"Ueshiba did it, Tohei did it, I did it… . You can do it too." Maruyama
sensei spoke those words to Mary and me at a winter camp instructors meeting around twenty years into my study with him. Although obvious to me only now, in hindsight, that sentence marked a turning point in my
aikido practice.
I first met Maruyama
sensei in 1978, about a year after I began taking classes with Laura Dubester, a student of his who moved to western Massachusetts from Philadelphia and began teaching at the Pittsfield YMCA. After hearing about Maruyama
sensei from Laura, I managed to overcome my social anxiety, and told her I'd like to meet him and attend a couple of his classes. She made arrangements, and the following weekend off I went.
Maruyama
sensei's dojo was on the second floor of a building on Arch Street, up a rickety flight of stairs. When I entered for the first time, the only person there was Maruyama
sensei, vacuuming the mat. I noticed chairs along the wall, so I sat down and wondered what to do next. Maruyama
sensei noticed me, walked over to where I was sitting, handed me the vacuum and left the mat. Not knowing what else to do, I took off my shoes and proceeded to finish vacuuming.
I have to admit that I was a little taken aback. Years later, I realized that this was a gift of welcome. Allowing me to vacuum the mat, to do
something, gave me time to acclimate myself to the
dojo. When students began to arrive for class, I was far more relaxed that I otherwise would have been.
What was it like to
uke for
Sensei? The first word that comes to mind is power. At one hundred, thirty-five pounds, he was, by no means, large. But he could generate power all out of proportion to his size. That power was delivered via a deceptively feathery touch that was nevertheless inescapable. I remember one occasion when he came to Massachusetts to conduct a workshop at the Pittsfield YMCA. He called me up, and asked me to repeatedly punch him. I have quick hands even today, but was quicker back then in my early thirties. Each time I punched, his hand would flick out and land on my wrist with that feathery feeling that felt, at the same time, like a thick piece of rebar. I varied the tempo of my delivery, the speed and my target, all to no avail as each punch was met by that same flicking hand. He did this while lecturing to the class on the importance of mind/body coordination to the successful execution of technique. After a couple of minutes, I had an egg-sized weal on the back of my wrist. There was no pain, but it was scary to look at. During the break,
Sensei came over to me and after a few minutes of applying
kiatsu to my wrist, the swelling was gone. The black and blue left after a few days, and I was none the worse for wear.
Whenever I was
uke, I attacked Maruyama
sensei with abandon, doing my best to get inside his defensive perimeter. I was never successful, even though his movements were very compact. When thrown by him, I always felt like I was being totally enveloped. Considering I stood at least a full head taller than him, this was always a disconcerting experience.
Being
uke for Maruyama
sensei during
ki testing demonstrations was an altogether different experience. Where his
waza was exemplified by the generation of power, his reaction to push/pull/lift testing was, in a word, nothing. I could push, pull or lift until I threatened to bust a gut and he would just stand there as though I didn't exist. It was like trying to push a large tree over. As I did my best to unbalance him, he would talk to the class and at some point effortlessly bring me to the mat.
Maruyama
sensei stressed the practicality of his
aikido. He had no tolerance for the mystical notions of
ki so prevalent in the 80's, and told me repeatedly that coordinating mind and body to find correct feeling was my path to my strongest possible state. Once I had found that state, I could perform to my maximum potential, and technique could be executed with "maximum effect and minimum effort."
Maruyama
sensei's teaching of mind/body coordination employed the use of the
aiki taiso exercises (
ki exercises), which a lot of
aikido students today view as simply warm-up exercises, lots of partnered
ki testing and solo weapons work. He explained that, correctly performed,
ki exercises served to unify mind and body while in motion, which more fully coordinates mind and body than when performing static meditation. In effect,
ki exercises were a form of moving meditation according to his views at the time.
Because
ki exercises are comprised of simple motions, it's easy for the mind to wander while performing them. This will cause the mind/body connection to deviate from unity. Therefore it's necessary to keep the mind from wandering in order to derive any benefit related to unifying mind and body.
Sensei explained that we should bring our consciousness to One Point and concentrate on the feeling associated with being centered. He would have us move our awareness from head to center and back again while testing us as we moved. He then would say, "You decide which is better." (That's a phrase we heard often. He would employ it during technique practice as well; after having us practice a technique using muscle and then with centered relaxed movement.)
Maruyama
sensei also had us practice the
aiki taiso exercises in pairs. One partner would perform the exercise, the other would provide resistance, apply testing, or both depending on the exercise. For example, he had us perform
tenkan while being resisted by an
uke holding tightly to a wrist. Without proper integration of mind and body, my arm would get jammed into my shoulder as I tried to turn, stopping me from completing the move. Integrating mind and body allowed me to neutralize
uke's resistance and easily perform
tenkan. After correctly executing my turn, my
uke having followed me around, would push on my wrist to see if I remained centered. A variation of this exercise had
uke stay put as I turned so we were facing the same direction side by side and then test me by pulling backward on my wrist trying to drive my arm into my shoulder. Sensei devised many of these exercises always with an eye toward fostering and strengthening mind/body coordination.
Most importantly, I think, he stressed that the exercises were not contests of strength. It was
uke's job to apply an appropriate amount of resistance, to provide
nage with the opportunity to find One Point and develop correct feeling.
Ki testing served dual purposes. First,
ki tests were used to measure progress of the student's ability to coordinate mind and body while being subjected to the application of force to various parts of the body. Sensei would also have us undergo testing in many varied positions; some of them quite unstable. He explained that correct posture wasn't a matter of external appearance; rather it was manifest by a solid internal structure that could be displayed in many forms externally. Second,
ki tests were used to strengthen the mind/body connection as we were exposed to greater amounts of force as we gained experience.
I remember that Maruyama
sensei did very little teaching of technique at camps and seminars. His instruction centered on the mind/body connection, and how strong mind/body coordination facilitated the execution of technique. The techniques we practiced were platforms that embodied the principles he was teaching us.
Looking back, I see that Maruyama
sensei provided a sequence of steps that enabled the student to: a) unify mind and body individually; b) strengthen the feeling by performing simple moves while being resisted and tested by a partner; and c) then be able to integrate that feeling into waza practice.
Sensei constantly stressed that all of what he was teaching was available to anyone. There was no magic formula or special talent required. Continued dedicated practice would lead to results.
Our work with the
bokken and
jo was pretty standard fare, consisting of solo
kata and paired exercises. What had the greatest effect on me wasn't what he was teaching. Instead it was how he moved with the weapon. Watching him wield a weapon was like watching water flow around smooth stones in a stream. His motion was fluid and unbroken, never stopping the weapon or retracing an arc. When working with Sensei in paired exercises, that continuous, fluid motion was translated into enormous power that shot through my whole body when our weapons met.
So how does any of this relate to the title of this article? It was at that winter camp instructors' meeting, while sitting with Mary and me,
Sensei began to speak of his interactions with
O Sensei and Tohei
sensei. The gist of his talk was that they weren't supermen blessed with otherworldly powers. They were human beings, just like the rest of us, but who were able to display their extraordinary abilities because of dedicated practice over a long period of time and hard work. It was at that point he looked at both of us, quite intensely, and said "Usehiba did it, Tohei did it, I did it." and after a slight pause "You can do it too."
From that point, my training and teaching began to turn; not on a dime, but more like an ocean liner making a big sweeping arc. I slowly went from being technique-centric to concentrating on mastering the internal principles that Maruyama sensei had been hammering home for all those years.
Sensei will be celebrating his eightieth birthday this year. And while I haven't seen him in a number of years since leaving the Kokikai organization to pursue my study as an independent practitioner, I think of him often with fond remembrance of lessons taught and lessons learned.
For those inclined to post, please re-read the introductory column before doing so. The rules for contributors, in short:- Only people who have actually taken ukemi the teacher who is the subject of this thread, may post
- Simply post your direct experience of taking ukemi. This can include the nature of your relationship with them, as ukemi is more than merely taking falls.
- Do not engage in back-and-forth with other posters, disputing their experience, or trying to prove why yours is more real. Just post your own experience. Trust your readers to take in each writer's account on its own merits.
- If, for any reason, you find something to praise or condemn in anyone's description or wish to amplify your insights and perceptions, do so elsewhere. Start a thread about that subject in the appropriate section of Aikiweb.
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Ron Ragusa began his aikido training in 1977 with Laura Dubester, an early student of Maruyama Shuji, in Pittsfield, MA. In 1982, he assumed teaching duties at the dojo when Laura left to pursue other opportunities. Ron and his wife, Mary Eastland, left the Aikido Kokikai organization in 2001, and started Berkshire Hills Aikido in Great Barrington, Mass., as an independent dojo. Ron and Mary's blended family consists of three sons, two daughters and seven grandchildren. Ron also enjoys landscape painting, mathematics and is the author of Being, Essence & Motion: Aikido as a Way of Understanding, a memoir of observations on forty years of aikido training and teaching. Currently Ron is writing a new book, Mind/Body Coordination: The Ki in Aikido and is collaborating with Mary to produce an introductory video course on mind/body coordination for Udemy.com.
