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Remaining Mind

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Zanshin translates as “remaining mind.” It does not mean the mind remains on the past or a few moments ago, or that thing you did well or poorly. It remains here and now.

Zanshin also translates as “the mind with no remainder.” Divide any number by one and the remainder is zero. If you are one hundred percent in the present, there is no room for ego to attach to the past or to fear the future.

In Aikido, zanshin is the moment after a throw, not walking away, but remaining present and focused on the uke. But it goes deeper than that, I think.

I took my blackbelt two weeks ago. It was a four hour ordeal, a constant challenge to stay present in the current movement. Botch a throw? It’s in the past. Feel something odd or curious? It’s in the past. The hardest part was to stay present in the moment, letting future and past go. Remain. Be ready.

But the actual hardest part has been the post-test. Now I can reflect and ask questions. And that means the post test is the real test of zanshin. Self-judgement? Let it go. Why let my mind remain there? Success. Failure. Good throw. Bad throw. None of it is zanshin, fudoshin, or mushin.

The blackbelt test means taking the first step into the practice of aikido. It means becoming a beginner. For five years it has been the spoken and unspoken direction of my training, looming as a target in the distance. For the past six months, the whole dojo has leaned into preparing, investing in me. My time and thoughts were consumed by training and preparation.

Suddenly it was here.

Now it’s gone, and with it, the direction it provided.

The carpet got pulled and I wasn’t really expecting it. Now what?

I know the physical basics of our curriculum. The broad strokes of form are familiar. Now the mental stuff of training. Shoshin – beginner’s mind. Stay curious. Search deeper. Explore the movements. Mushin – avoid opinion and judgement and just be in the zone. Fudoshin – do not waiver from the shugyo and don’t quail from new challenges. Zanshin – be more fully in the moment and remain there.

The Aikido of Hospice Care

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“They tell me I only have weeks, or maybe months to live.”

My friend has tears in her eyes as she tells me this. Her parents, primary caregivers for months now, sit on either side of her with pained expressions. Their daughter is in hospice care. They are her escorts to the grave. And all four of us sitting here in her apartment this evening knows it.

I notice a thought rise up: This is not okay. She should not be dying yet; she’s 12 years younger than me. And I realize that, once again, I’m blaming uke.

Uke grabbed my wrist incorrectly. Uke grabbed the wrong wrist. Uke should have grabbed my wrist with more/less energy.

I am arguing with reality. Responding this way, I put myself at odds with what truly IS in the moment. By overlooking this opportunity to agree with my partner’s ki, I create conflict. I am unwittingly attempting to impose my will upon this moment when I could be treating it with acceptance and kindness.

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Sitting on the couch next to my friend, I look around and take a deep breath. As I open myself more fully to the present moment, I become aware of the sound of her oxygen machine turning on and off, over and over. Tubes. Morphine. The changes in the contours of her face. The color and texture of her hair. The brightness of her eyes. The color of her skin. The shape and size of her body. Her speech.

I’m curious, so I ask her how she feels about all of this. About having cancer. About dying. What is it that you want your parents to know? What is it that you want to say that you have not said yet?

Before she can respond, her father begins talking. He talks about her achievements. He talks about how proud he is. He speaks softly, and he speaks at length. His heart is breaking, and I can see it. He is in his 70’s and he is walking what must be one of the most painful journeys a parent can ever experience.

I find myself blaming uke again. He should let his daughter express her truth. He is trying to distract her from her pain because he doesn’t want to face his own pain. He should be handling this differently.

But this is simply me arguing with reality again. And I catch it just a little more quickly than before. My aikido is beginning to bleed off the mat and into parts of my life I never expected.

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I think of kneeling across from uke in suwari waza. Uke grabs both of my wrists and I start pushing and pulling, trying to execute a technique; trying to do it *extra* good this time!

“Ohhhh… you’re using so much muscle right now,” my Sempai tells me. And she’s right. My habitual response to conflict: How can I get out of this predicament? How can I defeat this opponent and avoid pain and suffering?

We reset and she grabs my wrists again. I shift my focus to kindness. How can I connect more fully with this situation? How can I more openly and completely accept and embrace these current conditions, which are true regardless of what I think or feel in this moment?

Uke smiles as she loses her balance and is smoothly pinned. I’m smiling, too.

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Back in my friend’s apartment, the dinner plates have been cleared away and we’re sitting around the table, laughing and remembering good times. My friend is exhausted, and it’s time to say good night. As the evening draws to a close, I ask her what she wishes for in the world.

She answers without hesitation.

“More kindness.”

Mushin

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Coordination is a central idea in my training right now. Body coordination. Mind and body coordinating together.
Right now I am thinking a lot about mental coordination within myself. We talk about being “single minded,” usually in our focus on some activity. But all too often my mind bifurcates into conflicting thoughts.
Some of the central concepts of aikido are mental principles. I’ve mentioned shoshin (Beginner’s Mind). The other mental principles are zanshin (Remaining Mind), mushin (Mind-without-Mind), and fudoshin (Immovable Mind).
Mushin, No-mind or mind-without-mind, is odd to the Western mind. It is paradoxical to think about no-mindedness. But a curious beginner’s mind allows a person to experience it.
Every practice we begin with breathing. We settle into position, being aware of our posture, our bodies, our surroundings. Sensei says “Mokuso,” and we breathe. When thoughts enter our head, we acknowledge them and let them go. Worries from the day pop into our awareness and we let them go.
 
Mokuso means stilling or silencing thinking. We breathe to focus on breathing. Thoughts settle and still. Before aikido I was aware of my endless cycle of thought, analysis, worry, looking forward, looking back. But I struggled to interrupt the cycle. Until breathing trained me to create room for the cycle to get disrupted.
For me, letting go of thought is analogous to physically relaxing. Thoughts are like little bits of mental tension in mental posture. Thoughts cramp mental movement. Thoughts create resistance and bumps.
When I physically relax during practice, I become more perceptive of the physical interaction with my partner. The more perceptive I become, the more I become aware of the nuance of the physical dynamics.
Mokuso stills my body and mind, releasing unconscious mental and physical tension. The more I approach mushin, the more perceptive my mind becomes and the more aware I become of my surroundings. The more I become part of my surroundings.
One of my most vivid aikido memories is from my first year of practice. We were breathing before practice and, like a switch flipped, I became aware of sounds several rooms away. I could hear the clock on the wall.
It wasn’t ESP or enlightenment. It was my own barriers falling away. The mental effort of thinking suddenly stopped. And then my mind had the capacity to wake up to what was already happening.
This is a very beginner understanding, and maybe mistaken, but as Mind has less-mind, it becomes more present, relaxed and perceptive. Mushin, like relaxing completely, is not floppiness or lethargy. It is freedom to move with what is without timing or response.
Image: “Blue Bowl” by Pat Joyce is licensed under CC BY-NC 2.0

Unity vs. Coordination

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Aikidoka talk about unifying body and mind. It is a target we train for, but I still balk at the phrase. I couldn’t articulate why until I was recently re-reading The Aikido of Shin-Budo Kai. The phrase “coordinating body and mind” stuck out to me.

Unity, to my mind is an ideal or abstract state of oneness.  I realize that a high degree of mental and physical unity is what we pursue. But there is a process to get there, progress from my current state to better and better states.

Coordination, however, is separate things working together. As a beginner, I can wrap my head around coordinating body and mind. To borrow an analogy from Ikeda Sensei, a baby has to learn the coordination to walk. Then he has to wobble along from support to support in fits and starts until his little legs are strong and coordinated enough to walk freely. Then he has to learn how to go up slopes, down stairs, over rough gravel, across an icy sidewalk. Coordination is learned and practiced.

I can hit a baseball. But I lack the coordinated swing to hit a home run out of a major league park. I can be coached, I can physically and mentally train, I can practice, and one day smack a ball out of the park. But not without focused practice.

We train both mind and body separately and together. One without the other is useless. To strike only physically is madness. To strike only mentally is absurd. So each time I practice a motion, my mind participates. Whenever I have a mental intent, my body must move in order to fulfill it. No Jedi powers here.

I’m learning how to coordinate my body and my intent. The more they coordinate, the less either dominates or slackens. Everything begins to cohere into a single system.

I only understand unity as an embodied ideal sporadically, when uke attacks, I move, and things just happen. That only occurs on techniques I have practiced a thousand times. It almost never happens the first time I practice a new attack, technique or principle. Unity transcends mere coordination. But unity is coordinated. I can’t force unity to happen, but I can train my body and mind to be coordinated, laying a foundation.

Image credits: “Molnija 3601 watch movement macro.” Flickr.com. Guy Sei.  CC BY-SA 2.

Which way is down?

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Which Way Is Down?

I’ve always been a bit clumsy. From bumping into walls to drawing surprised glances when I dance in public, I have always felt challenged by my lack of physical grace.

But even so, I’ve always believed I knew which way was down. It’s just right there; look at the floor. Toward the center of the earth. Gravity is pulling me there all the time. Easy, right?

Well, on this fresh new journey into the world of Aikido, I’m beginning to realize that locating “down” may be simple, but it’s not always easy. Not for me, anyway.

Don’t get me wrong: when I am serving as Uke, my sempai clearly show me where “down” is. I am led down again and again, so it would seem that my intellect would understand instantly.

And yet over the past inaugural year’s training, countless times I have been under the impression that I was leading my uke “down,” only to be shown that I was actually leading them in any number of other directions. Currently, in the process of learning katate tori ikkyo hantai tenkan, a technique requiring Nage to lead Uke around and down simultaneously in a corkscrew-like path, I am surprised how easily I forget where “down” is. I lead Uke toward this wall, that wall… across the room… or even at some cockeyed angle approaching the ceiling. But not down.

The challenge I’m facing, I believe, is my habitual tendency to run all teachings up into my head and through my intellect before committing to movement.

I am graciously reminded by my sempai that the body often knows how to do a technique, but the intellect wants to “check it out and make sure it’s correct” before allowing the body to move. The result: confusion, leading to breaks in flow and continuity. Or, more recently, leading me to stare at my own hand as if I had never seen it before. A few of us shared a good laugh over that one.

All of this became clearer to me the other day as I was participating in our dojo’s Kids Class. A new boy about 5 or 6 years old attended for the very first time with a big smile on his face, occasionally glancing back at his father for reassurance. I asked the kiddo to roll over backwards, and he immediately did a very impressive back roll without even thinking about it.

I offered what I thought would be helpful corrections, pointing out that whichever knee is up shows us which shoulder we roll back over.

After my feedback, the poor kid could no longer do a backward roll. In fact, all I had truly done was brought the boy’s awareness up into his head where his intellect tried to “make it perfect,” resulting in a partial back roll turning mid-way into a front roll/barrel roll flop.

Turns out this is all good news, because it’s leading me toward some key questions:

In this moment, how aware of my body’s position in space am I? Where are my arms? Where are my legs? Where are my hands and feet? In which direction(s) are they moving?

And, in the bigger picture: What intention am I setting today? How am I feeling? How will I respond to perceived challenges, conflict, and friction?

As I come back to the present moment, time and again throughout the day, perhaps the best question I can ask myself truly is, “which way is down?”