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Old 08-08-2009, 12:26 PM   #668
donhebert
Dojo: River Valley Aikido
Location: Vermont
Join Date: Sep 2004
Posts: 51
United_States
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Re: Is It Missing In Everybody's Aikido?

Hi All,

In my previous post on spirituality in Aikido, I posed a number of questions, being sincerely interested in what others thought about spirituality and Aikido.

I do have some specific approaches that I use personally and I would like to share some of them here.

First I want to acknowledge that I claim no advanced knowledge of this topic and that I am often impressed with the level of spiritual integrity I encounter in people whether they talk about it or not. This applies to people on this forum.

Secondly, let me admit that this topic can get to sound awfully fatuous - so please, if I start to sound too serious, somebody throw a pie.

My impression of O'Sensei is that he approached Aikido from a shamanic perspective. Shamanism is rooted in the earth religions and involves forming a relationship with ones own personal gods or familiars. I think that when he was demonstrating Aikido for his students, he wasn't teaching techniques at all. He was manifesting the deity as it came through him in the moment. This has caused no end of trouble for Aikido over time. How does one codify such an experience for the purpose of transmission to others? At the same time, this has given wide latitude to individual practitioners to interpret Aikido in an astonishing number of ways.

Dan Harden has argued that there is a fundamental connectedness rooted in the body that can provide power in Aikido practice. The analogous statement for spirituality is there is a fundamental source of wisdom rooted in the unconscious that can provide insight in Aikido practice. The training itself can tap into this. Aikido can be like dreaming -- a source of truth that can be mined by using the will to listen to it.

On a physical level, Aikido training presents the person with a series of predicaments. One of the roles of uke is to create the predicament honestly so that the nage can work on the solution. Nage has to resolve the situation using the principals encoded in the art. I find it important that one measure of success is that the resulting movements are becoming beautiful as well as effective. Personally, I am a bit of klutz having spent my childhood falling off of things and making many visits to the ER for stitches. The idea that I could move in a beautiful way is simultaneously preposterous and sublime.

When we move during Aikido a rather embarrassing amount of who we really are is being revealed. Training is an unsettling mirror. This is why most of wince when we see a video of ourselves in action. Each physical predicament has a corresponding emotional or spiritual predicament. My responses to my partner become a channel for personal insight into my true nature. For example, am I connecting with my partner or am I disconnecting? Do I want to dominate my partner or do I want them to like me? Am open or am I shielding myself. Each of us has our own issues to work with and the trick is not put a lot of judgment on what we are experiencing, but to accurately notice it and then try to shift into a direction that causes growth. Because our internal nature expresses itself in the movements of the body, when we apply aiki principles to our movement there is a corresponding positive influence on our internal being. I believe that this one of the fundamental ways that Aikido can inform our spiritual progress.

This is hard work -- just as hard as the physical work. Here is an example. Once many years ago, sensei was demonstrating shomen-uchi ikkyo. His entering movement was clean and beautiful. After an interval of practice he stopped the class and began criticizing us for the flinching response that we were making before our attackers were really within range. "You are all feeling pain before anything happens!" he yelled at us. Then he imitated us mercilessly. This was a difficult time period of my life and I experienced a sudden, painful, flood of insight. This is what I was doing in my relationship! I was flinching away at every possibility of conflict in the hopes of avoiding the end of the relationship. Of course it was this semi-unconscious response that was fueling a failure with an important person in my life. It was a powerful moment. To be able to then standup and do the work of performing a clean irimi movement was painful and humbling and at the same time empowering and freeing. This basic work with my partner helped me to begin to make a profound shift in how I operated in the world.

This work can be found in the simplest aspects of our training. When I face my partner is my posture slouching because I am lazy or because of how I feel about myself? Am I taking an aggressive approach because I am afraid of looking bad? How do I feel about my partner? And so it goes. One has to be willing to do the work of noticing what is going on and how it connects to the major themes of our lives. I find this work of connection to be profoundly vitalizing and often joyous. If I were to regard Aikido as only as a bunch of fighting techniques I would be missing out on a lot.

The martial edge of Aikido practice has an important role however. Without a good predicament, I am too comfortable. I make the most progress with my learning when I am on the edge of failure or have actually failed. As our Aikido improves, we need to be willing to turn up the martial heat in order to make new progress. This is why the fear of looking bad can be such a major impediment. Of course we don't want to push so far beyond our abilities that we can't get anything. But it is important to consciously put ourselves a little out of our comfort zones on a regular basis. This is how we achieve aliveness.

This topic goes quite bit deeper and has connections webbing out to many things. Does anyone else do what I am describing? I will be interested to continue to read what people think.

I don't want answers to everything. The mystery of existence is as deeply satisfying as discovery. But I do want to experience my life as fully as I can before it comes to an end and I am concerned about the condition of my heart when it does. Aikido is one path (out of many) that can help.

I think I have earned several pies. Make at least one of them with whipped cream.

Best regards,

Don Hebert
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