With Aikido you get more Bubbles!

One thing we worked on tonight was two responses to shomen-uchi (overhead strike to the head). The first was just getting off line and the obvious next step is kote gaishi which is what we went on to do. BUT after that Sensei had us work on if uke had some more force and you couldn't apply the technique. Then Nage was supposed to go with it and turn it into Kaiten Nage.

In the “teisho” after class he used the example of an apple to say that the same thing means something different depending on your view. To a hungry man the apple is food but to an artist (I guess the artist had already eaten) it was shape, shades and colors. And Aikido really means you look at any situation as something with many different alternatives so you are not locked into any technique. Aikido is about "Options"

He went on to say something like with aikido two different people can look at the same thing and think completely different things and what he saw might not be what you saw. And at some point he declared something like “Aikido gives you more bubbles”.

He talked about a cartoon where two people are seeing the same thing but you can tell visually that they are thinking in completely different ways. In the business they call them thought balloons, but there is something so charming about calling them Bubbles. Like a refreshing sparking glass of champagne

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A teisho is a formal presentation of dharma by a Zen master, usually during a sesshin. A teisho may appear to be a lecture, but the master is not trying to convey concepts or knowledge. Instead, through the teisho the master presents his or her realization.

Aikido: The Art of Deception

After almost 2 months away I made it back to Aikido tonight, and boy am I tired. There are other dojos that keep a more vigorous pace during practice, but in any case for a plump middle aged man like me tonight was a whipping. A good time but still I am pooped.

Anyway I don't know if it was because I was away for 2 months or one of my recurring confusions. We were working on shiho nage from yokomenuchi (strike to the head from the side) and it was like I had never done it before.

But in an effort to explain things Sensei tried to explain how you can use a little trick to get the attacker (uke) off balance. As soon as Uke starts to raise his arm to strike, you extend your leading arm toward him. But not to block or atemi, rather as distraction that tuns into a “hook”. Just by dangling your hand in front of the attack you throw off the attack calculation of the attacker. Then you use you arm as a buffer to the coming force to retract a bit as your body moves back a bit to absorb the attack.

Then once you have his balance you apply shihonage (see above), BUT you do the technique with little to no force as you move uke's arm up high enough to step through. So that he doesn't know what you are doing until you are on the other side of his arm and can finish with some extension and bingo he is on the ground.

These two component demand that you feel what you are doing and what uke is doing, so that there is no resistance at any point.

In sensei's closing remarks he opened with something like “Aikido is the art of deception!”

He speculated that it is natural in any conflict for a forceful attack to expect forceful resistance. You as nage must present the target but at the right moment you move the target and actually Uke is deceived because all the stuff he was expecting was not there. And when he demonstrated it on us it was like magic. One of those times you say “What just happened” as you are laying on the floor.

Share The Tip Of The Sword With His Head!

What type of tip will you share?

I am starting a new topic...”Sensei Says!”

Sensei always looks for ways to express the subtle points of Aikido and sometimes the phrases have a unique quality that either comes from secret insight or a polyglot's overload of language.

Today was “Weapons Work” and we worked with the Bokken (wooden sword) not for actual martial application but to help us apply and understand our non weapons aikido techniques.

So today we where using the Bokken in a strike to the top of the head, and we all seemed to he holding back, keeping our our elbows too close to our heads or rather not giving our all to the motion of the strike. Not that we didn't use muscle and force to strike to the imaginary head, but that it really was not efficient.

So Sensei struggling to explain and came out with “Share the tip of the sword with his head!”. He then went on to say something like we were keeping our energy in, close to us and not “sharing” it with uke.

The phrase stuck with me and it does point out one of the interesting aspects of Aikido. In that O' Sensei made comments about harmony and there being "no enemy" but it is still a "Martial" endeavor and the reconciliation of those two aspects points not just to our view of Aikido (since slicing a head and harmony are normally two wildly different things), but to our approach to any endeavor. Meaning what do we dig about the thing we are doing; do we like the cool movement or the slicing of a head, the gentleness of sharing or the effectiveness of a strike to the head.

Of course this was just an exercise in our own personal movement. But still, there is the "sharing our sword..."