement turns into a full-blown argument with me trying to force my opinion, the other person fighting back, and in the end no conclusion or resolution.
2. Weapons – extending awareness.  One of my teachers used to say “When have the jo, you don’t have the jo.  When you don’t have the jo, you have the jo.”  He meant there should be no difference in the feeling you have when you practise aikido’s body arts (taijutsu) and with weapons (bujutsu).  Amongst many other things practising with weapons teaches us to extend our awareness beyond the ends of our fingers into our weapons, and even beyond that.That extended awareness has certainly helped me when driving in two particular ways.  Extending my awareness beyond the metal box in which I am sitting has helped me to spot problems ahead (and behind) sooner rather than later and take the necessary action – slowing down, speeding up, changing lanes, or turning off – well in advance.  In fact, it’s very noticeable to me when I brake sharply or end up in a traffic jam it’s usually because I haven’t been extending my awareness.  The flip side of my own extended awareness is being able to spot those who aren’t aware. The people who drive badly because their awareness hasn’t extended beyond their hands to the steering wheel, or those so caught up in what’s going on their heads – getting to work, going on holiday, being anywhere except Now; in short, the people who cause accidents.  And spotting them means I can take steps like those I mentioned above.

Now that I’ve put the idea in your head, I’m sure you’ll find plenty of other examples of how aikido transfers into your everyday life.

 

I 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.