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.