Tag: principles

Shadow Boxing

philipriffe

Shadow Boxing

I felt dismayed. In the midst of preparing for my first aikido test—consisting of 10 techniques—I made the mistake of asking one of the black belts what you had to do for the shodan (1st degree black belt) test. Before the next class, he approached me with a sly grin and handed me a ream of papers. As I scanned them, my heart sank. 292 techniques, around 10 solo and paired jo and a dozen bokken kata (choreographed forms done with wooden staff and sword). And after all that, in a rite of passage called randori, a mob is sent rushing at you and you’re expected to somehow survive.

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Ai’s Wide Shut

jenmichellemason

“It’s like we’re psychic,” Holly marvels.

“How did you know what I was thinking?” I ask.

We repeat the experiment. She shuts her eyes. I grab her wrist and we pause there a moment. Then I focus on her shoulder—specifically the bunched fabric of her gi top. I think about grabbing it with my free hand.

Before the thought can fully materialize, Holly steps back, defensively removing her shoulder beyond my reach. I did not move. I did not flinch. I only thought about attacking.

“Why did you move?” I ask her.

She says she felt her shoulder at risk. Almost a tingling sensation mixed with a sense of anxiety or concern.

We take turns as the “blind victim.” I close my eyes and she grabs my wrist. After a moment, I sense what I can only describe as danger clouding around my shoulder. I step back and remove it from that danger zone.

“That’s remarkable!” Holly exclaims. “As soon as I thought about shoving your shoulder, you moved it.”

Other aikidoka on the practice mats are having similar experiences. Mystified laughter erupts regularly in the dojo. Sensei patrols the experiment which he devised. He reminds us of its dual purpose. First, the blind test is designed to break up our tendency to go through the motions. We know each other so well, practicing so many hours together every week. Naturally, we get into the habit of performing the techniques.

By closing our eyes, we cannot perform. We can only extend awareness and deeply feel. This sensory experience is crucial to Sensei’s other goal, which is to give us a chance to feel what it is to know the other person’s mind. It’s one of the fundamental ki principles passed down from Tohei Sense and it hangs in a frame at the front of the room. It’s a concept that enables us to experience the “ai” or harmony of ai-ki-do.

Holly and I decide to alter the experiment. We’ve gone after each other’s shoulders several times. Perhaps that explains the supposed telepathy. We will, instead, think about attacking other, random and undisclosed targets. In other words, we’ll run a double-blind study.

I close my eyes and Holly grabs my wrist. She mentally, visually focuses on a bodily target. I sense my abdomen is in danger, so I pivot away, putting my free hand up to defend my trunk. Holly discloses that she had just imagined poking me in the gut. When I think about pinching Holly’s nose, she retracts her face, pivoting away to protect it. Every trial we run amazes us. The “blind victim” can sense the attack before it even happens.

How is this possible?

Do the electrical signals firing from my brain and out across my nerves pass to Holly via my connection to her wrist?

We run the experiment again, only this time, the attacker will not grab the victim. My ability to sense her intended attack takes longer, but I can still accurately detect what part of my body she targets. Holly experiences the same lag time. Somehow, signals pass through the air like radio waves. Without physically touching, we both experience a sense of “ai” and we are stunned. Humbled.

Holly delights in the equality of our mutual perceptiveness. That she, a brand new student with less than a month’s training, can match sensory awareness with someone who has trained for over a decade is reassuring.

To me, it suggests that Tohei’s fundamental ki principles run deep. Somewhere, without training, people developed an ability to know and understand the Other, the foreign, the supposed stranger. Despite what we see playing out in the national and international arenas, people are actually more connected and more capable of harmony than we realize.

 

Photo credits: featured image “Art Prize – The Eyes Have It” by Caribb CC BY-NC-ND 2.0; “Wellness” CC0; “Attempt to use human brain to receive radio waves” PD.

Mushin

natebrush
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

Exploring the Principles: Keep One Point

natebrush

 

Every art, trade, science, and study has its jargon. Aikido is no different. Jargon can be a barrier to learning, but it develops for a reason. The jargon points to specific ideas that laypeople may not comprehend without study and devotion. One idea in aikido that tripped me up was “one point.”

The principle of “keeping one point” is a translation of Tohei Sensei. Someone had to teach me what my one point was before I could keep it. It is a spot in your lower abdomen, a couple inches below your belly button. It is roughly in the same place as your center of mass.

That describes where one point is. What it is might seem odd to the Western mind. It did to me. The tanden or hara in Japanese or dantien in Chinese is the physical center and power center. It is where ki or chi flows from. It is the hubcap that all points of the body move in relation to.

Keeping it implies you can lose it. Losing one point is quite easy–let your posture slump forward. Carry tension in your shoulders. Let your mind wander. Do just about anything and that internal connection will ebb.

Keeping one point is hard to learn, harder to integrate into everyday life. Have good posture, a present mind, and let your mind be linked to your one point. I think O-Sensei’s words in The Art of Peace are clear teaching.

A good stance and posture reflect a proper state of mind. 

and

The key to good technique is to keep your hands, feet, and hips straight and centered. If you are centered, you can move freely. The physical center is your belly; if your mind is set there as well, 

you are assured of victory in any endeavor.

After four years of practice, that link is growing more consistent and it is following me into daily life. I got past the jargon, past looking in the glossary, past fiddling around trying to find my one point. There is an anecdote of a student asking O-Sensei if he was better at keeping his one point than anyone else. O Sensei said “No, I just come back faster.”

Don’t worry about losing one point, losing posture, moving with tension. Just come back to one point. That is the real practice. Come back to one point.

 

Image “finding balance” is copyright (c) by woodleywonderworks and made available under an Attribution 2.0 Generic license

Exploring the Principles: Relax Completely Part 2

natebrush

I’ve been thinking more about the principle of relaxing completely.  It is inextricable from the other key principles, but it is one of the easiest to notice when I violate it. Oops, my shoulder popped up. Wow, I feel my bicep flexing. Dang, my hips are stiff and I can’t turn at all.

But what I’ve observed the past few weeks is the tension before uke even moves. “Get out of the way!” “This is going to hurt if you don’t block it!” “He’s stronger than you!”  That little voice re-framed my understanding of the principle and my exploration.
Relax the Mind Completely.
That’s the real pickle in training. So what are the characteristics of a relaxed mind? First, here are lists of my observations of slack and tense mind in myself.
SLACK MIND – disengage
– Nage: I can’t do this
– Nage: This is too hard
– Nage: He won’t really hit me
– Nage: I don’t need to know this yet
– Nage/Uke: Pull back, get away.
– Nage/Uke: Whatever, I don’t like this technique
– Nage/Uke: What’s that shiny thing over there?
TENSE MIND – resist
– Nage: I can’t do this
– Nage: This is too hard
– Nage: I’ll mess you up, puny weakling
– Nage: This is going to hurt
– Uke: I’m so grounded he can’t throw me.
My experience is that having mind in the wrong attitude makes me myopic on the attack or expected outcome. It locks me into one moment and puts too much consequence (or not enough) on the outcome. But we are training the mind as well as the body. We practice aikido so that our bodies and minds react well in conflict. I remind myself that during practice I am not getting jumped by thugs. I’m training to prepare for that sort of thing, but it isn’t happening from the men and women wearing gis. The list of relaxed mind’s attributes below are my current understanding after three years of practice.
RELAXED MIND – receptive
– I can do this.
– This isn’t too hard to learn.
– Here I am.
– Let’s see where this goes, together.
– I understand better now and am still learning.
There’s another quality that is hard to describe. When I’m centered and ready and unafraid, sometimes it is like there is no attack. Or the attack is inconsequential. If aikido is the way of harmonizing energy, when mind is relaxed, attack and response are all one blended note. It is a thing of beauty that I didn’t cause, but participated in.
For me relaxation depends largely on confidence. If I’m not confident that I can respond well to a punch to the gut, I’ll tense up. Then I won’t respond well. But instructors and senior students help by giving attacks at my level. And I help myself by telling myself, “Sure it’s new, but I can do this.” Pretend I’m confident and someday I might be. But if my attitude is “I can’t do this” I might as well be hitting myself.
I think the first uke is always the mind. On the days I can take the negative thoughts and set them aside and have an attitude of “Here I am, I can do this,” those are the days I learn. When I’m at work and something goes wrong and someone starts accusing, if I can take the attitude “Here I am. Let’s see where this goes, together,” then my ego disengages and we can focus on the end result we need to reach.
Those little harmonies, on and off the mat, are worth the hard training. I’m getting better at taking a breath and relaxing the mind. Better, and still improving.

Exploring the Principles: Relax Completely

natebrush
Martial arts require practicing new ways of moving, thinking, and interacting with others. Aikido relies on several key principles that take time and exploration to understand. The more deeply I explore the art, the more a bottomless well of vocabulary roils beneath, enough to drown in if I take it all on at once.
When I first started aikido someone suggested choosing one of the four key principles and practicing it for a month or two until I had some feel for it. Then move to the next principle. I’ve followed that advice, so in any class I am working on what sensei is teaching and trying to apply an internal principle as well.
Recently I have been practicing what it means to “Relax Completely.”

Art by Nate B. Copyrighted 2017.

When uke grabs, can I relax my wrist, then elbow, then shoulder, then stand with my spine relaxed and straight? Can I do all of that before contact?
What has really transformed daily life is what happens from the one-point down. Are my hips and pelvic muscles relaxed? Can I settle my weight down into the floor without tensing my hips, without twisting my knees out of alignment with my feet?
I noticed a lot of internal tension in my hips and legs. I started focusing on that in practice, cooking in the kitchen, standing to stretch. It started to make it easier to stand up straight.
I’ve always enjoyed running but for the past few years have been hindered by old injuries. I decided to start up again and run only as long as I could keep my lower body relaxed. If my posture started to cave in or my stride hobbled in any way, I would stop. If my old injuries flared up–as they have so many times–I would stop and preserve my joints.
In three months, my old complaints haven’t acted up, I’ve had no injuries, and I’m running twice as far as I ever have and slowly adding to the distance. And it doesn’t hurt. Sure, it takes a lot of effort and sometimes my cardio rises to high and I have to slow down. Sure, sometimes I bite off a bigger climb than my legs can handle and I have to dial it back. But I can tell the difference now between discomfort from asking my body to push and the pain of demanding too much.
Applying aikido principles creates a feedback loop. When I put my focus on listening to the cues from my body (Are you relaxed? Feeling good? Want to keep going?) I find running to be much more joyful. Instead of demanding from my body (Three miles at this pace, I don’t care if you’re sore. I’m Mind and you’ll do what I say, Body!), I relax and listen. I haven’t been injured because the goal is not to achieve, but to participate.
Now on the mat, I work to let go of achievement. I try to listen and participate.