It’s always nice to see kids’ aikido classes.  Lots of smiles and lots of fun; but my experience is that not many juniors go on to study aikido as adults.  Why is that?  First and foremost, it’s not a reflection on the teachers; I have seen many excellent teachers of children and classes full of fun and learning.  And it’s also not a reflection on the students themselves; it’s not that they aren’t keen or don’t practise hard enough.

Obviously in your teens some things become very important: being part of the crowd, the opposite sex, and doing all the things your parents don’t approve of, but I don’t think these are necessarily the things that stop younger people doing aikido.

Conversely, I believe it is the one thing which has kept me interested in aikido over the years: that nothing is what it seems.

Let me explain: I attended a seminar recently where one of the instructors spoke of allowing uke to fall.  We were practising irimi nage: entering throw.  Over the years I’ve heard many sensei caution about being in a hurry to “get to the throw”, but this was the first time I had heard the throw being described as a point where uke has no option but to choose to fall.

This is what I mean about nothing being what it seems.  That hour with sensei Alan Morton of Ocean State Aikido made me revise my thinking about aikido –again!  I find that over the years much of my practice has been like this.  It is a series of Copernican revolutions.  When Copernicus said the Earth went round the Sun and not the other way round, nothing in the world changed, and at the same time it was a major shift in the worldview.  So I still go to practice, I still do the same techniques, but now I do them with a different feeling and for a different reason.

This is the reason why I think adults usually stick with aikido and children tend not to.  You need to be older and wiser, to have more life experience to appreciate how small changes can make such a big difference.

In teaching I have often likened aikido to a stage magician performing magic.   By subtle misdirection the magician causes you to look in the wrong place while he is doing something-or-other in the right place; you watch his right hand waving in the air whilst at the same time he is slipping a dove unnoticed from his pocket.

Now I am not saying that aikido is about trickery – although there are unscrupulous teachers out there who use this misdirection to their advantage, dressing up technique with the mysteries of ki rather than teaching good basics such as proper posture, timing and extension – but I am saying that aikido can fool us without the aid of a magician.

Or to put it another way: sankyo can be a hard technique for beginners to grasp – no pun intended!  This is for a number of reasons not least of which is that it is hard to appreciate that in order to make uke rise it is not necessary for tori to rise too; in fact, exactly the opposite.  But even when you get past these basic principles, you will hear people complaining that they “can’t get it to work”.

This is because their focus tends to be on the wrist, where the technique is apparently being applied.  In fact, the torsion of sankyo runs all the way up to the arm through the elbow into the shoulder, and brings uke to a position in which he can no longer move either his elbow or shoulder.  When I can’t get a technique to work, my first question to myself is: “Where is my attention?  Is it in the wrong place?”  And I find that very often I have been focussing too closely on what my hands were doing instead of what is or isn’t happening to uke’s body, or where my body is in relation to uke’s; in fact a whole world outside of my narrow focus.

Aikido is a long study.  It is only half-jokingly that irimi-nage or entering throw is called “the thirty year technique.”  Ikkyo is regarded as the simplest of the immobilisations and actually means, in one translation, “first basic technique.” Because of this it often the first technique taught to beginners; and yet I have always regarded it as one of the hardest to do well.

But I realise now, thirty years too late, that the reason it is taught first is because it contains so many of the principles I mentioned earlier.  GozoShioda says of the finish to ikkyo:

“Beginners find it difficult to apply pressure directly downwards from a seiza[sitting] position, but it is only through techniques such as this that the true power of aikido, i.e. using the focused power of the whole body, can be learned … it could be said that ikkajo [ikkyo] is the most basic of techniques and also the most difficult.”

There are three particular principles in Judo: kuzushi, or unbalancing the opponent; tsukuri, or the correct action for the attack; and kake, the attack itself.  It is very easy in aikido to see the attack, and since most practice is predetermined, one is very well aware of the correct action, but often the initial unbalancing is completely missed.  Perhaps there is an atemi, or strike, which has not been noticed.  Morihiro Saito says:

“Atemi are an essential part of basic and advanced techniques and should not be omitted from your practice.”

There is always something new to learn, or to be taught.  And this is what continues to thrill me and brings me back to aikido, and I suspect it applies to most other aikido practitioners too.    And all of those lessons are also lessons to be applied outside the dojo.

We can always try to extend our attention outside of our narrow focus.

Although this was said to me over quarter of a century ago, I still remember it, even if I can’t remember who it was who said it.
“Are you coming training on Friday?”
I probably agreed, but there was something about the question that didn’t sit right with me and for a long time I couldn’t think what it was. It wasn’t the question itself; the very idea that I wouldn’t be training. Finally I realised that it was the word “training” itself.

I was not what would call a sporty child. For me, it was reading books not playing football, writing not running and certainly not training. Training is what you do in sports, and I didn’t do sports. That was for “the flannelled fools at the wickets or the muddied oafs at the goals” to quote Rudyard Kipling.

This is, I suppose, what attracted me to, and continues to fascinate me about aikido. It is not a sport. It is an art, an art which I practise. I don’t train to be faster than someone or to be stronger or better than they are. I practise the same way, and for the same reason, that an artist paints. I do it to express something I feel inside. I want to interpret the internal externally.

Aristotle said “The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.” So the artist doesn’t paint what he sees, he paints what he feels. In this way he takes what cannot be perceived by looking and makes it visible. This is O’Sensei’s “profound truth that the manifest and hidden are one.”
The artist, Michelangelo, writing of sculpture, expressed it this way:
“Every block of stone has a statue inside it and it is the task of the sculptor to discover it.”

Aikido helps us to do this through technique. Of course, in the same way that Rembrandt, Van Gogh and Picasso all used basically the same materials and yet their interpretation of what they saw was completely different, if you put twelve aikidoka in one dojo they will perform twelve different types of shiho-nage, for example – the essence will be the same, but the form will be different.

I like to think of aikidoka practising together as musicians. They practise for hours and hours to improve, so that when they perform they are (hopefully) in harmony. Graham Nash of Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young said of their practice:
“Our voices had range and pinpoint control, which allowed us to locate the tension in the harmonies. We experimented with melodic dissonance, modal chords and irregular arpeggios, using flexible notes that combined in unusual ways.”

It’s the same with aikido; once you have mastered, or begun to understand the basics, then you start experimenting, and ultimately, like CSNY you ultimately find your own unique style of aikido which will hopefully be harmonious. Interestingly, when Nash took up painting he found that there were similarities between art and music:
“Having in paintbrushes in my hand, I discovered, was the same energy as having a guitar in my hand. Just a different tool.”

Of course, aikido can be regarded as self-defence only, and there is nothing wrong with this; but I do think that it gives a restricted view of the art if you only think this way. The techniques themselves are very effective, and have been tested on the battlefield. O’Sensei himself, and aikido masters such as Koichi Tohei and Kazuo Chiba had wartime experience, and the Yoshinkan Aikido of Gozo Shioda is taught to the Tokyo Riot Police. The Dalai Lama highlights the problem of this one-dimensional view:
I’m sure all of us agree that we need to overcome violence, but we first need to examine whether it has any value. From a strictly practical perspective, on certain occasions violence appears to be useful. We can solve a problem quickly by force. But this success is often at the expense of the rights and welfare of others. Although one problem has been solved, the seed of another has been planted.

At the age of 61, I am looking ahead to the next ten or twenty years of practice that I hopefully have left. I cannot condition my body in those ways any more, so I must look for deeper forms of practice. But as an instructor I can see a danger here that I have to be careful of. If my students copy me too carefully, or I try to make them too like me in my instruction, they will end up practising like an old man. The adjustments I have made to my technique to accommodate my painful knees or arthritic toes aren’t necessary for young students.

When young people start Aikido, or any form of martial art, they are looking for more than a discussion of whether we practice or train. They want action!
Thus, as Dave Lowry says in “Moving Towards Stillness”:
“ … budo begins with a training of the gross muscles and then advance to the education and strengthening of the smaller, finer ones and then on to conditioning of the sinews and ligaments and reflexes and nerves themselves. Attitudes, feelings and emotions are all brought into harmony in the process … and all of this occurs under the aegis of movement and struggle.”

So perhaps what I should be saying that aikido encourages us to move from training to practice over time. Irimi nage is sometimes called the thirty-year technique as it will take you thirty years to master all the subtleties of it. Ten years to learn the physical side, ten years to understand the mental side, and ten years to grasp the spiritual aspects. When we start aikido maybe we do “train”; train the muscle memories so that we can perform tenkan and tai-sabaki without thinking, so that our hands will automatically find the right place on uke’s body, but the purpose of the training must ultimately to be to move us towards the practice.

People talk a lot about patience in the martial arts, about patiently waiting for an opening in an opponent’s defence during combat, saying of their next grading “I know I’m not ready now, but I’m prepared to wait”, or the patience an instructor might have with a particularly slow student.

As I see it, the danger is if patience is regarded as the sacrifice of the fulfillment of our immediate desires or needs in order to do what is necessary to produce a desired outcome in the future.  Patience then becomes a focus on the future and a neglect of what is happening now.  And if the martial arts teach us one thing, it is to be present in the Now.

There is a famous Zen story called Pot Lid Zen, the essence of which is this:

A young man went to a great teacher called Banzo to learn swordsmanship.

“How long will it take me to learn swordsmanship?” he asked.

“The rest of your life,” was the reply.

“I can’t wait that long. I will accept any hardship, and will devote myself completely to the study of swordsmanship.”

“In that case, ten years.”

“What if I train twice as hard?” tried the young man.

“In that case, thirty years.”

“Why is that? First you say ten then thirty years. I will do anything to learn, but I don’t have that much time.”

“In that case, seventy years.”

In the end the young man agreed to work as long as it took, and do anything he was told. However, for the first year all Banzo had him do was to perform simple physical tasks such as chopping wood. After a year of this he demanded that Banzo teach him some swordsmanship. Banzo merely insisted that he chop wood.

He returned to the woodpile, inwardly furious, but while he was chopping Banzo crept up behind him and struck him painfully with a wooden sword. “You want to learn swordsmanship, but you can’t even dodge a stick,” he said.

From that day on Banzo would creep up on him and attack him with a wooden sword. As his senses became heightened, Banzo changed tactics. Now he attacked, even when the young man was asleep. For the next four years he did not have a moment’s rest from the fear of unexpected attack.

One day, when he was stirring some food on the fire, Banzo crept up and attacked him by surprise. Without thinking the young man fended off the blow with the lid of the pot without taking his mind off stirring the food. That night Banzo wrote out his certificate of mastery.

 

The young man’s success was achieved not by deferring instant gratification for some reward down the road.  It was achieved through continual practice in the now without thought for the future.

I also like to think that when he finally received his certificate of mastery, the young man did not think he had arrived.  He continued to practise, improving his skills and expanding his knowledge.

The martial arts in general and aikido in particular, are not a means to an end.  As Eckhart Tolle says “When work is a means to an end, it cannot be of high quality.”

Patience implies judgement on the part of the person being patient.  “I’ve been very patient”, “I’m running out of patience” are phrases that we are all familiar with.  We’ve either used them, or had them used on us.  They mean that a standard we are judging against, or being judged against, is close to not being met.  It brings us back to the idea of some desired outcome.  Margaret Thatcher once said “I am very patient, provided I get my own way in the end.”

So perhaps we need a new word.  Acceptance is too passive.  There is a suggestion of agreement with what is happening; it’s one step away from resigned acceptance of a difficult or unpleasant situation.

It is important to be more than simply stoical.  Stoicism can help – when your practice is going badly it is useful to remember that it will get better.  And when it is going well, it is also useful to remind yourself that there will be times will be times when it will be terrible.  It is a reminder not to be caught up in an emotional response to what is happening now, because emotions are temporary: one day up, the next day down.  But to me, this is not enough.  One doesn’t want to be simply “toughing it out” when things are bad.  We shouldn’t want fixate on a future where things will get better or worse.

So I would suggest Openness.  There is no judgement in openness, but neither is there acceptance.  It acknowledges a situation and deals with it as it is.  The poet Rainer Maria Rilke, who linked patience with openness, said it this way:

“ … try to love the questions themselves as if they were locked rooms or books written in a very   foreign language. Don’t search for the answers, which could not be given to you now, because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answer.”

In this way you are responding to what is happening Now.  In the same way that you shouldn’t force an aikido technique to make it work but, responding to what is happening to uke and yourself, allow the technique to happen at the right moment.  Nor should you cling to the feeling of that technique and try to reproduce the next time.  Each time it will be different, some good, some bad, and we should remain open to them all.

But a much wiser person than I said it much more simply:

“Rivers know this: there is no hurry. We shall get there some day.”

Winnie-the-Pooh.

And of course, that is the most useless piece of advice you can be given, because trying is the very opposite of relaxing. The more you try, the less relaxed you become. You can’t force yourself, or anyone else, to relax. Relaxation comes when you are doing something else, and yet aikido requires you to be relaxed in order to practise it well.

If any tension creeps in the techniques jar – I feel that jar most of the time. Afterwards I might say to myself, “Ah, my shoulder was too tense. Next time I need to relax my shoulder.” But next time the technique jars again and I find that in trying to relax my shoulder, tension has crept in somewhere else: my arm, my back, even my jaw!

Perhaps that is why in Japanese arts like calligraphy or the tea ceremony, so much attention is paid to preparation. In calligraphy or sumi the grinding of ink is considered a great way to prepare the mind and wrist for the forthcoming writing. Water is poured into the inkstone and the inkstick is ground against it, mixing the water with the dried ink to liquefy it. In the tea ceremony, chanoyu or chado, the preparation of the tea by the master and the preparation to drink it by the guests stills the mind and draws attention to the present moment. But to simply focus on the present moment is very difficult.

As the 16th century tea master Sen Rikyu said:
Tea is nought but this:
First you heat the water,
Then you make the tea.
Then you drink it properly.
That is all you need to know.

John Lennon said, life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans. I think the same can be said of relaxation – it is what happens to you when you are doing something else.
So the preparation is not the boring bit before you can “do” the art; it is what you do before you can “be” the art. In aikido, these are the warm-ups; not things simply to be gotten out of the way before we do the interesting bit, but the necessary steps you must take in order to relax the body and the mind.
Koichi Tohei, 10th dan, is one of aikido’s greatest proponents of relaxing. In “Aikido in Daily Life” he says it is easy to relax when nothing is annoying you, but much harder in the hustle and bustle of everyday life. He devised four techniques to help us relax, two physical and two mental:
1. Keep the one point
2. Extend ki
3. Keep weight underside
4. Relax completely

These exercises are designed to unify body and mind. Essentially numbers one and two are exercises of the mind, and three and four are physical, but ultimately, according to Tohei, they cannot be separated. They are equivalent. If you can achieve any one of the first three you will achieve the fourth, and then your mind and body will be co-ordinated.

To explain the exercises in simple terms:

1. The one point or seika tanden is located approximately two inches below the navel and two inches into the pelvic girdle. Physically, it is the body’s centre of balance; what one of my instructors called the power triangle. Tohei states it is the place where mind and body intersect – but certainly if you pay attention to the one point, you find your neck and shoulders become less stiff, your centre of gravity settles in the lower part of your body and you relax.

2. In order to “keep the weight underside”, Tohei simply says “Because the mind moves the body, its workings will be reflected in the body. If you think that the weight of your arm is underside, it will become so.” Once again, by imagining (or image-ing) the weight of your body moving to the undersides of your arms and your feet, you achieve the same results as stated for exercise Number 1.

3. Ki is assumed to be the universal energy that flows through all things. Tohei says there is only one kind of ki and it is strong because it is extended strongly and weak when it isn’t. The standard test for extending ki is the exercise known as Unbendable Arm. By opening the fingers and imagining the arm to be like a fire hose and ki flowing down the arm and out through the fingers the arm becomes “unbendable”.

So practising any of these three exercises, leads to “relaxing completely” and thus to Tohei’s “unification of body and mind.” A number of aikido’s warm-up exercises are used by aikido organisations such as The Ki Society are used to test whether or not their practitioners are keeping their ki at the one point – exercises such as the Rowing Exercise, Shomen-uchi Ikkyo and Happo Undo.

They can equally be used simply as aids to relaxation prior to the start of practice. By keeping the one point, keeping the weight underside or extending ki whilst warming-up, the body naturally relaxes because you are not forcing it to. Relaxation has happened while you were busy thinking about something else.

What is difficult of course is to carry that sense of relaxation forward into practice. As soon as someone has seized hold of your wrist or punched at you, it is perfectly natural to tense up, physically and mentally. When a technique doesn’t go right, we become angry with ourselves, and once again tension creeps in – in our own bodies and also in uke’s as we try and force the technique through in an aggressive way.

All we can do is take Koichi Tohei’s advice, and return to his four principles again and again.
And what is even harder, after a good practice, when you leave the dojo feeling relaxed, is to carry that relaxation with you on the drive home or on the bus, when people around you all seem to be doing their best to upset you. As that good feeling dissolves in a wave of irritation, we try to cling onto it, and the harder we grasp at it, the more it slips through our fingers.
And that is one of the reasons we practise aikido. So that it becomes easier to relax in difficult circumstances and the feeling stays with us for longer and longer – to our benefit and that of people around us.

In a previous blog I mentioned toddlers learning to walk, and also learning to fear falling.  The other thing to notice when watching about toddlers walking is how close they are to falling all the time.  They finally get unsteadily to their feet and then the wobble just keeping their balance, but those first few steps are hardly walking at all.  It’s more like controlled falling, and if there wasn’t a pair of adults hands out-stretched to catch them, that walk would probably end up on the floor.

And so it is with us as we get grow up; we mastered walking when we were toddlers so we really don’t pay much attention to it now.  But it is fundamental to developing a stable base.  If we aren’t aware, just like a toddler, we are one step away from falling, and there won’t always be a pair of comforting arms there to catch us when we fall.

Walking, like talking or eating, has become second nature to us and so we don’t notice how much of the time we are off-balance, swinging one leg after the other through quickly.  No wonder that we find ourselves stumbling.

An image I like to use from tai chi is that of a vase full of water, and a table.  If you imagine that your hips and pelvis are the table, then your upper body is the vase of water.  When performing technique, I try not to tilt the table and spill the water.  I find that if I hold onto the image and worry less about how well the technique is working out, often the technique goes much better.

In Zen Buddhism there is a meditation technique called Mindful Walking.  The intention is to keep one’s consciousness alive in the present moment.    Thich Naht Hanh, the Vietnamese Zen Buddhist monk says:

“In our daily lives, we usually feel pressured to move ahead.  We have to hurry.  We seldom ask ourselves where it is that we must hurry to.

When you practice walking meditation, you go for a stroll.  You have no purpose or direction in space or time.  The purpose of walking meditation is walking meditation itself.  Going is important, not arriving.  Walking meditation is not a means to an end; it is an end.”

 

This is a very important point.  One of the things that initially attracts people to aikido is the apparently spectacular, and effortless, throws.  We want to be able to throw people that far and that hard; but wanting to do that gets in the way of good practice of aikido, because it is focussed on an end result.  It is possible to take Thay’s words and apply them to aikido:

The purpose of aikido is the practice of aikido itself.  Practising is important, not throwing.  Aikido is not a means to an end; it is an end.

This is not to say that throwing in aikido is wrong, simply that it is not everything, and focus solely on that outcome is to lose sight of other equally important things, like your stability and posture.

Throwing spectacularly is more about ego, and ego and awareness are incompatible; being in the present does not focus on an end product.  Demonstrations frequently feature techniques that draw gasps and rounds of applause from the audience, but they are not really aikido.  Often you can see tori preparing to make some huge throw, and his mind is not on what he is doing; he is thinking how far he is going to throw uke or how hard he is going to crash him into the mat.  As a result, his body becomes tense.

Demonstrations can be a way to attract new students to a club, but when they discover that aikido is not all “wham bam thank you ma’am”, they can become disappointed and leave.

Look at old film of O’Sensei Morihei Ueshiba.  You will see a beautiful old man with beautiful posture, enjoying the moment (literally “in joy of the moment”, as he is usually smiling or laughing), with beautiful posture.  You will find you rarely pay much attention to what happened to uke.

One of the things aikido teaches you to do is to reconnect with your body, so that instead of falling involuntarily through your life, you consciously take control of your movement.  This is one of the reasons Aikido can be so difficult to start with and why beginners look so ungainly.  We are not used to moving consciously.

One of my first teachers, Shihan Ralph Reynolds, used to say we act without thinking and we should shake ourselves up by doing something differently; for example, if you are right-handed, try making your cup of tea left-handed (or vice versa).  Doing an everyday activity differently forces you to engage mindfully in the act.

The problem is that unlike walking or making a cup of tea, to learn aikido is to learn something new and unfamiliar.  Initially we become over-conscious (especially when we catch our sensei watching us) and every movement is broken down into steps instead of flowing.  The mind continually criticises what we are doing: “That foot should be there, you’re doing it all wrong!”  But it is not wrong – it is difficult to divorce being present from thinking about being present.  In fact, it is better to be thinking about technique than getting over-confident and performing technique without mindfulness; but ultimately, when being mindful it is important to be mindful of everything, not just whether a hand or a foot is in the right place.

 

As the Zen Master Shunryu Suzuki says:

“In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s there are few.”

So it is important to maintain an awareness of our posture and our stability, but not to obsess about it as if we were being watched all the time.  And ultimately, this mindfulness will still the mental chatter, the inner critic, and we engage fully with the technique.

 

 

 

 

Fear of Falling:

It has often been said (sometimes by me) that you only really start to improve at aikido technique when your breakfalls improve.

There are a lot of reasons for this.  The first, and most obvious one, is that you start losing your fear and relax.  It is hard enough to walk into a dojo for the first time without feeling nervous, where everyone knows everyone else and seem to know everything, or at least more than you do.  So to the basic fear of “will they like me?” is the added to the fear of looking stupid which in turn is compounded by the fear of doing something as unnatural as learning how to fall over.  All in all, a not a mix designed to induce relaxation, which is a key component of aikido technique.

As an aside here, I can add that,most people who have practised aikido for any length of time will say that looking stupid is something you have to get used to, because it will happen again and again: doing tai sabaki completely out of synch with everyone else, breakfalls that release unexpected wind, holding the bokken the wrong way up, tripping over your hakama.  The list is endless.  And any time you begin to feel you begin to feel a little over-confident, aikido is there to feed you a little humble pie.

Then there is the fear of pain.  Aikido is a contra-intuitive art.  When something hurts us our every instinct tells us to pull away.  It makes no sense to move towards pain or to move with that which is causing pain, and yet that is precisely what aikido teaches us to do.  Nikkyo hurts less when you move towards it, sankyo is less painful when you move with it.  One of the reasons why it is difficult to do these techniques on beginners without injuring them is because they tense up and try to pull or twist away, and at that point an experienced aikidoka will release the technique.  This leads to some beginners giving up before they have really started because they don’t think the techniques work, when in fact the opposite is true.  The techniques work just fine, but it’s hard to put them on people who can’t take a breakfall without injuring them.

And of course, there is fear of falling.  From the moment we learn to walk we are taught to fear falling.  Toddlers’ first steps are accompanied by many falls and few tears as they have not yet learnt to be afraid of falling.  In fact, a toddler’s falls look quite similar to the beginning of a backward breakfall.  It is only the first time the head gets banged on the floor that the link is made with pain and then the fear of falling begins to develop, reinforced by adults warning “be careful!” and rushing to snatch up and cuddle the crying infant.

And so on, into adulthood, unless it is trained out of us, leading to broken wrists when we are younger and broken hips in old age.

Most practitioners of aikido are asked at some point, “But have you ever had to use aikido in real life?”  And almost everyone has got a story, which ultimately disappoints the asker because invariably they are about how an angry situation was diffused by kind words, as the aikidoka remained relaxed in a tense situation and realised there was another way that didn’t involve fighting.  I recommend the book “A Way to Reconcile the World” edited by Quentin Cooke, 7^th dan, of Burwell Aikido Club in Cambridgeshire for many such stories by ordinary practitioners of aikido from all over the world.

A good ukemi story is from the book is Simon Collier’s:

“ … one day as I was walking along a street talking with a friend and not looking where I was going, I walked into a row of bicycles.  As the bicycles and I started to fall over, my ukemi training kicked in.  I sailed smoothly over the bicycles and then rather than crashing into the concrete I effortlessly rolled and came up walking.”

My two own stories are equally disappointing to anyone in search of blood and guts.  The first occurred when I was up a ladder, drilling into a wall about eight feet off the ground.  Since the ladder was on a laminate floor, and no one was footing it, when I put my weight on the drill, the ladder slipped from under me.  Because thirty years of aikido had taught me not to be afraid of the floor coming up to hit me it felt like I had all the time in the world.  I knew I couldn’t let go of the drill because it could have ended up anywhere, including in my body, so I held it at arm’s length and as I hit the floor, did a backward breakfall the way we practise when holding the jo.  The result?  When everyone came rushing to see what the crash was, I was already on my feet, assuring everyone I was fine.

The second story also involved a ladder and power tools; you would have thought I would have learned my lesson!  I was cutting the top of a hedge with a pair of hedge trimmers when the ladder fell through the hedge.  With more open space, this time I was able to throw the hedge trimmers forward and myself backwards, with the same result as my first story.  A little backward momentum, chin tucked in and legs up, like Simon Collier’s, it was the best ukemi I have ever done.

Aikido has allowed me to survive being stupid twice uninjured, so now ladders and power tools involve a second person at the foot of the ladder.

To quote again from Quentin Cooke’s book, to give heart to those who may be struggling with ukemi, here is Reesa Abrams:

“It took me six months to learn how to do a backward roll from standing and two years to do a front roll from standing, despite receiving the best mentoring from many of the sensei.”

Every instructor has a different way of teaching breakfalls and all of them work for some people, leading us to the moment when the fall itself is no longer feared.  It is a moment that we have to find for ourselves.

And that is the moment when we learn to love to fly.

 

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.