Have you ever come across a kestrel?
You can recognize it by the fact that this small hawk, is able to remain perfectly motionless in the air, no matter how strong the wind is.

It is a technique that the kestrel has developed to locate its prey and that makes it appear almost free from the law of gravity.

A few evenings ago, we saw one at sunset (that little dot in the picture).

So we thought: are we sure that when we talk about grounding, we are only referring to when our feet are firmly anchored to the ground?

If we look at both the teaching and practice of falls (ukemi), we notice that we often focus on certain principles.

We focus on receiving incoming energy and perceiving changes in balance. We attach great importance to the skill to accept the deformation of one’s axis, to transform a vertical geometric structure into a more rounded shape capable of dispersing incoming energy with a natural, soft, non-traumatic movement that is functional to regaining balance.

But if grounding is a principle, then its universality -which goes far beyond any martial discipline- must somehow permeate ukemi as well. And not only in its extreme phases, when the initial grounding is modified and then recovered at the end.

Can one be grounded in flight?

Yes. One must be.

Good ukemi practice should lead to certain skills that are not only functional to the technical movement itself, nor even to the fundamental safety of those performing them.

For this reason, progressive attention to knowing how to give your fall the desired trajectory is of utmost importance.

It is not just a matter of learning to fall without hitting other people or the wall of the Dojo (although it is about time, especially in certain stages, that ukemi etiquette should be required: uke should be thrown outside the tatami, on free trajectories, and one falls and makes others falling if and only if the conditions are right).

It is about… mastering freedom, as the kestrel does. Knowing how to direct, at the moment of maximum flexibility and therefore vulnerability, a chain of events that leads us to lose our balance and then regain it.

There are ukemi and projection (tobi-ukemi) training methods that allow for good progression, fully respecting everyone’s physical condition.

Despite this, especially for those who approach it in adulthood, consciously giving up contact with the ground is always a moment of (healthy) crisis.

And this is why projection, accompanied and never imposed, is the truly revolutionary moment of the entire practice.

The anti-gravitational suspension of time, that experience that causes the system that regulates our balance to tilt, allows us to experience a grounding that does not depend on physical contact with the ground.

In a way, we can say that that feeling of serenity, of the expansion of time and space, of total trust, together with the realization, once we have fallen, that the experience we have just had was not traumatic or negative, that feeling is rootedness in the air.

Trust, after all, is not a blind act of our will but a decision that involves every fiber of our being in a direction that we believe to be credible, positive, and constructive for us.

That same trust that governs and underlies practice and every true moment in any relationship.

Let us not trivialize the study and practice of ukemi with the two opposites seen on the tatami: never falling or throwing anyone as if there were no tomorrow. We would lose an essential aspect of the practice that a common kestrel has helped us rediscover.