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.