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.

Language/Communication

I find myself often return to the analogy of language (or conversation, communication, etc.) when thinking about aikido and people in general. I realized recently that the first time I wrote anything for others to read – it was for the Saku dojo newsletter – it was about the same thing. (I can’t remember specifically what I wrote but I’m sure it was a crude, beta version thing that covered way more topics than it should have in a page.)

Recently I’ve been thinking about style/method/school differences, such as at seminars, and about the teacher/student relationship. I think that both of these situations entail unique factors not likely found in “usual” relationships and communication.

advanced theory/practical vs basics theory

I had a conversation recently with sensei in which he said clearly that what he did normally in his classes was theory, and that people need to take it upon themselves to get the basics. Furthermore, it is basics that enable a person to understand more advanced, as well as diverse (e.g. material from a different school), material, and provide the starting point from which a person departs and finds their own style. (For context simplicity’s sake: what sensei does in his classes could also be called “advanced practical” is putting basics into practice, and that might make more sense if we considered, here, basics classes as “theory”.)

I feel that I neglected to touch upon an important point from my conversation above:
Basics are the “starting point” from which we depart, deviate, adapt to fit reality, etc. What sensei is teaching, he said, and what everyone should do as far as creating/finding their own aikido, is depart from the starting point in a way that has validity and meaning for them.

Know Thyself

I read in an interview one shihan’s statement that kata (forms) were a way for a person to be able to have a conversation with his own body/own self. While part of my brain registered that this could sound like a silly idea, it also made perfect sense. It has also occurred to me that, during my thoughts about inspiration and faith, and learning and development, that imagination is something that you use “on” yourself (and it’s also registered to me that this idea also might sound silly, like “I know who I am already. Should I act like a crazy person and imagine I’m superman?”) Even the use of imagery, at least in the way we usually conceive it, does not amount to what I’m thinking of as “imagination” here.