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.