Today we offer a reading for those of you under a beach umbrella or enjoying the cool air of the mountains. A perfect moment when mind and body are not immersed in the routines of the year, which sometimes make it more difficult to look deeply at what we do. Enjoy the reading.
Among the Martial Arts, Aikido stands out, beyond its technical peculiarities, for the absence of a specific training methodology aimed at combat – and particularly at combat sports
Its technical and experiential progression is structurally similar to that of the other disciplines that make up Japanese Budo. In Ju Jutsu, Judo and Karate as well, teaching is based on rigorous study of movement, on experimenting with the effects of applying principles to one’s training partner, and on technical execution.
During the learning phase, there is no real chance of finding one’s bearings or initially understanding the principles without a great deal of openness and generosity on the part of teachers and training partners.
“Giving away” the technique does not mean belittling one’s partner. It means putting them in a position to begin the process of learning and internalizing.
This does not happen only at the beginning, during the early stages of one’s practice, but whenever, in some way, we become beginners again. A different way of practicing, a different perspective, a variation is enough to reset the counter, even for experienced black belts. What changes, when practice is built on solid foundations, is the amount of time needed to adapt one’s own system to the new propositions.
From the outside, this way of practicing can undoubtedly appear ambiguous. The web is full of thousands of discussions about effectiveness, fakery, unrealistic practice, collaborative or non-collaborative partners…
Now, teaching -and therefore learning- how to break a wrist with a technique (a straightforward application of nikyo, for example) takes no more than fifteen minutes. Nor does it require years of attending Martial Arts classes.
Applying a principle through the execution of a technique can, in fact, produce enough pain to force a submission.
After all, this is the need from which the various techniques originated, in Japan as elsewhere in the world. A joint lock was originally intended to cause permanent injury.
On the tatami, however, conditions are different. Different from the battlefields of the samurai, but also very different from the unpredictability of a street-fight.
Attacks are codified and greatly simplified, and nobody on the tatami attacks or defends with the same attitude as someone who once had to fight to make it home alive. In fact, however high the physical and technical level may be, this does not even happen on the tatami where an Olympic medal is about to be awarded.
So? Is it all fiction?
Is it a sophisticated way of fooling ourselves into believing that we have superpowers within a life confined by rigid social and relational frameworks?
When we have the courage to suspend judgment and go beyond this, we begin to see that the purely technical and applicative dimension is only the first level of the discipline. Essential to its foundations, but extremely reductive and dangerously limited if it becomes merely an exercise in listening to one’s own ego -rather than to the wrist of the unfortunate partner.
A truly oppositional uke -in street-fight mode, so to speak- is simply useless. At least as useless as a robotic nage.
Slowly, we learn that we are not “giving away” the technique. We are learning to feel our partner through the body. And, by doing so, ourselves.
The concept of awase (合わせ) refers to the idea of a perfect fitting-together between two very different individuals who, in that moment, are co-creating something.
It is through awase that, progressively, we experience defusion.
We begin to execute and receive techniques in a relaxed way. We tend not to take personally what the other person is doing. We clearly perceive a greater degree of freedom than the body, constrained by a grip, would otherwise experience. At the same time, we discover an enormous distance between the world of thoughts and the present moment.
ACT (Acceptance and Commitment Therapy) is a psychotherapeutic approach based on a central idea: we cannot completely control what happens in our minds, but we can learn not to be governed by it.
Martial Arts, and Aikido in particular, offer an experiential path for extending this approach to our entire psychophysical system.
Just as a technique can only take place when space is created between the two people practicing together, ACT also seeks to create space. Our common experience tells us that our minds are often clouded by intrusive thoughts.
Yet it is possible, especially through practice, to move from thoughts such as:
“I’m having the thought that this is going to go terribly wrong”. -which is certainly not something that happens only to adolescents
to:
“I can allow this thought to be here, feel what I feel in my body, and still decide what I want to do”.
That space between thought, emotion and action is, to a large extent, at the heart of psychological flexibility. And it is at the heart of Aikido.
Accepting what you cannot control, gaining distance from what the mind tells you, being present, and choosing actions guided by your values is the culmination of a discipline that places itself as a catalyst between fusion and defusion.
The aim, therefore, is to foster this process, with a willingness to work with a partner while keeping in mind that each of us is part of this process. Doing the technique, regardless to the partner’s integrity or becoming oppositional may serve as a way of testing the geometric accuracy of the execution, but it serves far less -much, much less- the overall growth of the individual.
Disclaimer: Picture by DS Stories from Pexels