Glimmerscape

Still focusing

This morning was extra sunny due to the time change, and I arrived at the park where we do Sunday weapons practice to see the bright sun sparkling in the still-wet grass.

Candy was there along with Carmen, an old friend and training partner who started Aikido around the same time as I did.

We did the 31 jo kata a few times, and I was so erratic and stumbly that it threw the others off. I had a little conversation with myself about paying attention. It sort of worked. We went into the 31 partner practice that I'd worked on with the San Rafael bunch yesterday, but Dennis Sensei, who teaches up here, likes it done differently, and again I caused breakdowns in the sections that are different, not doing anything recognizable from either perspective. Everyone was overly kind and forgiving.

Carmen, who knows the stuff in his sleep, helped us sort it out and we finally got out of the quagmire I'd led us into. The sun was warm and nobody else was in the park. We spent the last 20 minutes of class moving smoothly through the form.

We even went over an alternate ending that involves different attacker moves for 28 through 31. It is an older ending that Saito Sensei seems to have abandoned sometime in the mid-1980s, and we do it now just for the fun of something different and to keep alive a historical artifact.

Later, after I arrived back home, the kids and I carved pumpkins.

Early class and a missed commitment

i woke up an hour early this morning. It's Saturday and eventually I have to get down to San Rafael to give a class on the 31 jo kata partner practice, or kumijo. Today is special because after class I have to beat it back up north in time to see my daughter's soccer semi-finals playoff game.

I drank some coffee and packaged up a DVD of Saito Sensei that I made for my teacher. I had really one job to do of any importance this morning: call my daughter from the dojo at 8:30 so she could get up and get ready to go with her mom to the soccer field for warm-ups.

Despite my early start on the day I was late driving through the fog to the dojo. I arrived at the same time as some other students and we all went in together and started getting dressed for practice. I got my weapons out and we bowed in.

In this class we've been working for about 6 months on the 31-count jo partner practice, doing it in sections first and then last week, beginning to do the whole thing continuously. Things go a little raggedly through the first half of the class. There are breakdowns when people forget their move at a certain point, or more commonly, one or both partners spontaneously switch sides somewhere in the middle and then realize something's not making sense. We stop and get things back on track, and by the last ten minutes of class everyone is moving nicely with their partner.

I have to bow out to get back on the road to make it to the soccer game, but by then Sensei has arrived and the students jump back on the mat between classes and continue practicing the form.

Not until I'm driving away do I realize that I never called my daughter to make sure she got up.

I phoned in a panic and apologized for spacing out on helping her get up and ready for her soccer game. I felt so angry with myself, and mystified at such a towering demonstration of irresponsibility.

On the freeway I realize that the guilt is a grab distracting me, taking me out of the present. In practicing the kumijo, we had just spent the last hour staying in the present and dealing with the immediacy of attack and response, where distraction is deadly. I remember this and try to get past the trainwreck in my mind.

What new practices?

In a comment, Coleman Ridge observes that whatever we do to help put Aikido principles to use in daily life situations, for effective results, we ought to build new practices, and not hope for success by simply "intending" to do something different. He conjectures that these new practices would be rhetorical or linguistic, basically arising in the realm of speaking and listening.

This is what I think too. An assumption I'm making is that practices aimed at producing new actions, different from our default programmed actions, will be most successful if we simulate training environments similar to the ones in which we actually want to move in new ways. What I mean is, if we want to verbally "blend" with a declared adversary at work, we would succeed best by designing and training with practices using linguistic "blends" staged or role-played in a workplace setting.

This assumption is a corollary of my original suspicion: that on-the-mat training is insufficient to enable a robust ability to enact Aikido principles verbally in off-the-mat domains. I do not know whether these assumptions are that well founded, and I believe it would be a tremendous project for a doctoral student to explore these assumptions.

I also have additional concerns about any proposed verbal learning practices. One of the most important of these concerns to me is, how to facilitate such learning while preserving the dignity of everyone in the loop. In the dojo this is easy. The students give the teacher complete discretion to guide them through whatever physical and attitudinal shifts they need to make to progress in the art. It is a given that the students are not themselves aware of what these shifts are nor how to make them. To put ourselves in the hands of a teacher to help us learn what we don't know we don't know requires a deep trust. Establishing this kind of trust in the more purely linguistic world of everyday life and especially work life is vastly more difficult and complicated than doing it in a dojo, where you can see the physical techniques you want to learn performed elegantly and expertly.

There have been a few researchers in organizational behavior that I have grown to respect as possible resources for help in designing the kinds of practices that might help, and at the same time, satisfy the learner's right to informed consent to the nature and structure of the learning process design. This value of informed consent, I feel, is important in preserving the dignity of everyone involved.

Some of the researchers I'm talking about are John Dewey, Kurt Lewin, and Chris Argyris. One basic practical guideline I'm drawing from these and other researchers is that it is not helpful to "trick" someone into learning something, no matter how beneficial such learning potentially may be to the student. Not only is it not helpful for creating learning, it actually inhibits learning by eroding the student's trust in the teacher or facilitator. I think many teachers limit their success by being in denial that their very methods are counterproductive to the results they claim to achieve.

Training log 10/28/2004

Today started out with early morning training in Santa Rosa, CA. Three of Dennis Tatoian's students (he's still in the Phillipines until mid-next week), Julian, Jason, and Kathy, have been regulars, and our first exercises in the freezing warehouse space are extending Ki to warm our hands and feet. Nobody ever complains; there's no complaining in Aikido.

On mornings like these I remember how Dennis would tell us about training in winter at the Iwama Dojo with Saito Sensei. On cold days the Uchi Deshi (live-in students) would be instructed to go around the perimeter of the dojo and open all the windows so that the cold wind and snow would blow right in. There were also surprise training sessions with weapons outside in the pitch black winter nights. These memories that Dennis Sensei would talk about always somehow surfaced when someone shivered or made some comment about the cold mornings in Northern California.

Kathy is a martial artist who has just begun in the past few months training her body to match the ferocity and hardness of her mind. She has what the Japanese call "konjo" or "guts." She gets thrown and jumps up before the person who threw her is ready for the next attack. She reminds me of another woman, a Brazilian woman we named "Rocky," who punched me hard enough to make my glasses fly about half-way across the mat in our old Rohnert Park, CA dojo space. Rocky is long gone. She practices Kenpo in San Francisco and works as a fitness trainer.

We spend half the class on variations of techniques for shoulder and collar grabs, then we switched to practicing ways of disarming an attacker with a wooden staff. these are called "jo dori" and we worked on two of them today. Dennis will be back next Thursday.

Training log 10/27/2004

This is actually something that happened six or seven years ago, but it seems to come up practically every week in training.

I'd been training around at different dojos and I picked up some ways of doing irimi nage that were different from the way my teacher showed it to us. At that time I wasn't really interested in any particular style, but just wanted to soak up as much as I could from wherever I could find it.

So I came to class one day with my regular teacher and we started doing irimi nage. I began trying to mimic the moves I'd learned in another dojo that I'd visited a few days before. I was surprised to find that what had worked so well at the other dojo completely failed from the utter start with my usual training partners. I was astonished and bewildered, and I became so undone by it that I lost all my confidence and couldn't perform the simplest move for the rest of the class.

After class I went to my teacher, a guy who tends to discourage meta-conversations about Aikido practice, and I asked him, "Sensei, I thought I knew how to do irimi nage, but today I couldn't do the tiniest part of it, what's happening?" He laughed and walked away, saying, "Ha! Wait 'till that happens to you after you've been training for 30 years."

Transference of Aikido skills to everyday world

In the "Aikido as a way of being" post I said I have doubts about how well physical Aikido skills actually train us to move more effectively in the off-the-mat world of speaking and listening in which we spend most of our time.

These doubts have persisted even though many authors of Aikido-in-real-life type books seem to suggest that physical Aikido skills transfer readily into new actions in, say, verbal conflicts at work.

What we are really talking about is the question: does Aikido practice enable me to move into action with more and better choices in stressful situations than I had before I began training Aikido?

Certainly, if through Aikido (or any martial art practice) I have learned to direct my mind to find my physical center and to relax, breathing into it before moving into action, then this is dramatic progress. From a relaxed, balanced, alert physical position I think anyone would have command of more choices for action than had they simply reacted reflexively. And I agree that in many situations Aikido practice will build in physical habits of rexlation and centering deeply enough to make a difference in the way we present ourselves to some level of increased difficulty.

But I also think that our default action programming -- learned over a lifetime -- to win and not lose, to control the field of play, to always appear rational, to hide negative feelings, (to name a few), is a powerful force that embodies and directs our actions when we feel truly threatened. If martial arts practices like Aikido can help us to raise the bar of situational difficulty so that it takes more conflict to make us panic and fall back into our default routines, then great. I believe this happens and it's obvious progress. But I think we are better off having an idea of the scope of what we are up against: our years of previous practice just powering through things and people with strength and aggression. These are deeply rooted habits of reflexive action, and they will not just leave our bodies like exorcized spirits. They are a part of us, now and always.

If we are to have a chance of really making lasting and significant progress in translating Aikido principles such as "blend or merge with the other's power," or "develop power without strength," or even simply "move out of the way of an incoming attack," into effective new actions, then I think we will succeed better in the long run by designing additional real-life situational practices to reprogram our bodies to act in new ways in precisely those real-life situations. These practices would be everyday life responses to everyday troubles, but they would be informed by Aikido principles instead of default principles such as "win at all costs."

My theory in this, to sum up, is that Aikido training is good but it's beneficial impact on our everyday actions will only give us modest, though non-trivial, success. For a truly dramatic, increasing, and lasting ability to shift into new ways of moving, speaking, and listening additional practice is required off the mat, practice geared to the actual kinds of situations we find ourselves panicing in out in the world.

I'd like to explore here what kinds of practices those new, off-the-mat, varieties might be, what principles they would embody, and how we might conduct such practices in a way that facilitates deep learning and at the same time preserves the dignity of eveyone involved.

Training log 10/25/2004 #1

Last week my home dojo hosted a visit from Tetsutaka Sugawara Sensei. He has been on tour from Japan this Fall demonstrating his new kata, which is intended as a Tai Chi push hands practice in the form of a long series of Aikido "kaishis" or counter techniques. Each move involves an active and passive component, and partners alternate these each in turn as the form unfolds.

A "kaishi" is a technique used to neutralize the application of an Aikido technique, and then it applies a counter technique back the other way. Sort of a turn-the-tables kind of thing. Often kaishis are strung together in a sequence which, when performed, looks like a lengthy back and forth series of alternating attacks, none of which gain any real advantage before the next one is applied.

Sugawara Sensei is sort of a maverick who has tried over the years explicitly to integrate Chinese internal martial arts with Aikido, a japanese art. He has at least one book on the subject of internal martial arts, and in addition, he is a practitioner of Iaido and Katori Shinto Ryu, both sword arts. He's a very eclectic fellow.

I was especially interested in learning more about Sugawara's new partner practice, which he apparently developed all in one day last September. During his two-hour lesson we were able to get through the first 25% of the form.

I found right away that the Aikido style we practice (Iwama Style) is way too hard to bring into Sugawara's new practice. He was telling us all to empty out our wrists, arms and upper body, relax our lower backs, and sink. If you accidentally let out a kiai you got yelled at. This was supposed to be all soft and connected all the way through.

In retrospect I think that this new practice would be very useful for Aikidoka who are struggling with the riddle of how to get more power using less strength. It's hard to get the idea that in Aikido we are not doing anything "to" our opponent, but merging with their force and intention to guide the episode to a rapid, safe conclusion, a conclusion in which the attacker has few choices for a little while. It's sort of like a "time out" for trouble-makers. It's harder to overpower someone to accomplish this, and recognizing this, Aikido takes the strategy of coordinating with the attacker's movement and folding up the body in a non-painful natural way. This results in less resistance from the attacker, who was already committed to the movement anyway.

Sugawara's Tai Chi/Aikido form is really a series of Aikido counter techniques performed with a kind of Tai Chi mentality and physical attitude of softness and attention to the other. These are already considered virtues in Aikido, though we are still not very disciplined in embodying these virtues. We get caught up in using strength and hardness to overpower our training partners, and this practice of Sugawara's is a physical reminder that Aikido has more promise as an internal art than as a hard external art.

Training log 10/24/2004

For the last two weeks of October one of my teachers, Dennis Tatoian, is away in the Phillipines, and while he's gone it's my job to lead some of his classes. On Sunday mornings we have an Aikido weapons (sword and staff) class outside in a local city park. Click here to see some pictures.

The dojo has a lot of new students in various kyu ranks and a handful of recently promoted Shodans (first degree black belt). Most of the senior students drifted away or moved away around the beginning of 2001 after our old dojo closed, and I'm one of only three who stuck around.

This morning it was very wet after a couple of days of rain, and we met at an alternate site that affords some cover and dry ground.

Two students showed up, Chris and Candy. Chris is a very new student. He's a naturopath about 40 years old. His son, Brian is a black belt who trained with us until moving to Japan earlier this year. Chris is inquisitive and ambitious, and he picks things up pretty fast. Candy is a young woman from the East Coast who has a warrior inside her, but she tends to keep that part of herself on a short leash. She has been training for a couple of years and knows most of the weapons katas pretty well.

Sensei had us working on a 31-move paired staff form in which an attacker and a defender strike, thrust, parry in a back and forth sequence. This form is divided into 7 sections of 3 - 5 moves each. We began today on the sequence 21 through 27, which was the section our teacher had left us with when he went away.

Part of the difficulty of leading people through these sequences is that there are so many different ways of doing them. I train in two dojos and things done in one place are taught differently in the other. I have to remember Dennis Sensei's way of doing these forms and stick to that.

In the 21 through 27 sequence Dennis does something I've never seen anyone else teach, so I have to pay close attention to how I present it. Chris and Candy seem to get the idea and they work their way through the sequence stopping at each move to check foot and hip position and hand placement on the staff (jo). There are questions about how to avoid getting hit, and the answers are mostly about turning the hips and aligning the body to both get out of the way and to set up the next strike or thrust.

Meanwhile, right next to our outdoor training spot there is a dog arena set up in the grass, and people are running their dogs through a sort of doggie par course. Every time a dog does something good it gets a treat. We don't get treats when we do good, over in the Aikido class. But also, when we do something good we either successfully avoid getting killed or put our opponent at a disadvantage. That's sort of a treat.

At one point in the class Chris asks some questions about the form. I have to remember not to get into extended talking, which is a trap some novice instructors fall into. It's better to give shorter answers and guide the students back to simply doing the practice. Usually, the practice itself provides answers, and as the teacher I can often connect someone's physical learning lightbulb to a question they asked earlier. Sometimes I'm successful at making this connection, sometimes not. Today with Chris I think it was hit and miss. I need to listen better to what he's concerned about.

The founder of Aikido, Morihei Ueshiba stressed that training should be fun, so I always try to make it fun whether I'm training with my teachers or leading a class. Students come back if they're having fun.

We moved on from the 21 - 27 sequence to the 28 - 31 ending sequence. This is a short set of moves, but it contains a complicated parry that involves a lot of movement with both the body and the weapon. As a thrust comes in toward the face you have to move your jo to vertical and bring your hands together with the weapon in front of you, then you have to swing the weapon out wide to parry the thrust while pivoting back with the right hip and raise the jo to a high position we call "Hasso."

Chris and Candy picked up the move without a lot of trouble and made it through the sequence on both sides about a half-dozen times before we ran out of time. As we bowed out to each other some dogs from the competition next to us ran through our space as though they knew we were leaving.

Aikido as a way of being

There is a lot of hype and slick choreography surrounding the presentation of martial arts through mainstream media. Many people are attracted to the study of martial arts with the idea that they will learn, in a very short time, how to do spinning heel kicks, twirl a wooden staff, or do flashy nunchuck routines. Others choose martial arts because they want to be able to improve their ability to defend themselves in the face of physical attack.

Some choose martial arts study because they think there is a chance it will make them better people, more capable of acting effectively in a variety of difficult situations -- not just physical threats -- but in everyday conflicts and dilemmas too.

Internal martial arts such as Tai Chi and Aikido are common choices for this latter category of people because these arts stress awareness and willful relaxation of internal tensions and tightness that often for many people simply go unnoticed. In western civilization the practice of living in our bodies has been largely overlooked in favor of practices of rational thinking. But rational thinking is not likely to enable us to calm our breathing or relax tense muscles at times when we need to move into action in a creative way. Anyone who has tried to speak powerfully and persuasively at a time of high physical stress knows how physical reality can encroach on our ability to perform the way we want.

On this weblog I want to explore the idea that the study of a specific art -- Aikido -- can help people configure and manage their internal systems in a way that makes them more versatile, mobile, creative, and ultimately more effective in resolving difficult everyday life situations. Such situations include interpersonal conflicts, threats, or frustrations at work, school, at home, or simply out getting around in the world.

But I do not think that simply studying Aikido by itself will necessarily enable us to act more effectively out in the world beyond the dojo doors. In fact I believe that our default practices, built up over a prior lifetime for dealing with conflict and frustration, are powerful programs that cannot be easily displaced no matter how many Aikido techniques we practice patiently over time. I will explore what else I think is missing here in this space. And I hope I will be able to find a way for others to contribute their ideas here too.

Yet, the idea that Aikido practice can increase physical awareness, relaxation, and control and thereby enhance our ability to move skillfully seems to be worth pursuing. It provides a controlled environment on the mat for experiencing what it feels like to merge or blend with the energy of another, to avoid charging recklessly into another's strength, and to direct physical conflict toward peacrful resolution not necessarily requiring that anyone be hurt. This is a worthwhile aim, and if it is not as easy as some believe to transfer the application of these skills into real life, that does not mean it's not a good idea to keep on trying.

This weblog will reflect my path of trying out ways to make Aikido and Tai Chi vehicles for building everyday life skills for dealing with the world, and for adjusting the physical moods we adopt that become our starting points for moving into action.