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Somebody once asked me whether I would be his Aikido “coach.” He saw Aikido as just another collection of mechanical techniques that could be added on to whatever it was he thought he already knew.

Aikido goes far beyond technique.

Of course, we have forms such as the sankyo wrist lock that we teach in very specific ways, that we require to be effective and that our students must perform correctly in tests. But even in Aikido, there are dozens of ways of doing sankyo. Many teachers that I respect deeply do it somewhat differently than I do. 

I have heard that O-sensei seldom performed techniques exactly the same way twice — always adapting to his ukes on the fly and teaching his students what he felt they needed to know, rather than by rote. He disapproved of kata-style training and spirituality was core to his Aikido.

Aikido is about community and self-development. There is something deeper behind Aikido technique, physically and psychologically. If all you learn from Aikido is how to twist somebody’s wrist painfully, I don’t think you are putting your time to good use. Strong Aikido technique reflects having learned something deeper.

Every martial art has its target students. For most people who commit to Aikido, self defence is just one circle on the Venn diagram.

I don’t have the slightest intention of denigrating any other martial path. They each have their value and purpose. I have practised Jiu-jitsu, Taekwondo and Karate personally and respect them all, been strengthened by them all and deeply admired my sensei. But mostly they are following different paths from Aikido – sometimes focusing on self-defence, sometimes sports, sometimes culture. They attract students aligned with their goals. 

Aikido is constant self-refinement, lifelong training to be a better, stronger person.

Aikido is not a way to learn joint locks. Joint locks are a way to learn Aikido.

Today is the memorial day for Ueshiba Morihei-sensei (1883-1969), the founder of Aikido.

As a callow teenage jiu jitsu student reading the pages of Black Belt magazine in 1969, I vividly remember coming across the notice of 0-sensei’s death and the impact of his photograph. I knew nothing about Aikido and the picture surprised me – he didn’t look like any of my martial arts heroes. He was elderly, dressed in clothing that seemed exotic to me, with a piercing gaze. 

He looked  like a wizard.

A lot of people talk about O-sensei, but few of them have first-hand knowledge. Even the shihan who were my mentors talked little about him, even though they had been taught by him directly.

I think that sometimes we hear a lot of nonsense about O-sensei and his ideas from people who never met him.

Biographies, even the detailed ones, seldom do justice to their subjects. I think that to really understand O-sensei, you had to be in his presence, feel his hands on you. Kawahara-sensei once told me that taking ukemi for O-sensei was unique – feeling that inexplicable and irresistible power.

Aikido is going to be the starting point of any biography of O-sensei. But there was much more to him – he was an agrarian, a profoundly spiritual man, a calligrapher, a scholar of ancient texts, a father, a poet, a participant in some very tumultuous history. All these things fed into his Aikido.

I think that trying to grasp the breadth of O-sensei is key to understanding Aikido. 

He made a massive imprint on Tanaka Bansen-sensei, who then left his imprint on Kawahara-sensei, who passed it on to his students, including to me. I hope that what I am passing on to my students includes some of the breadth of O-sensei, not just the details of technique. Aikido isn’t just a strong nikkyo. It’s a lifestyle and ethos.

Though I never met him, I know I owe him a debt. Today is the day we thank him.

I sometimes get asked whether Aikido works.

My usual reply is, “What do you expect it to do?”

The frequent response: “Work in a fight.”

The next questions are “OK, who are you fighting? Multiple attackers, or somebody with a gun or other weapon, or somebody who really knows what he’s doing?”

“How hard are you going to practice? Are you going to show up once a week and take it easy, or are you going to commit?” 

It isn’t so much a question of whether Aikido works, but whether your Aikido works.

If you believe you’re going to be attacked sometime soon, don’t start Aikido. It takes too long to learn. Notify the police, try some kind of brutal and direct combat training, carry pepper spray or some other legal weapon and stay out of dark alleys.

 But if you train consistently, you will gain survival skills.

• Awareness
• A calm attitude
• Strength, reflexes and resilience
• Understanding of timing, distance, unbalancing and footwork 
• Ukemi
• Experience with multiple partner and weapon attacks and 
• Effective, fundamental technique 

These all may help to get you out of a jam, if worst comes to worst.

If the only focus of your training is fighting, you’re missing the whole point of Aikido. Aikido is a Budo – a life discipline, with the goal of making you a stronger, healthier and more grounded person — not just able to toss people around on the street.

I think of Aikido as a katana — something deadly — but to be prized, maintained and trained with for your own growth. 

But if it’s not sharp and strong, it’s not a katana.

For such a foundational practice of Aikido, I think that many students, even more advanced ones, don’t fully grasp the spirit of ukemi.

I practised other martial arts besides Aikido. For them, ukemi was what happened to you when you were defeated. It didn’t really matter how you did it, apart from trying to minimise the damage to your body.

One of my favourite quotes from Kawahara-sensei was that “Your technique will never be better than your ukemi.” Ukemi is at the very heart of Aikido practice, the ying to the yang.

A few points:

• Ukemi is a continuum. It begins with uke’s intention to attack, a correct and sincere attack, the resulting body relationship and the final movement leading to a fall or a pin. Each part is crucial.

• Ukemi is a vital aspect of learning. Without good partners, you won’t progress. This is particularly so because many Aikido techniques are complex. If your uke is resisting or uncooperative, you are not getting a chance to experience the technique. It’s not uke’s job to make you “prove” that the technique works, but to partner with you in learning it.

• Ukemi is for safety. I have seen bad injuries result from bad ukemi. Protect yourself with correct ukemi.

• Don’t be stupid. Grabbing nage’s wrist with an ironlike, vise grip and stiff arm is just asking for injuries. It’s not a smart attack in any context, inside or outside the dojo.

• Be responsive. With wrist attacks, hold the wrist firmly but in a relaxed way, so you can react. Your arm should be as flexible as a rope and your grip as soft and connected as a knot. As you become more experienced, this kind of grip will enable you to “read” nage, to feel what’s coming in terms of timing and movement. This is self-preservation 101, a basic self-defence skill.

• Ukemi is active, not passive. Uke is not the victim of practice but a participant in it. Uke should follow actively, not limply or stubbornly. Don’t be lazy, wishy-washy or stiff. Uke should stay glued to nage, continually trying to maintain a surviving position, moving naturally according to Aikido principles, blending with nage.

• Advanced students may run through various possibilities for kaeshi waza mentally as they follow a technique — WITHOUT executing them, to give nage a chance to practice.

• A good uke adds energy and enthusiasm to the practice. Even a hard, committed attack becomes joyful for both parties.

Ukemi is not something that happens to you. You are not a tackling dummy. You spend half your time in Aikido taking ukemi. Don’t waste it.

There’s a big difference between knowing what you’re doing and doing what you’re doing. That sounds cryptic, but bear with me.

In the first, you have an intellectual image of the steps involved in performing whatever the activity is – tenkan, for example. 

In the second, through hundreds if not thousands of repetitions, the understanding transcends your conscious mind and settles into your body.

The only way you can learn to swing a bokken is by relentlessly swinging a bokken with presence of mind, not by intellectually thinking about how to swing a bokken.

Once you have grasped a movement, you no longer need to think about it. You simply know the feeling. It becomes as natural as scratching your nose. When you improve, it’s by fine-tuning the feeling, not the algorithm.

“At some point, self-consciously ‘understanding’ why you do what you do just slows you down and interrupts flow, resulting in worse decisions,” to quote educator Barbara Oakley.

Think about teaching a beginner to ride a bicycle. You can talk yourself blue in the face — “Hold the handlebars like this, sit like that with your weight just so, keep constant pressure on the pedals, shift your balance when you turn etc.” But until that person actually climbs on the seat, starts to roll, maybe falls down once or twice and finally gets the feeling of riding a bicycle in his or her bones, no real progress will be made.

As an Aikido instructor, it can be easy to slip into the “explaining” mode instead of emphasizing practice, where the learning actually happens. This is one of the reasons that students talking during class is such a negative… the wrong part of the brain is engaged.

One of my favourite quotes about Aikido practice came from a sempai who was known for his graceful, fluid ukemi.

I asked him for his secret. He said, “There’s no secret. When I attack, I have no expectations, so I’m never disappointed.” And by “disappointed,” he meant the ugly, painful falls I sometimes took by guessing incorrectly about what was about to happen.

As nage, you need to feel the same way. Although we practice in ways that could be described as drills — prearranged attacks — never take your attacker for granted. 

Uke may attack on the “wrong” side, or may have misunderstood the attack altogether, or may be executing the attack in a way or with ma’ai or timing that you didn’t anticipate. To quote another favourite adage, “Uke is never wrong.” Nage has no excuse.

Don’t let the rhythm of practice lull you to sleep. 

Mushin is an important concept in budo. It literally means “no mind” — being free from thoughts, emotions and ego. It is the basis of spontaneous, natural and immediate action.

Practice freestyle against a variety of attacks. It is also revealing to practice with beginners (gently, of course). They will often surprise you with strange interpretations of the ukemi that seem to come from out of nowhere.

Keep an empty mind, be aware, relax and have no expectations, if you want to practice Aikido as a martial art.

I realize that choosing grammar as a topic is going to result in a fall-off of about 95 percent of potential readers. However, language was my study in university and I’m a retired writer, so it’s an easy lens for me to use.

Every language has a grammar, as does every martial art — or every human activity, for that matter.

Aikido has a vocabulary of nouns (techniques) and verbs (body movement). How these are connected in practice is the grammar of Aikido, which includes timing and distance. In a sense, Aikido practice is communication, a shared understanding between people and a set of mutual expectations.

Each of us has an idiolect — the way we normally speak and the way we like to practice in the dojo. Every dojo has a dialect — a collection of idiolects that the members take for granted and often come to accept as an objective standard.

Some are tempted to feel that their dojo’s dialect is correct and that all others are therefore wrong. You may be practicing with someone from another dojo at a seminar and get the feeling that there is something weird about what they are doing. You recognise the technique but somehow you feel outside your comfort zone. (The urge to discuss this can be intense, but resist it.)

It’s the same with language… a Texan can be talking with a Scot and they understand each other, but they are very conscious of their differences.

I won’t even get into other martial arts… a karateka may have a completely different technical vocabulary and grammar than you do. It’s a different language. And as we sometimes see in foreign countries, shouting at them in your own language won’t help.

So, to get to my point… love your own language and become fluent. Embrace the technique as taught in your dojo. But don’t assume it’s somehow objectively the “correct” dialect or language or practice. Develop an ear for new information. Expand your vocabulary. As is often pointed out, learning a new language is good for the brain. 

Seminars — practising with people from other dojos — are a good place to start.

What is the point of testing?

I don’t know too many students who look forward to testing. Some it makes self-conscious, others get performance anxiety, some view the test prep training as a grind and so on.

At least in our dojo, there’s no competition and rank usually makes no difference in who you are going to train with. You won’t get a different coloured belt, except maybe black if you train sincerely for a few years. Regardless of your rank, you are only as good as you are on the tatami.

But testing is important. I use the analogy of the goldfish. They say that if you keep a fish in a goldfish bowl with nothing but water and the occasional feeding, it will eventually die. But if you put a rock in the bowl, the fish will swim in circles around it and live.

I think that’s one of the purposes of testing – to give you some kind of concrete focus in your training. It gives a focus for your sensei, too, to make a point of periodically reviewing your progress and advising you on areas that need improvement.

After you pass or fail a test, you’re still the same person you were the day before. A new rank doesn’t make you a new person. Students that chase rank often quit once they get a black belt — a ridiculous attitude, in my view.

I think that many students misunderstand what it means to fail a test. The examiners are not criticizing you or saying that you are a bad student. They are saying they believe you can improve and you should try again. I don’t believe that any good student wants to pass a test that the observers thought he or she should have failed.

I know many great Aikido practitioners personally who have failed tests along the way. 

As a matter of fact, I considered myself to have failed my shodan test. The examiner was extremely generous in passing me, but the process brought home the fact that I had to make significant improvements before I even thought about taking another test. It was a valuable experience and very useful feedback. It opened my eyes and motivated me.

Gaining rank is not the purpose of Aikido. Testing is just one tool in the ongoing process of “sharpening your blade,”as they used to say, and it is the test itself, not passing or failing, that does this.

Testing is a snapshot of you at one point in time. It’s not a judgement – it’s information on where you should take your training next.

Many thanks to our guest instructor, Rob Carroll-shidoin, dojocho of Aikido Tendokai, for his instruction today. The class was informative and enjoyable, with several techniques relating to nikkyo.

We were happy to welcome two special guests to practice as well— Alex Loo-sensei and Rika Murota from Aikido Kensankai.

I have been working through the Dokkodo, Miyamoto Musashi’s final list of precepts for his students.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dokkōdō

They’re all brief, thought-provoking and well worth considering in depth.

But number 16 really surprised me.

“Do not collect weapons or practice with weapons beyond what is useful.”

That’s counterintuitive, coming from a renowned swordsman.

But Musashi was  not one to follow convention, deceive himself or waste his time.

I think the crux is “what is useful.”

What is the purpose of your practice? Are you getting sidetracked with non- essentials? Or does every practice take you closer to your goal? Is your weapons practice frivolous or useful to you?

If not, it is not useful to a martial artist. Focus on what is important and what matters to you in your training. That’s all you really have time for.