Cliff Judge

Thank you to Darren and Dr. Goldsbury for your comments.

Graham,

I was thinking last night about how I might define three levels of Aikido, and I settled on these:

1) You are a beginner trying to figure out what is going on. You are focused on obtaining a result that is grossly approximate to what you see the instructor doing to uke at this point: generally throwing or taking down uke.

2) You are familiar with the overall shape of the techniques, and you've gotten plenty of feedback - probably frustrating - from your instructors and seniors about, for example, foot placement, keeping your posture, using your hips not your arms, etc. You begin to become very concerned about being centered, keeping your posture, not using muscles, etc. You seek to become the center of the technique.

3) It has perhaps bothered you at stage 2 that you can be centered, balanced, harmonious etc in yourself and yet not affect your partner's balance at all. So you begin to worry, again, about how to do that. This is the stage where you learn to combine your center with your partner's, to create one body, and break the balance of the one body, while still somehow keeping your own balance.

I think there are more beyond that....Ikeda Sensei says that the unification of both centers into one can take place automatically on contact if you develop the body instincts to set it up properly, and also that the movements that cause the unbalancing can be entirely internal and either extremely subtle or outright unmanifest (I am not sure I can tell the difference).

Your three stages probably map to my second and third, I think. Maybe your third goes beyond my third. I dunno.