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Rank: Shodan My first dojo was in Ventura CA. under Sensei Dennis Belt. That was in 2000. Actually I had taken aikido about 16 years earlier in a college course. It had haunted me for all that time and I finally went back to it.
What is it about Aikido that keeps me coming back? There are a number of aspects that come to mind. As a practice, aikido is exhilarating – you get to be sent through the air and to send others through the air, which a lot of fun. You get sweaty and your heart beats fast and sometimes you want more air. And then you get to fly again. There is also a process of continually learning how the body moves and how it settles and how it interacts with other bodies. This exploration is done within a very friendly environment.
The environment of Aikido is different from the environment of other physical activities. There is a formality to the dojo. At first I found this awkward, as my everyday environment is not very formal. However, I have come to appreciate more and more the formality on the mat. The formality means that the approach of the students is not frivolous. But it allows for a sense of delight in the practice. Also, the formality reinforces the sense that learning aikido is special and should be approached with respect. As well, there is a respect that is shown between the teachers and the students and between the students themselves. It has been obvious from the beginning that although the practice takes place on a very physical level, there are many other levels involved in Aikido. For instance, the way that we react physically to the attack is often similar to how we react to emotional or psychological situations that we don’t understand. On the physical level you are trying to keep your ground, your connection to the earth. In that way, you have some sense of stability. At the same time you try to be sensitive to your partner. You connect with him, feeling the attack, guiding the attack but not trying to overpower it. With that sense of gentleness you can resolve the attack so the neither you nor the attacker gets hurt. The attacker ends up on the ground which is connecting him to earth. And in some sense it is the lack of a connection to the earth that inspires an attack.
When I first began training I had to overcome the strong desire to look away when a strike came in. It was very instinctual that I would turn away as the strike came closer and closer. And that tendency to look away is not limited to physical strikes, it happens in personal interactions as well. So when one is practicing this very physical art, one is also working with one’s habits and hang-ups and the possibility of dropping those.
One of the most compelling aspects of aikido is the sense of awareness during activity. You find that you can hang in with an attack for a long time. It continually surprises one how much time there can be in a split second. And how elastic that time is. Sometimes everything seems to happen so quickly. At other times, especially when you are relaxed, there feels as though there is a great amount of space and time in which to react and many different ways to deal with the attack.
Aikido has a martial aspect, especially in this dojo. But the training has many other aspects that train the mind as well as the body. One way of approaching it is to see the attack as a hostile environment, an environment that has become chaotic and insane. The question is how does one deal with it. The training is one of resolving that situation. So instead of creating more aggression and hostility, you add gentleness and sensitivity. The training is not to run from the attack but to direct it and ground it. There is the training to develop a stable connection to the earth so that when there is chaos or craziness in the environment, you don’t get thrown off your seat. In that way you can provide a connection to the earth to your partner/attacker. And that is the most generous thing you can do for someone who has lost his or her connection to the earth.
Tenzan Aikido | 7700 Aurora Ave N | Seattle, WA 98103 | (206) 525-9035 | reception@seattleholisticcenter.com |
