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My persOnal insights on aikido, karate, macrobiotics and daily life applicaTions
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.
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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. |