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My persOnal insights on aikido, karate, macrobiotics and daily life applicaTions
I don't know about you, but I'm loving the warmer weather lately. I can feel the excitement of this time of year in our dojo too, with welcoming new students lately and events coming up soon. Belt Level Gradings First up, we have gradings during the last class of Term 3 on Thursday 21st September. Through completing a grading successfully, the student has the opportunity to be promoted to the next belt level. What's involved? During the 6:30 - 6:45 timeslot of each class, students have been working on the grading techniques for their next belt level (e.g. the white belts have been practising techniques for the red belt grading). Within our last class of the term, students who feel they are ready will be tested on performing their grading techniques. If the student performs all techniques confidently, they will be promoted to the next belt level. Who can attempt a grading? Generally, any student who has practised all of their grading techniques many times, and feels they are confident in all these techniques, will be allowed to attempt the grading. Receiving your belt and certificate Grading fees are to be paid after a student passes a grading. The standard fee is $20, which covers the grade promotion and the belt. If you pay $30, you can receive not only the belt, but also a personalised grading certificate. I also have grading technique videos available for purchase so students can learn and practise at home. See the “learn from home” page of this website, or contact me if interested. Aiki Communication Class for Parents and Children - Thursday 5th October 6:30pm The principles of aikido can be applied to daily life, and in particular, communication. I have combined my 18 years experience in aikido, 12 years primary school teaching experience and qualification in holistic counselling to bring you this unique course. You will learn to create harmonious and effective communication with your child, leading to deeper connection, cooperation and mutual understanding. Click the button below to get more info and book in your place: Spring Health Tips In the holistic understanding of macrobiotics and oriental medicine, winter is a time of stillness - a heavy, stagnant time. Spring is when the energy starts to move. Winter is like the seed, and spring is like the seedling beginning to grow. Energy starts to move up and out. You may have felt this shift yourself. You may be feeling more enthusiastic or energetic lately. If not, don't worry! There are plenty of things you can do to catch the energy of spring. Everyone has heard of spring cleaning. This isn't just for your house. Your body is doing it too! Traditionally, spring relates to the liver and gallbladder. These organs help protect your body from toxins, and they're working particularly hard in spring. They're working to clean you out of all the heaviness, stagnant energy and toxins that have accumulated (especially through the winter). If this detoxification goes well, you should feel light and energised, with plenty of energy to accomplish what you want in life, or, more importantly, to enjoy life! Here are some tips for this time of year:
Finally, if you'd like more detailed, one-on-one help and guidance for a healthy diet and lifestyle, I am available. With my qualification in macrobiotic holistic health counselling and over 20 years experience studying diet and health, I will guide you to help overcome health challenges or achieve your health goals. This could be for yourself or a family member, such as a child. I will give specific recommendations based on deeply listening to your needs. Here are just some things I can help with*:
* Medical legal disclaimer: obviously I am not a medical professional, so my services should not replace consultation with a qualified medical doctor. For any health concerns, or before implementing any changes I may advise, consult your doctor or healthcare professional. Any ideas I provide you with are for your informational purposes only, and what you choose to do with this information is your own responsibility.
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Openings are an important concept in the martial arts. Understanding them will help you overcome your opponent. However, it goes much deeper than this. There are important applications in our daily life. In this post, I want to discuss how to use openings to improve both your martial arts practice and your daily life.
In a martial arts sense, put simply, an opening refers to a moment and or part of your opponent's body that is vulnerable to attack. It can include time (e.g. a moment where they are not prepared to defend) or space (a part of their body that is unguarded). Openings are not just of the body, but also the mind and energy field. Their mind might be distracted or unready. Part of their energy around their body (aura) might be weak. In daily life, an opening is probably best described as an opportunity, when or where you have the chance to do something. In the martial arts, you may wish to attack your opponent. If you just attack straight away without finding an opening, it is at best likely to be unsuccessful (they will defend) and at worst dangerous (you leave yourself vulnerable to their counterattack). The same goes for daily life - if you act where there are no openings, you will waste energy and possibly put yourself in a harmful situation. To have the best chance of success, you need to wait for an opening. You must stay very focused and have complete awareness of your opponent. That way, when an opening appears, you can attack at the right time and place. You need both patience and readiness to act quickly. The same goes for daily life. Keep your eye out for opportunities and be ready to act when they appear. Don't be discouraged if you have to wait. Think of the samurai of ancient Japan. When they had duals, they would often stand facing each other for a long time with their swords ready. Any wrong move could lead to sudden death. But a skillful move taking advantage of an opening could mean swift victory. In the martial arts, keep a full awareness of your opponent. Watch for which part of their body is not strongly guarded. Be ready for the moment they are unready, then strike at the precise time and place. Sometimes there are no openings, or the target you want to attack does not have an opening. In this case, you may need to CREATE an opening. In the martial arts, you can produce a fake strike that they will block, leaving them open somewhere else. For example, the classic combination of high - low punch. Punch high, your opponent raises their hands leaving an opening for you to strike down lower. Another way to create an opening would be to enter and break their defence, e.g. move their hands out of the way. In daily life, maybe there's something you want to achieve, but no opportunities are coming up. Sometimes you need to be proactive and make your own opportunities. Think about how this can apply to your daily life, for that is where its real value lies. To help you, let's study an example from my life - my career path. After graduating with my teaching qualification, obviously I wanted a job. There were no offers being given to me, and I knew this was highly unlikely to happen automatically. It was like facing a very well guarded opponent who was unlikely to present any openings. So I knew I had to go out and create me own openings. So I contacted many schools to let them know I was available. Openings were created - schools called me for casual work. I took those openings. But still, I wasn't getting full time work, which is what I really wanted. However, there were no openings for full time work. So I focused on taking the openings that were there - casual work. However, there were still not enough openings. So I began looking for where the openings were. By researching and just generally being aware and thoughtful, I decided to try for schools further from my home. Schools near my home already had plenty of casual teachers, but I realised that schools in other areas had a greater need. In other words, they had openings. I soon started getting much more work, because the openings were not in my local area, but further away. You might be trying unsuccessfully to attack one part of your opponent's body, but then realise that another part is actually open to attack. By working hard as a casual teacher, I proved my worth. This created an opening for full time work - at one school where I was working, a teacher took leave (an opening) and they asked me to take her class for the rest of the year. Naturally, I took the opening while it was there and accepted. This is like in the martial arts if, for example, you wanted to attack the opponent's head, but their hands were guarding their head. You could attack the body. Their hands come down low leaving their head open. Or the work you've done on their body causes them to bend over and now their head is open to attack. The work I did in casual teaching created the opening for full time work. Please continue to reflect on how these understandings of openings can help you, both in your martial arts practice, and, more importantly, in your daily life. The purpose of this post is to explain the serious injuries I have had, and provide an aikido perspective on injuries.
I frequently talk about how aikido helps prevent and lesson injuries. Young children who I teach aikido to have often found it surprising and confusing to find out I have had a couple of serious injuries even after starting aikido. With a child's simple understanding of the world, I see how this confusion arises. However, it is important to develop a more complex understanding of things. First of all, I have never said that aikido completely stops you from having injuries. That's not possible. However, proper training in aikido usually leads to you have less frequent and severe injuries. This means that injuries happen less often, and when they do, they are not as bad. This has certainly been my experience. I have trained in aikido for sixteen years. In that time, I have only had two serious injuries - even though I also spent a lot of that time in dangerous activities which I won't go into now. Compare that to the time before I started aikido - I had already experienced a few broken bones and many more injuries. I was a very clumsy child who was frequently injuring myself. Aikido has led to a huge improvement for me in that way, considering where I have come from. I will analyse my two serious injuries in a moment. But first, let's briefly look at an aikido perspective on injuries. Basically, an injury happens when you are out of balance. In aikido, we train to have an even spread of energy throughout our whole body. If too much energy builds up or stops in one part of your body, you are likely to experience an injury there. We develop this even flow of energy through our whole body through the exercises we do (if you do them properly). We also learn to absorb an opponent's force through our whole body. When our partner is applying an aikido technique, we practise letting that force flow through our whole body - by being relaxed in our whole body and moving from the hara (center). When falling, we roll over our whole body, rather than absorbing the force all in one part. This benefit flows over to daily life. I can't count the number of times I have avoided painful collisions, and the number of times when bumping into things that I have been unharmed because I let the force flow through my whole body. But nobody is perfect 100% of the time. I experienced a fairly serious injury a few days ago. Why? Here are my thoughts. Firstly, I have not been able to attend aikido classes in person for months due to lockdown. So that has been a long time without practising absorbing force safely. You need to keep up your practice, or you slowly lose your abilities. Secondly, I feel like my energy had been stuck in my head. I was very much into ideas of things I wanted to achieve during lockdown and the school holidays. I was getting "a-head" of myself - see where the saying comes from? I could feel my energy rising out of my hara (center) and I did not feel as calm and settled. It is no wonder then that I injured my head. Basically, I was trying to do a lot quickly, was thinking about ideas in my head of what I wanted to get done (so was rushing and distracted). I stood up quickly and forcefully, hitting my head against the metal part sticking out of the door frame (where the door handle joins). My head got split open badly and bled for a long time - I needed to get stitches. I couldn't stand up without feeling like I was going to faint. I had experienced concussion - an injury where the brain is basically shaken against the skull. I have felt off for the days after. I feel frequently off balance and drowsy. But it has been a great opportunity for me to learn to slow down. In the aikido understanding, every injury or difficult experience is life giving us a gift - a gift of teaching us to come back to more balance. The other injury was a few years ago. I was at a school disco. I was doing a dance move that a student encouraged me to do where you jump while kicking both legs out to the side. She was encouraging me to go faster and higher. And I did. But my balance and landing control couldn't keep up. I landed on the side of my foot. It was badly broken - shattered, actually. I needed surgery to repair the bone that was broken into multiple pieces. This left me unable to walk for a couple of months. I won't go into details about the reasons why I think the injury happened, but will say briefly that my diet was unbalanced, and my feelings were unbalanced. I was kind of reaching out for too my, without staying grounded. This relates to the physical injury. However, many positive things came out of the injury. I learnt that I could still do a lot of things, just differently. I learnt to forever more appreciate how nice it is usually to be able everything, like just walk around easily. Finally, without being able to attend aikido classes, I realised how committed I am to this art, and that is actually when I decided to start my own dojo (my own aikido classes). It was a great learning experience! To summarise: proper aikido training should lead to you experiencing less injuries. When you do experience them, they should be less severe (not as badly hurt as you would usually expect). Finally, we learn to receive everything positively. Take injuries as a gift, take the lessons from them and use them to move yourself towards more balance and move forward positively on your life path. Everything in life works in cycles. Learning aikido provides us with an opportunity to understand and master this process.
In the macrobiotic understanding, we know that everything eventually turns into its opposite to bring balance, and everything is constantly changing. A great example is the seasonal patterns. When you are learning aikido, you should feel slightly overwhelmed and confused in each class. This is a sign that you are learning something new and reaching towards a higher level of development. When learning a technique, there is a lot going on. How do you get past this to a point where you feel confident with the technique, and you feel you can easily, joyfully perform it? Because, let's be honest, that's a great feeling! You practise it many times. Through practising over and over again, your body and mind get used to it and can perform it automatically. Then you can experience a wonderful feeling of flow - joyful relaxation within the activity. This is the same as everyday skills we take for granted, such as walking. Do you have to think hard about how to walk? No, you just do it automatically. Why is that? It's because you have practised the skill of walking many, many times. Once you have practised enough times, you can enjoy the ease of performing the technique almost effortlessly. But you should not stop there. You can, and should, always develop the technique further. So the next time we do that technique in class, watch and listen to your sensei for clues on how to improve your technique. Pay attention to your technique while practising it, thinking about what you can change. Then work on those things. Start the cycle again. Feel challenged and overwhelmed. Practise, practise and practise again - this time trying to make those improvements. Eventually you will reach that joyful stage again, where you can perform it effortlessly, but this time at a higher level. This time your effortless performance will be an even better, more effective form of the technique. This not only applies to improving your techniques in a straightforward way, but to expanding them, applying them to different situations and in different ways. Learning how to apply a technique in response to a different attack, or a different position or angle. This is all necessary on your everlasting journey towards "aiki" - that ability to respond most appropriately to any situation. By understanding and mastering this learning process, you can enhance your whole life. There are times when you take on new challenges and feel quite overwhelmed. But if you persist, you will eventually reach a point where those challenges are things you can just do automatically. If you give up or don't practise enough, they will never become easier. Some examples from my own life: When I was at university learning to be a primary school teacher, it felt so difficult, scary and overwhelming to teach a whole class of students. After lots of practise, it just became a normal part of my life - getting up in front of the class and doing my thing. My first few years as a full time classroom teacher, I found the workload very difficult to cope with. But through ongoing effort, it became easier to manage. But still, to feel alive, you need to take on new challenges and start the process again. I did this through switching over to teaching new grades, starting to teach aikido etc. Understand and master the cycles of learning, and you will be more prepared to enjoy the ongoing challenges of life. Recently I conducted a Kahoot quiz in my online aikido class. One question was "What is the number 1, ultimate goal of aikido"? Not surprisingly, must students chose "self defence" as their answer. However, the correct answer as determined by me was "to live a happy life and be most effective in everything you do" (or something very similar to that).
Does this mean aikido is not useful for self defence? Quite the contrary - if you learn aikido properly, it will be VERY useful for self defence. Proper aikido will be more effective than anything else for self defence. See my other blog post "Aikido and Self Defence" for an explanation on this. However, the benefits of aikido certainly don't stop there. It goes much further than that. If self defence was the only goal, it wouldn't be worth devoting so much time to practising the art (unless you are likely to get into fights regularly because of your job or lifestyle). For most of us, we are not facing self defence situations regularly. We need those self defence skills just in case, but the art needs to provide you with more than this. While we may occasionally need self defence, or we may possibly never need it, we will definitely face plenty of other challenges in our lives. So let's not just practise only for something that we may or may not need. Let's practise also to increase our effectiveness in all of life's challenges. Let me repeat: proper learning of aikido will help you with self defence. But there is so much more to gain from aikido. HOW does aikido help you have a happy life and be most effective in everything you do? That is a deep topic, which I have addressed aspects of in previous blog posts and plan to address further in future posts. But here is a brief overview. Aikido helps develop a healthy condition in your body and mind. When you feel and healthy and you feel good, you enjoy your life more and perform better in both physical and mental tasks, and your relationships seem to just work better. Aikido trains you to find the most appropriate and effective response to every situation. You focus on finding your opponent's balance and openings in each different situation. This carries over to daily life, because rather than just acting out of habit, we develop deep awareness and an ability to look for the most effective response in each moment. Aikido develops focus and strong energy, while keeping a calm, relaxed, comfortable feeling. It develops effectiveness with harmony. Martial artists can often develop too much of a tense, fighting response. When carried over into daily life, this doesn't feel good for you or other people. Your relationships and interactions can be strained. A fighting approach means you create more arguments and conflict. On the contrary, aikido helps your daily life and relationships flow more happily and harmoniously. You learn to gain cooperation from other people, instead of creating resistance and conflict. This is because the way you practise aikido trains your mind/body to respond effectively and harmoniously, creating a relaxed and cooperative feeling. So while proper aikido does help with self defence, let's not stop there. Let's also work towards the higher goal of improving every aspect of our lives. An important universal truth we learn in aikido and especially in macrobiotics is that of yin and yang. Everything is made up of opposites. Sometimes people can get confused by this, with all these conflicting ideas. We need to remember that truth is paradoxical. Both sides are important.
In the martial arts, as in other areas of learning, there is often an approach which focuses on learning something through a lot of repetition so that you master it, then moving on to learning something else. When I trained in Genbukan Ninjutsu, this was the approach. Students of each grade would just work on the techniques for their grade level. This approach is good because it takes a lot of practice to learn to perform a technique correctly, and a lot of repetition to become confident with it. In a stressful, high pressure situation, like a real self defence situation, your body automatically responds with what you have practised. So if you haven't practised anything, you might freeze. Your body will only remember the techniques if you have practised them many hundreds of times. And will these techniques even be effective? That depends on how well you've focused on improving your technique during your practice. So there is a need for both repetition and constant focus on improvement. However, there is a downside to this method of practice. There are literally endless possibilities we might need to deal with in a self defence situation (and life in general). Aikido is not about techniques, but about developing the ability to respond most appropriately in every different situation. Performing a pre-set technique or response means that your response was not created to fit this very moment, and will not be the most effective response. Also, by focusing on mastering a limited amount of techniques instead ofpractising a wide variety, this limited set of techniques will not cover you for enough different situations. As an example, let's look at a fight I got into in high school. At one point, my opponent lost balance and turned away. I automatically performed a combination sequence of attacks which I had practised over and over again from my karate classes. It involved a kick followed by a couple of short range snapping backfist punches. Those punches ended up being very weak and having no effect. Why? Because they were designed for someone facing towards you, not away from you. They were designed to hit the weak targets of the nose and groin. But I was unable to adapt to the different situation. The other approach is to not focus on repeating and solidifying certain techniques, but to practise responding to many different variations. When I tried out the other main school of Ninjutsu (Bujinkan), their approach was like this. As mentioned earlier, aikido is about adapting to every situation most effectively. This is not pre-planned. It requires an awareness of the moment. However, the pitfall of training like this can be that you never deeply develop effective techniques. So what are we to do? The best approach is one that takes the best of both worlds. Like in the classes I attend on Saturdays. Each class, I feel like I'm doing something different that I've never done before, but at the same time within these different techniques there is something familiar. That's because we have a core set of techniques, but we practise applying them in different ways all the time. Then when we do freestyle practice, we respond automatically to our attacker, including their positioning etc. and the movements we perform do not necessarily always look like actual techniques. That's because aikido techniques are not about techniques - they are about teaching you to move effectively, to feel your opponent's energy and find the best response in each situation. My advice to you is this: we learn a particular way of doing something in each class. If you want to develop deep ability in what we learnt in a class, practise it many times on your own afterwards. Next class, we'll practise in a different way, so you can always be freely growing and developing, opening your mind to the endless possibilities this life offers. It is beneficial to practise a technique many times, because you can deeply develop certain skills. This is why we learn set techniques for gradings. Through practising them over and over again, while constantly thinking about how to improve, you deeply develop particular skills. However, don't become trapped in performing techniques a set way. Be open and free to change instantly and discover the most appropriate response in each moment. If you focus on just learning and memorising techniques in aikido and aiki karate, you will never develop the higher powers of these arts.
There is an excellent metaphor to illustrate the difference between techniques and the real goal of the art. Imagine someone is trying to show you the beautiful full moon one night. They point to the moon so that you may look in the direction they are pointing and see this beautiful sight. But you just go on looking at their finger. You miss all the beauty they were trying to show you. Techniques are the finger, aiki is the moon. Remember, "aiki" is complete harmony, oneness and coordination. Your whole body working together in the most effective way. Your body and mind working together wonderfully. And you joining completely with your opponent, so that their attacks are no longer a threat and there is no more conflict remaining. Techniques are a way for you to learn aiki. Too often, though, students of aikido just focus on copying the movements of a technique, and don't focus enough on what makes the technique actually work, or on what the technique is trying to teach you. This is like looking at the finger when someone is pointing to the moon. You can easily copy the movements of an aikido technique. To an untrained observer, it will look like you are performing the technique correctly. But when you try to apply it on a trained practitioner, it won't work, because you haven't developed aiki within the technique. So HOW can we develop the inner teachings of the technique instead of just copying the movements? How can we use the finger to help us look at the moon, instead of continuing to look only at the finger? When learning a technique, pay attention to the details as taught by your sensei. Think about what actually makes the technique work. Is it teaching you to drop and fall through your opponent's balance? To find the direction and point of balance where your partner will easily fall? To move out of the way of an attack so you are unharmed? To receive an attack without disturbing it? To find an opening? How do you move your whole body as one during the technique? How do you keep energy even throughout your whole body within this technique, without becoming too tight in one area? How take away your opponent's balance in this technique? How do you keep your own balance? How do you make your opponent relax and give up their will to fight? How do you join completely with your opponent's energy. Think about these kinds of things when practising a technique, and you will be on the path to learning the true power of aikido. The purpose of aikido is to harmonise with each situation. The current challenges we are going through with COVID and lockdown offer us an opportunity to practise and develop this ability.
Let's use the example of a fight and the physical application of aikido. Your opponent attacks you. You could prefer your opponent was not attacking you. You might prefer a different type of attack, because your better prepared to deal with it than the current attack. However, they are attacking you in this way in this moment. Wishing it was different won't help you. The situation demands that you deal with what is there. Really, you have a choice. You can go on trying to respond as if the attack was different, or try and go on as if the attack hadn't happened, but this means you will get hurt. To avoid getting hurt, you need to apply the most effective response to the attack your opponent has given you. And "given" is an appropriate term, because in the understanding of aikido, we see attacks as a gift. An attack is just energy coming your way. You can judge it as good or bad, or you can just use it to create the best possible outcome. How do we do this? We move in whatever direction we need to in order to be unharmed by this particular attack. Moving another way or staying still will lead to you getting hurt. Then, we join with the direction and energy of the attack, we absorb that energy, and then combine it with our own energy to create a wonderful, powerful movement (like a throw). In more of a karate sense, once we have moved out of the way, we look for our opponent's openings and strike them there. For example, the opponent's attack might have placed them in a position where it is easy for you to strike the back of their neck. How does this apply to our daily life? Like the attack, the situation you are in is providing you with the gift of a certain energy. Move out of the way metaphorically - don't take it personally and wish it wasn't happening, don't try and go on living the same way you were before this situation, trying to pretend it is not there. You will get hurt. Next, find the direction of the energy. What direction is it pushing you in? Go with this direction and use it. For example, lockdown might be giving you the opportunity to spend more time with your family and home. You can build these relationships and improve your home. Maybe it's giving you more time to yourself, to develop your hobbies and interests. Look for the openings. Like the points of your attacker's body that have suddenly presented as open to a strike (where they were previously out of reach), what opportunities has the current situation brought to you? Take those opportunities! We are all human. I have things I dislike about the current situation. But I don't dwell on them, because there is not point. On one level, we will still have these dislikes, and that's okay. But you will be better off if you shift your focus mainly to the opportunities of the current situation. And what a shame it would be to miss those opportunities while they're here and only realise later when it's too late. So let's let's strive to harmonise with every situation. I have a long story with karate. Putting it briefly, I fell in love with karate as my entry to the martial arts. I was obsessed with it. But once I found aikido, I realised I'd found something of a much higher level. Karate practice wasn't doing anything new for me anymore, so it felt like a waste of time. But over the years, my personal love for karate has nagged me, always there in the background, calling me back. When I'd try and go back to it, it always felt awkward, like I was going backwards. That is, until I had a realisation: instead of karate bringing me down, why don't I bring karate up? I had discovered the high level of aikido, and didn't want to be brought down from that. But karate was still something that resonated well with me, had a lot of attraction for me, and brought me joy in practice. So I started working on practising karate with the principles of aikido.
In this post, I'd like to introduce how karate can be practised with aiki - the principle of harmonising. Let's look at what pitfalls I found in karate, and see how I have addressed each. The first and most obvious one to me was karate's emphasis on tensing muscles. To be fair, you are generally told to relax right until the end of a technique, then tense, then relax again. But in practise, after being involved with aikido, coming back to karate the way I had been taught always made me feel too tense. This was an easy fix. I just practised the same techniques without excess tension. There's a feeling of focus, contraction and tone at certain points, but mostly a balanced, relaxed feeling where we do not unnaturally add tension. Secondly, karate focuses on hitting. In my understanding, aikido aims to protect the attacker as much as possible. Sometimes some degree of injury to the attacker is unavoidable, especially if they are very tense, dynamic and determined. Aikido techniques mean the attacker's energy comes back to them. But generally we try to be as soft and harmless as possible. Conversely, karate tends to focus on delivering the most powerful, debilitating blows possible. To rectify this, I have studied using karate strikes with the purpose of stopping the attacker from being a threat to you, while doing the least harm possible. Striking arts focus on hitting vital points on the opponent's body. Rather than choosing the vital points that lead to serious harm, in "aiki karate" we target the points that lead to reactions such as temporarily disabling or stunning the attacker. It also involves the way in which you strike these points. This gives us a chance to get away to safety or to hold and control the opponent, while having minimal lasting harmful effects. Finally, I would like to talk about clashing vs blending. In aikido, we aim to blend, to fit in completely with our opponent's movements. This dissolves resistance. In karate, there can be a tendency to fight back against the opponent, to clash with their movements. This creates an uncomfortable feeling and more resistance. By slight changes to existing karate movements, changing how they are applied and introducing changes in body movement and positioning, I have learnt to apply karate movements in a way that blends rather than clashes. Furthermore, instead of trying to force an attack, you find the openings and direct your attack there. But that is the topic for another blog post. There is much more to say about this topic, but this blog post is long enough. In my Aiki Karate Do online course, I go into more detail and show you how to apply these principles and more within karate techniques. Sorry to start off by possibly sounding pessimistic, but sometimes it seems like almost nobody knows to how really listen! Now this is not a complaint, as I am guilty of it myself too. Rather, I am taking the time reflect on the difficulty of listening properly. I will aim to end this post with some tips we can all use to try and develop this most difficult art.
How does this relate to Aikido? Remember, Aikido is a reflection of everything in daily life, including our verbal interactions. Martial arts are often practised just like our usual interactions, one person attacks, the other person blocks and launches their own attack. This is like two people speaking. One says something, they other sort of gives a minimal response and then focuses on getting their own point accross. Both people trying to attack each other in a fight. Both people trying to speak their own point in a conversation. Neither really fully receiving the other. Aikido, however, is different. We fully receive and blend with the attack. We let the attack be fully expressed, received and joined with. Only then, once the attacking energy has dissipated, do we return our response, which is not purely our own response but rather a combination of the attacker's energy and our own. In a conversation: using Aikido, you listen fully to the other person without adding any of your own ideas. You aim to fully hear and fully understand their point. Once they have felt truly understood, you speak your point, combined with the understanding you received from their point. And this is real communication! A rare gem. But back to the focus on listening. Most of the time, people are too preoccupied with their own ideas to fully listen to the other person. You may think you're listening and understanding, but this very idea might be stopping you from really listening and understanding. You may be analysing what they're saying, with your own theory in your head. Invariably, when you respond with your own ideas like this, the other person doesn't feel fully understood. Some tension will remain in the interaction and the relationship. We need to develop what they call in Zen "empty mind", or in some Eastern Traditions "mirror mind". Imagine your mind is a pond on a full moon night. Your thoughts create ripples and rough water. Does the pond clearly reflect the image of the full moon? Only when the water is still will you reflect the moon perfectly. The Aboriginal people have a beautiful concept called "dadirri", often translated as "deep listening". One practice I learnt from an Aboriginal person is to focus on fully taking in nature (or even a less natural environment) with full awareness of all your senses. You just become fully aware of the sights, sounds, feelings, even smells and sometimes tastes, feeling all of these entering you as energy, not thinking about them or making judgements. This is a very relaxing meditation you can do any time. You can extend this to your interractions with people. When someone is listening, just have full awareness. Fully receive their words, tone of voice, facial expression, body language etc. without your own thoughts or judgements. You will gain a much deeper understanding. If everyone did this, we would all feel a lot more calm, understood and connected. And that is the meaning of Aikido - true harmony! |