Ralph Pettman
Going For A Walk In The World
BODY EGO AND BRAIN EGO In mental terms aikido means "letting go", not relying on physical strength, not depending on the intellectual part of the brain to think of solutions to the problems we face. These are not little things to let go. The thinking part of the brain always wants to tell us that the intellect matters most. It will use that sense of the body that uses out muscles to stay in control. The thinking brain and the body-in-the-brain both seem to have an ego. They're used to having their own way and they'll try and stop us seeing anything more than their version of ourselves. To get beyond them we have to find ways to change our bodies and change our minds. Good aikido training is meant to help us to do just that and over time, it does. Good aikido training is pure movement. It is universal movement. To quote Uyeshiba himself: "The secret of aikido is to harmonize ourselves with the movement of the universe and bring ourselves into accord with the universe itself. He who has gained the secret of aikido has the universe in himself and can say, 'I am the universe'". The feeling of pure movement is hard to catch because our mental and physical egos get in the way. The experienced practitioner says: "relax". He or she says: "Let the feeling of the movement flow so you can catch it for yourself; so it can catch you". He or she says: "Follow the feeling and aikido will teach itself. It is natural movement. Let it come to you. Let it come through you. Let movement itself show you what to do". But what is: "relax"? The more you try to "relax" the tighter your body becomes. So then you go to the other extreme and become floppy and useless. What is this feeling of flow you are supposed to feel? How can you feel it unless you know what it is already? And if you know what it is already, then you hardly need to feel for it, do you? It's like a Zen koan. Zen koans are mental riddles used in particular Buddhist training schools to baffle the brain and bring it to the point where it lets go and takes the leap to larger awareness. In the same way learning to "relax" means learning to feel more centred and extended. It means more than copying the relaxed movements of an instructor. It means finding these feelings inside yourself, that is, knowing what a moving centre and relaxed strength actually feels like. I remember a good example of this kind of knowing in my own training. It showed me very clearly how the body- ego can hang on to one physical feeling no matter how much we may want to change. It showed me that if we don't know what we are feeling for, it can be very hard to know what to do to change what we are and the way we move. There is one movement in aikido called "irimi nage". To do the "ukemi" for this movement, that is, to attack and then to receive this technique well, you have to bend your back very flexibly and I had trained for years in a style of aikido where you did not bend your back very far at all. This made my "ukemi" very abrupt. I trained later in a style in which the attacker bends their back as far as they can. This gives the defender a much better chance to learn the feeling of the movement.
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