Glimmerscape

Diamond, Willow, Water, (Air)

In Aikido we often use words to talk about knowledge that mere language will not teach. We use language anyway in hopes that the spoken ideas can become reminders of, or pointers to, physical knowledge that may lead us closer to the Aikido we wish to express through our bodies.

But these ideas and concepts are not destinations in and of themselves, however entertaining and stimulating indulgence in them may seem. They are, like poetry, a symbolic doorway to realms beyond language.

Saito Sensei used the words Kihon, Yawarakai, and Ki no Nagare to denote whole categories of practice, across which a technique like Ikkyo Omote might be performed very differently.

The basic practice according to this scheme is Kihon Training. This is hard, static practice without initial movement. Someone has grabbed you; you're both standing there; what do you do? Beginning from a static grab requires you to move your body in a certain way to unbalance your opponent after s/he is already settled into the grab. This requires a certain precision and deployment of kokyu that may not be so important if you catch your attacker still in motion. This is why Kihon practice is so difficult to do without using strength, and is probably why Saito Sensei favored an emphasis on Kihon training for everyone, especially up to about 2nd Dan.

Yawarakai Training means "flexible" practice. It differs from Kihon Training insofar as the movement into the technique begins in the micro-instant the grab engages. It's as if the energy of the grab is transferred into you, triggering the technique. Watching flexible technique, one sees no moment of stasis after the grab engages, only movement, yet the grab is solid.

Ki no Nagare, or "flowing Ki" training exhibits only coordinated movement and effortless technique. The attacker grabs, but there's nothing there. Nage's body has moved with the attack, leading it just out of reach, seamlessly into the dynamics of a technique. To perform at this level requires long practice, an emptiness of mind, and a generosity of spirit. Mostly, however, talk about Ki no Nagare practice falls short. It is something that the mind cannot own, but just marvel at; a feeling of physical dynamics accessible not by words but only through practice.

In some dojos these three levels of practice are called, Diamond, Willow, and Water (Air is another category beyond these that is even further, for me, beyond words). The usefulness of these categories is measured in the practical value they provide to students working to improve their Aikido. Saito Sensei clearly thought that a methodical progression from static to flexible, to flowing practice would build power, teach precision, and enable the gradual refinement of mind and body -- the way of being -- necessary finally to bring forth Takemusu Aiki, or the spontaneous Aikido that lies beyond technique. For most of us, achieving this would be like attaining the Holy Grail of Aikido.

A few years ago I heard Bill Witt Shihan say that he only practices fundamentals, and that he does not do Aikido. Perhaps that was a hint that part of the process of reaching the Holy Grail is to become unattached to the idea of it. Simply moving into action, beyond all ideas. What a concept!

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Spring blossoms and Kumi Jo

Fragile, pink Spring blossoms covered the small trees that surrounded our outdoor Sunday morning training spot. Seeing these trees in bloom reminded me of how long it had been since I'd attended a Sunday morning Weapons class.

Medium overcast shed a flat light on the parking area as I angled across the lot, but my spirits brightened at the sight of some old training partners from the 1990s in Rohnert Park who had arrived today ahead of me.

The biggest surprise was to see that, perhaps in my long absence, Shaun had returned to training with Tatoian Sensei, and he was standing in the lot along with Craig, Carmen, and Jor. The presence of Craig, Carmen, and Shaun made it a mini-reunion from the mid-90s Rohnert Park dojo cast of characters.

Shaun is a complex, good-natured, and very strong young man who was my sempai when I first began training. There were people you could mess around with, even if you didn't know anything, but Shaun wasn't one of them. Sensei would warn us newcomers that we ought to not resist techniques with Shaun, but just go with it. It was for our own protection. Sensei never wanted anyone to get hurt, and you got the impression that Shaun was like some partially trained, wild animal, who might become dangerous as easily as smile. That's Shaun about to throw Carmen in the middle of Kumi Jo 6.

The fact that there were a lot of people like that training during those days with Tatoian Sensei only added to the general mystique of Iwama Style Aikido as something a little bit too menacing. In any case it had led a number of well-meaning Aikido friends to shake their heads in dismay when I told them that I had begun taking classes from Tatoian Sensei. I didn't quite understand their concern, since I'd taken ukemi from Sensei and he was full of power but it felt safe and effortless. And in fact, nobody ever got hurt who wasn't doing something monumentally stupid.

Shaun had disappeared from Aikido before we got evicted from our dojo space in 2001, and I'd seen him only a few times on the mat since then. I had remembered a day of training with him in which we moved through a back and forth sequence of shomen uchi Ikkyo Ura that felt as smooth and seamless as though it had been one move.

Today I paired off with Carmen and Shaun to do kumi jo. We started with Ichi no Kumi Jo and did stop-start first, followed by a few rounds of awase. Working our way through the forms when we got to Shichi no Kumi Jo Sensei commented, "now you know why Saito Sensei originally had only seven kumi jo, that's all you can practice in the space of an hour." I looked at him suddenly realizing that a whole hour had passed.

It was fun laughing and bantering with Carmen and Shaun just like old times, all the while remaining focused on the fact that we were striking and thrusting at one another with lethal sticks, each of us drawing on the cold emptiness of pure martial intent.

The picture above shows Shaun, Sensei, Jor, Carmen, and Craig after class standing in front of one of those beautiful trees full of spring blossoms.

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Carmen Cheats Death

There was a time when everybody wanted to be Carmen. He was a middle-aged guy in great shape from doing various martial arts, at the time retired, and could do just about whatever he wanted to do, which in his case was to train Aikido.

Carmen started Aikido about six months after I did, at the newer of the old Rohnert Park dojo spaces Dennis Tatoian Sensei taught in during the mid 1990s. From the beginning his athleticism, spirit, and desire set him apart from other students. I remember thinking, "hey, this guy is actually trying to hit me!" His good-natured, self-effacing manner instantly won him friends among the other students, and soon Carmen was a fixture at the dojo, training more classes per week than anyone else. There he is in the picture throwing John during one of our extra-work sessions with Sensei.

Carmen took to the weapons curriculum early, and we would practice kumi jo and kumi tachi for hours before or after class with Tatoian Sensei. When it came time for my Shodan test, it was Carmen who worked with me on the test for the buki waza segments. Prior to my test he had spent about six months with me in extra sessions working through the various techniques and attacks helping me embed the physical patterns in my body.

He also worked with other students when they were available. Often I'd arrive early for morning class to find Carmen and Bill practicing tachi dori on the freezing mat while the uchi deshi still slept in the back.

Carmen was a risk-taker, and that was part of his charm. He would just barely get out of the way during fast weapons practice, and the jo might whistle past his temple missing by milimeters. On the other side, when he would be the attacker, you knew he was coming strong. Kumi jo numbers 4 and 5 were especially fun to do with him on the attacking side.

Tatoian Sensei, who never tires of reminding us that Aikido is a martial art, seemed to have adopted Carmen, and this semi-favored status probably saved him one night during weapons class when, after Sensei called him up to help demonstrate a move, he struck too hard with the bokken and hit Sensei on the head.

We were praticing paired kumi tachi sword forms, first working through them in the halting, stop-start manner that Saito Sensei invented so that people could check their form and not get hurt going too fast. Carmen's move was to enter and strike yokomen with the sword, targeting the side of Sensei's head. When this is done correctly the sword stops an inch or so above the head. You really don't want to even disturb any hair, especially with Tatoian Sensei.

But this time the sword came smack down on Sensei's head, making a ringing noise that seemed to echo through the dojo. Everything was still while we held our breath, waiting for what was coming next. I was sitting in seiza next to a sempai, John, and we reflexively traded grimaces in the silence. I was sure that Carmen was going to be split open like a ripe melon any second. The entire world seemed to have collapsed into a singularity containing only Sensei and Carmen.

Sensei broke the spell with a broad smile, and we all breathed a sigh of relief, especially Carmen, who I'm sure was happy to be able to get started on the rest of his life.

Aside from further assuring me of Sensei's unbounded compassion, this eposide convinced me that Carmen was a very lucky guy who, having spent one of his extra lives that night, still seemed to have lots more left over.

These days I usually only see Carmen at Sunday morning weapons class with Tatoian Sensei. He's still a riot to train with and you still really have to get out of the way. And I always feel a slight tinge of excitement when Sensei motions with a big smile for Carmen to come out and be his uchi tachi to demonstrate the next technique.

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Momentarily sidelined

Quiet around here these past few days. I'm off the mat for a few weeks to heal from gall bladder surgery last Monday. The procedure was done laproscopically, so I should have a pretty speedy recovery.

Aikido was useful in the hospital, mostly in the form of breathing exercises to help stave off post-anesthesia nausea. The other benefit of Aikido, and probably all martial arts training, during recovery from surgery is that living in the body gives you an awareness of the amount of stress the body takes, and how much respect you need to grant your body for healing to occur. Almost everywhere I visit in my body today something is at least a little out of sorts, some areas more than others. It's a little like visiting a construction site with debris and intermediate patchwork holding things together.

I don't feel a need to rush back to the mat. Perhaps I'll begin some slow weapons suburi next week just to have something to do, and maybe I'll work out both sides of Hoa Newens's version of the 13 no jo awase continuous that he features on his new DVD.

Meanwhile, it's going to be a mostly inward-focused meditation, listening to my body, giving it the exercise it needs for healing without pushing too hard.

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Aikido cultural norms are obstacles off the mat

While Aikido has lofty aims of promoting peace and harmony, its internal behavioral norms are, in important ways, out of sync with the goal of establishing robust conflict-resolution practices in verbal or linguistic domains of action.

This is especially evident where Aikido has been transplanted into cultures that tolerate verbal interpersonal conflict, and that support the development of verbal skills to manage and resolve conflicts. In such cultures this disconnect can lead to confusion and ineffectiveness when students seek to apply Aikido principles in their problem-solving and conflict-management behavior off the mat, especially with one another.

As a martial art and the product of Japanese culture, Aikido promotes within its practice communities behavioral norms biased toward non-verbal conflict management and unilateral strategies for saving face both for one's self and for others. To bluntly challenge another, especially a superior, can be interpreted as disrespect. Yet, for example in the US, such strategies are often seen as evasive, duplicitous, and disingenuous (this does not mean people in the US do not act this way; I think they do despite perhaps a greater espoused tolerance for open verbal conflict). Acting according to these indirect strategies in the US often leads to increasing mistrust, as people grow to expect that the spoken message is a distortion or contradiction of the real message which remains unspoken.

Specifically, I think that the culture of Aikido maintains norms of behavior that make it difficult to communicate assessments -- especially critical ones -- validly and authentically with other Aikido people, especially Aikidoka of higher rank or of other styles. While acting in ways that purportedly show respect for the art and for one's sempais and teachers, students are motivated unilaterally to do or say things aimed at saving themselves and others from embarrassment.

In Aikido training we are taught that committed, unambiguous physical attacks are good, and that hesitant or uncommitted attacks are bad and even dangerous. Yet on the verbal level we do not practice this way with one another. Instead, we tend not to speak forthrightly what we are thinking if it means disagreeing with or challenging the position of another, especially if the other is a sempai on the mat.

To complicate the picture further, there is ample reason to accept and follow the notion of keeping quiet and withholding assessments while on the mat, and concerning matters of training. Aikido is a difficult art for westerners to grasp both conceptually and physically. Humility is a virtue for students who wish to begin and continue learning, and usually withholding assessments in order to discuss issues discretely later with sempai or teachers can be a wise choice.

However, this on-the-mat virtue can become an off-the-mat liability when Aikidoka interact on matters not directly pertaining to aikido practice, such as making business arrangements for seminars, organizing member dojo associations, performing administrative duties, and doing tactical or strategic planning at dojo or association level. The norms of speaking and listening that we get used to practicing with one another on the mat tend to remain in use when we address one another off the mat, and so the circumspect, overly polite manners we properly practice in training become our default behavioral guides in other, verbal domains. A common result is that a stagnant status quo is upheld for want of authentic debate. Off the mat conversations may very well be better served by increasingly frank challenges among those who disagree or have concerns and positions incompatible with those of others in the conversation.

Just as physical training requires committed, honest attacks; verbal exchanges on difficult issues are often well served by blunt, honest give and take. Indeed, for peace and harmony to be restored there must be some kind of open conflict to give people something to work with.

I feel that this relationship between Aikido cultural norms and the way we actually behave with one another off the mat is an issue worth addressing out in the open. I believe that continuing to accept the apparent disconnect between our espoused Aiki values of resolving harmony out of honest physical aggression and our established off-the-mat verbal norms of avoiding direct conflict is a detriment to the art and an obstacle to its continued growth around the world.

Moreover, for those Aikidoka who wish to transfer aikido principles into the realm of conflict resolution for non-martial artists in everyday life, to maintain linguistic practices that inhibit authentic verbal exchanges will become a tremendous obstacle to their success.

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Initiating with the hips: work in progress

Just as I raised my jo over my head into Shomen Uchi Komi position Goto Sensei said, "freeze!" I mentally checked my hanmi and hip position. Everything seemed OK.

"That's all fine," he continued as though reading my mind, "but as you do the strike, let your right hip begin the movement, then let your upper body be like a sling-shot powered by the hips." I tried it. I let my right hip lead and felt my upper body snapping into the technique with the elasticity created by the hip thrust. "Good, that's whole-body movement," Sensei remarked, and it had felt remarkably good.

We'd been doing jo suburi, or fundamental solo thrusts and strikes. This is the weapons curriculum that Bill Witt Sensei was restricted to for his first three years at Iwama Dojo by Saito Sensei. Now, 40 years later, Witt Sensei still preaches fundamentals, and that was all we worked on today.

Earlier in the class, while we were practicing a thrust to the rear, Ushiro Tsuki, Goto Sensei had brought up the issue of driving the technique with the hips. I watched him. As he turned to the rear his left hip opened slightly, just enough to whip his upper body around into the thrust. He did it a few times, emphasizing the hip action that powered the thrust. I had tried it then too, but felt a little fragmented, probably from too much thinking.

When we got to Shomen Uchi Komi I guess Sensei felt I needed a reminder, and that was when he walked over and froze me in mid suburi.

As I began thinking about letting the hips initiate everything it was like I'd never heard it before. At least I'd never seen the particular significance of this advice for snappy technique in doing humble suburi.

Hmm: let the hip initiate the strike/thrust. Let the upper body whip through the technique powered by the uncoiling of the body as it follows the hip movement. Of course this sounds just like what Sensei has said countless times, perhaps because he *has* said it countless times. Yet today, for some reason I saw a new, simpler logic to it that infused the idea with irresistable waves of common sense. "To make the body move and feel like that, of course you would initiate with the hips," I felt rather than heard my body explain.

More and more I'm believing that Sensei just says the same eight or nine things over and over, year after year: "sink," "move your hips," "extend," "don't lean over," "check your feet." We hear him droning on about these things interminably until one day it all makes sense, perhaps even for just an instant.

I've had a few moments of illumination about the whole, "let the hips command" project. I have even felt a little smug about my subtile understanding of this concept. But today I felt it in my body in a way that I can't remember feeling before, and the whole idea seemed so simple and logical; almost self-evident.

Perhaps this is what it feels like to learn some small thing on our road to becoming Aikidoka. Anyway, now I'm going back through all the jo suburi and finding a way for the hips to initiate the action. It's work in progress.

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Buki Waza for Everyone

Hoa Newens Sensei extended his wrists to me as we sat in seiza, facing each other.  We had paired off to do "kokyu dosa," the closing technique in Goto Sensei's class at the 2004 Memorial Day Gashuku at Lake Tahoe. 

I grabbed his small wrists and he became animated as though by some upwelling force expressing itself through his body and into mine.  He moved smoothly, opening like some kind of carnivorous flowering plant, enticing me all along to move with him into the trap. 

Ever since that time I have tried to create that same feeling for my ukes during kokyu dosa.  Of course if you move jerkily, or too fast, or too soon, the spell is broken and you lose the magic.

Newens Sensei is one of the most thorough and precise teachers of Saito Sensei's weapons curriculum, or buki waza, that I know of.   The buki waza is a tremendously important category of training.  It generates kokyu power, and it expresses the deep parallel, or Riai, that relates the weapons practices with the empty-handed techniques.

However important, Saito Sensei's buki waza curriculum has not been thoroughly captured and presented in books or videos.  This is in part because there is so much material on so many levels, and because the practices are always changing.  I remember Pat Hendricks Sensei explaining to us at the 2002 Saito Memorial Seminar, "practices go in and out of fashion; old ways evolve into new ways, and then sometimes the old ways come back."

Recently, thanks to Newens Sensei, a new, more thorough and structured demonstration of the buki waza curriculum is available in his two-DVD set, Aikido Curricuulum: Vol 1 & 2, Aiki Ken and Aiki Jo.  This set is not inexpensive at $48 per DVD, but for Aikidoka who want a training guide to buki waza its thoroughness and clarity make it a highly valuable asset. 

Until now the most incompletely documented of Saito Sensei's weapons forms has been the Ken Tai Jo, jo on sword paired awase.  Bits and pieces of these awase do exist in circulation in the US and especially in Europe, but a structured presentation of the 7 basic awase, with standard henkas, has been completely missing. 

Newens Sensei fills this void with a very detailed and easy to follow demonstration of the ken tai jo awase, in the order shown by Saito Sensei during his late 1990's seminars in Rome and Berlin.

Another exotic set of practices, the 13 no jo paired awase, are included on Newens Sensei's Jo DVD.  He presents the discontinuous single-move awase that Saito Sensei taught during the 1990s, and he adds a continuous version of the 13 awase that seems to capture nicely the spirit of the solo kata.  I have seen various attempts to make the 13 jo awase continuous, and this one looks the most in line with the spirit of Iwama Dojo weapons practices.

In the DVDs Newens Sensei seems more interested in organizing and preserving Saito Sensei's curriculum than in expressing his own Aikido.  So, to get a feel of Newens Sensei's Aikido you'll probably have to visit his dojo in Davis, California, or be lucky as I was to pair off with him at a Gashuku or seminar.  I promise, it's something you won't forget.

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