I spent this past weekend at an aikido seminar and I know that I learned something; I just wish that I knew clearly enough what I learned to be able to put it into words. It is easy for me to be silenced by the experience of not knowing, expecting myself to have things figured out before I put words around them. This is a part of my old pattern of thinking that I hope this blog can help me release as no longer serving me or the world.
The old paradigm that I’ve lived by says to get things figured out before sharing them; that way I can appear wise. It is rooted in the old belief that wisdom is a function of knowing and that anything less than wisdom is foolishness and cause for embarrassment. I am ready to once again declare that I am a learner – not a knower, especially in the domain of aikido. One of my practices as a learner needs to be to learn to express my wonder and amazement and my half-baked understanding. In doing so, I may be able to strengthen my connections with the knowledge and to make it my own.
Practicing with a master like Ikeda Sensei is an amazing experience. As he describes it, he is able to take the big skills of aikido and make them smaller and smaller and smaller until they are no longer visible, until his aikido becomes an internal practice, not a big external physical movement. It really challenged my beliefs and my understanding of what is physically possible to watch him move three big men with only his fingertip and without effort and without apparent movement. My mind kept trying to figure out a physical or mechanical explanation for how he could make heavy bodies light and how he could drop a person to the floor with hardly a touch.
One of the biggest gifts of this seminar was the realization that so much more is possible than what I can understand and that my beliefs are a significant limiting factor for what I am able to do. Having experienced the potential for
- My beliefs about what is possible are too small and they are limiting me. By unconsciously denying what I don’t understand and what falls outside of my experience, I create an enemy of learning. Conversely, by opening myself to possibilities that beyond my current ability, I open myself to the potential for learning.
- There is an energetic dimension to aikido. Even though I am still focused primarily on the physical and mechanical techniques, these techniques are really gross manifestations of subtle shifts and projections of energy. The practice can make external physical movements smaller and more subtle until they become more energetic than physical. My rational brain does not yet know how to make sense of this but I do have an experiential glimpse of this possibility.
- “You cannot control another person, you can only learn to control yourself.” From this perspective, aikido is all about learning to maintain and regain balance in every interaction. The ability to sense the loss of balance and to regain it, thereby shifting the balance of one’s partner is the essence of every technique. Every training experience (and life experience) is another opportunity to practice controlling one’s self and noticing how the consequences.
- Technique begins with connection. Connection does not necessarily mean strength. It means intention and focus and it is as much energetic as it is physical. Connection involves the ability to sense one’s own and one’s partner’s center and then to be able to move them. Being a good uke (training partner) means being honest. Going through the motions of taking a fall in response to an ineffective technique is not honest and is not helpful. Neither is being resistant and not giving up my balance in response to an effective technique.
- Strength, rigidity and fighting are all responses that interfere with the ability to connect. Balance is dynamic. It is a flow, a continual returning. Because balance is a process and not a lasting state, the key is to be able to regain balance quickly and effortlessly. Balance is a process of letting go and acceptance, not of struggle or grasping. Living aikido means being willing to give up my position and my balance when necessary and to flow into a new balance. Such responsiveness is much more adaptive and resilient than fighting to retain or regain balance once it is lost.
- All of life is aikido. Everything that I have learned or glimpsed in aikido has direct application in every aspect of life. It is all too easy to get discouraged when I recognize my physical challenges and limitations. I’m sad that I will never have the physical flexibility and grace of the some of a young practitioner. This is a reality that I need to accept while not allowing it to get in the way of learning and applying everything that I can. As my sensei says, the practice of aikido is about learning to recognize what is getting in our way. For me, this means coming to peace with my abilities and limitations and allowing aikido to be a lifelong practice of finding balance and connection and learning to flow with the energies of life.
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