Filling and emptying are such simple gestures. And such powerful ones!

We are very skilled at filling.

We fill -indeed, we saturate– our days with a thousand activities. Our silences with endless words and sounds.

Doing, doing, doing, and still just…doing. Precisely when even nature slows its rhythms and society grants a few days’ pause from work, we press harder on the accelerator.

So last night we devoted the first part of training to the slow practice, almost in slow motion, of a kata performed with the jo.

Slowing down, for those who are used to always going full speed, is not easy.

Emptying the mind of the thoughts that clog it is even harder.

But then, after overcoming the initial moment in which the system, tamed to always be under pressure, rebels and tends to speed up, magic begins to happen.

We begin to feel ourselves. We begin to feel the other. We see ourselves for what we are, for the movements we express. There is no longer space for anything else: the chaos, the things that fill us, encounter a presence that gradually expands and comes to inhabit our present moment.

A discipline is made of simple elements, yet it addresses us -a society that is damnably complex- that loves to overload rather than reduce, and to scatter rather than concentrate.

Aikido is all here: becoming richer because one gradually learns to let go of everything that is unnecessary.

Wishing you a good approach to Christmas.

Diclaimer: picture by Ravi Kant from Pexels