Seminar – taking stock

• “The Animal” – Clark sensei responded to someone who was basically commenting how it “feels like nothing” when you do the technique and your partner falls down. Perhaps the question was, how do you assess and improve the skill if you can’t feel when you succeed? Clark brought up the concept of the “animal” that we feed with the feeling of success or otherwise working away at something (eg wrestling with someone, overpowering someone). Getting better at technique means becoming able to do technique in a way that doesn’t give you that feedback that “feeds the animal”. Conversely, if feeding the animal is your incentive for practicing, then your technical improvement will accordingly stay at a level at which you can still feed the animal. To move on, you have to starve it.
  An immediate thought I had was how the animal can adapt to different “diets”. And, because the animal isn’t being fed by the initial diet, I might be in danger of feeding it without noticing. This is a question of  internal awareness and introspection, one that could be the biggest one I took away from that weekend. It was one of those “Ag!” moments where I realized I didn’t really understand what my teacher was getting at years ago. I’ve already had a couple of “Ag!” occasions where I thought I understood why Endo sensei was so persistent about the idea of feeling oneself and not being captivated by the partner to the point of not noticing or ignoring the partner.
  My “project” now is to notice the animal’s current diet.
• The value of a group to which you belong, or a “kai”.
  Talking with some of the Jiyushinkan people, I could see on one hand how much they were developing as human beings from their practice because they belonged to a coherent, cohesive group. Belonging entails having a set a values, priorities, relationships, reference points – all of which entail having an identity. Paradoxically, being able to have an identity enables a person to question themselves and thereby grow.
  On the other hand, and this is not a piece that is strictly wedded to being in a group, there is the aspect of “other”. That is, belonging to a group influences how you see people outside of the group and how your experience is when you encounter such people. The main, possibly only, danger lies here, in that that development of “other” could go poorly. Precisely because the danger lies here, a person’s way of mitigating that danger is to initiate encounters with it (ie interact with “others”) and continue to be/become the person he/she is trying to become. So, if belonging to a group involves any related danger, it is to minimize exposure to “other” and increase the possibility of a person’s grasp of “self” and “other” to go awry.
• Premises and assumptions.
  Examining the assumptions that I place myself under in my practice is a good way to contemplate why I am practicing, what I think is important, how I prioritize, what I’m trying to get out of it.
  To start from specifics, I think I don’t value reversals as much as I value absorption and efficient use of energy. I probably value continuity more than intentional acceleration/deceleration. I think I value surrendering myself to my partner’s actions more than consciously deciding or knowing what we are doing from moment to moment.
  I probably value demanding, or encouraging, a pre-decided form to happen by making my own openings rather than my partner’s openings apparent. This could have something to do with boundaries, but particularly when I’m dealing with someone I’m not familiar with or with a beginner, I will be more likely to leave the windows of opportunity open, and close them with people I’m more familiar with and of a higher level. Of course the premise is that I think one dimension of an interaction with a partner is awareness of who they are and when something is being artificially, rather than organically, given/taken. I don’t know if this reflects my attitude on social context or my aikido development.
  Why? Why choose these assumptions? For the first assumption, at the risk of providing an evasive answer, I like “neru” practice. I like the idea of striving for unconscious awareness and accepting whatever comes. As mentioned above, with a higher level partner I can “keep a channel open” for my own agenda (eg attacking and putting them down, or reversing) but it’s not an emphasis.
  As for the second assumption, again at the risk of an evasive answer, I think that that is more in accordance with my philosophy of life at this point. It’s likely also how I’ve “starved my animal”, at least in one way.

Judging

I like analysing people. Now I try not to focus on judging others, guessing what they are like and what they might be thinking about, but I still watch others in the street to observe the way they walk.

Since I can remember, I’ve never really gotten how people seem to use the word “judge”. It seems to carry a negative connotation. “Assess” seems to make some people feel better. I wonder if people’s negative take on “judge” has something to do with perceiving that one is separate with others, that one can observe the world and not be a part of it.

I have a thing with posture. It might have something to do with my bad eyesight. I notice posture/comportment from far away – it enables me to identify people when I can’t see their face. Not only do I notice it in a pure sense, I notice it in a subjective sense i.e., if someone’s posture is really bad or really good, I take notice. I can acknowledge that I’m noticing because it’s good or bad – I don’t mind too much saying so. Perhaps this is when people don’t like the word “judge”. “Who are you to say that person’s posture is good/bad?”

But the bottom line is a significant part of why I notice what I notice is due to my subjective experience of the thing. The above has been about good/bad, possibly beautiful/ugly. What about other dimensions?

For example, at some point in aikido I started to pay attention to whether a person really meant to attack and experience the prescribed technique of the moment with me, or they meant to sort of attack, sort of let me do the technique but more fall down by themselves, sort of attack but be more concerned with blocking my atemi, prevent me from doing what we’d supposedly agreed upon, etc. This is not a simple good vs bad kind of aspect, yet I would say that it has to do with “judgment”.

Subjectively, the degree to which I experienced my attention being drawn to this aspect probably puts me more at the sensitive end of the spectrum. It was something that pushed my buttons. Thus it was about attachment and something I have worked on. However, though I’d like to be free of the attachment, I never thought to give up on becoming a better and better judge of people’s intentions.

As I got more and more accurate, and more and more free of becoming attached/captivated, I became more and more able to see the situation. The current situation as what came before and what’s reasonable (not forced) to happen next. Thus, in aikido techniques, the interaction with the partner could happen earlier, time-wise. However, from my perspective it is happening at the right time. “Early” is only relative to the point in time I perceived our interaction as starting as I would have reported one year ago, ten years ago, etc.

If someone is about to attack me in practice, and I can tell they don’t like me or have some problem with me, I try to see it, see how I am with having perceived that, and accept it all. If I don’t like that I’m feeling my partner is being suspicious of me or scared of me or whatever, I don’t think to stop judging  – stop judging because I might not be right or because judging only introduces information that is possibly useless. Not only is it (to deal with attachment and greater self-awarness) part of my area of interest and motivation to do such a practice as aikido, it is also relevant to the execution of technique on an “aiki” level, territory I think I’ve started to delve into recently.

As a human being, it makes sense to me to take into account how a person’s emotional state is when I am try to see all of how a person is. As a human being who is in the learning process, it makes sense to take advantage of my strengths in the process; if I am more adept at noticing certain details, I should continue, not stop, to refine the noticing of those details so that it serves me in my learning. If I notice something because it makes me feel good or bad, so be it. It is not the assessing, judging, or noticing that is counterproductive but the attachment to and captivation by the same.

Wise mistakes

Short quote from “In the Beginning was the Command Line” by Neal Stephenson:

Sometimes their lack of a broad education makes them over-apt to go off on intellectual wild goose chases…

It resonated with me for some reason, as I re-read this essay after some years. The most obvious reason it resonated was because I agreed with it (or I found it agreed with me, or it was agreeable to me, etc.). However there is one very obvious part of it that was different from what I’d been thinking. It was different but still fit. Where I had been thinking “wisdom”, he writes “a broad education”.

My conception of wisdom is some sense of efficiency related to achieving comfort, avoiding trouble, finding peace of mind, accomplishing one’s goals. Experience is one component for sure. Another is receptivity and openness. Yet another is constructive self-doubt and ego. One finds oneself making fewer mistakes, taking into account one’s weaknesses, wasting less time as one becomes wiser. How one oneself experiences this could be a combination of gut feeling as well as some insight (eg knowing why one is apprehending a situation as one does, why one is behaving as one does).

One presumption I may have been making was to consider wisdom outside of the context of education level, so that it would apply to someone with folk or street smarts.

What comes to mind now are people who succumb to mystification of one kind or another and spend a lot of time pursuing that myth, look at things from within that myth, while simultaneously viewing themselves as knowing and inquiring “enough” or even more than average.

Three contexts in which this is apparent are aikido, psychology, and international/multicultural being.

In aikido, one may have a teacher who is truly skilled or just impressive or convincing. That is, the teacher doesn’t act as a catalyst, directly or not, for the student to venture out from their comfort zone and experience things “outside”. “Outside” could be practice in a certain manner in the same place with the same people. It could also mean in unfamiliar places, or with unfamiliar premises, emphases, frameworks, beliefs, and values. Despite staying within comfort and familiarity, one can certainly find things to work on and challenges, to all of which one can say, “I’m doing my best!” But a) how to tell if those things and challenges are in fact worthwhile or going to lead you to what you wish to arrive at, and b) how to tell if the way you’ve been going about it thus far has covered all the possibilities. The most powerful limitation of possibility is not knowing you are limited. If you’ve gone to the ends of the earth according to the map you’ve been living by, then of course why would it occur to you to venture further or look out elsewhere? How could you possibly see the map differently when it already makes sense? It tells you the edge of the earth looks like so, you go there and see that it does, the map tells you that there are stars and moons out there and here’s how to get to them isn’t that challenging, and you find that yes, it is challenging isn’t it? That is, here are the techniques, here is what’s important to consider when doing them, here’s how to do them well or better, yes it’s challenging, off you go now, practice practice practice!

If I originally see things in terms of angles and off-balancing directions, what process might I go through when I practice aikido with folks who are more concerned with energy and flow? I might be able to conceptualize whether they’re doing the same thing I’m doing at all. I may also be able to see how it can be so. Based on the broader education of these two paradigms, when I encounter an aikido that has as its premise partners’ reactions to openings for strikes that aren’t necessarily taken by the other partner, then I may more quickly see what they’re trying to accomplish with what they do, how they do it, and further down the line how it relates to what I was doing originally.

Psychology… That one’s way to big and many – I’ll leave it alone.

Culture. That one is close to psychology but again it comes back to how to see oneself, recognize the lens through which one sees and experiences. How can you know your own culture to any conscious level without seeing how other cultures are. I’m sure many people living abroad would say something along the lines of, “The longer I live away from the US, the better I come to know this culture, the more and more I know in my bones I am an American”. It’s really difficult to know that one doesn’t know without contrasting experiences. The questions precipitated by contact with other cultures (“Why do they eat like that? Why do they show respect like this? Why do they not care about time like us? Don’t they want privacy like you and me? etc.”) will make it much easier to organize and make into bite-size chunks the things one subsequently notices, sort of at least, about one’s own culture. So there’s the experience and exposure. And the education probably does a great deal as far as training one to verbalize, ask certain questions, follow certain lines of inquire, and possibly even have tools to see the tools with.

Aikido and Cultural Competency

In my graduate counseling training program there has been some good, thorough, and explicit inclusion of cultural and diversity concerns in the training. In a nutshell, we as counselors should do our best to be aware of our own presumptions and the lens through which we see the world, particularly in regard to the clients’ different backgrounds and accordingly sensibilities.