1 minute read
Introduction
INTRODUCTION
Doing aikido I often feel it's more a matter of aikido doing me. My partner and I take turns at being attacker and defender (this is standard aikido training procedure). Our movements get faster and more open, the ebb and flow seems to intensify, and we begin to lose any sense of time and place. There is a feeling of renewal and this feeling begins to grow as new energy seems to rise up within us and through us. Moments like these are very affirmative and very invigorating. They are very creative too. The whole experience is a joyful and a liberating one. Every moment feels comprehensive and alive.
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From a distance we look like we are doing a kind of dance. Aikido is a dynamic art and when it is done in free-form the locks and throws follow each other in rapid succession. Trainees come together and move apart, their "hakamas" snapping and swirling. ("Hakamas" are the pleated culottes that black-belt students wear over their judo-style training suits).
Like a dance the movements can look rather contrived. They can confuse those who have never seen aikido before, not least because what the onlooker sees is actually a training method, not a form of combat. There is no winner or loser in an aikido class or demonstration. What you are watching is a lesson in sensitivity. Training partners are not trying to prevail. They are trying to become more aware. The self-defence capacity they get is almost a by-the-way one. Compassion, not combat proficiency, is the point of the training process.
I have talked to many people who do aikido and they give very different answers when I ask them how it feels. I have given one brief account above. Here is another by a friend of mine: "It must have been about a year after I started. I was being thrown ... when for a tiny second there was a sort of endless expansion. I had the sensation of floating in a place where there was no up or down, left or right, and although I was aware that such things still existed, they no longer seemed relevant. For such wells of renewal do we train!"
