What I Think About When I Think About Aikido

By Mark Peckett

This is not another book about Aikido techniques. It's about Aikido principles and how anyone can use them to live more fully.  Taking examples from the martial arts, music, literature, science, religion and everyday life – everything from driving a car to dancing - , here are lessons for making simple changes in our lives.  It's not just for people who practise Aikido, it's for anyone who feels life could be a bit better.   And if you do practise Aikido, it might just improve that too.

"I don't do any form of martial arts but this book has improved my skiing and made me question much of how the sport is taught. This is a book of universally applicable lessons." Andrew Sparke

• Language: English
• Publisher: APS Publications
• Release date: Jun 2, 2017
• ISBN: 9781911310815

Book preview

For Cathy

Mark Peckett has been practising aikido for over 35 years. He was awarded his 1st dan by Shihan Ralph Reynolds, one of the first British aikido black belts. Since then he has studied under many sensei both in Britain and abroad and he is now 3rd dan. In 2011 he started his own club, Goshin Aikido, and became chief instructor of Aikido Academy UK in 2014.  He writes a weekly blog on aikido for the AAUK website, and teaches aikido seminars as well as Tai Chi and a system of exercise he has devised called Bodyworx for people who want the benefits of the martial arts without the kicking, punching or throwing.

Mark can be contacted on [e-mail]

More at www.aikidoacademy.co.uk

CONTENTS

First Thoughts

The Aikido Priest

Fear Of Falling

Standing On Our Own Two Feet

Tread Softly

A Balanced Approach

Nobody Wins Nobody Loses

It’s An On Again/Off Again World

Fight Or Flight Or Something Else

Just Try To Relax

Aikido In Everyday Life

The World Of My Dojo

Aikido From The Outside In

I Like Driving My Car

Everyday Life In Aikido

In A Relationship With Aikido

All The World’s A Metaphor

The Stories That We Tell Ourselves

Life Stories

Reading The Signals

A Way With Words

What Keeps A Suspension Bridge Suspended

Unexpected Aikido Practice In The Bagging Area

Taking The Rough With The Smooth

The Happiest Day Of My Life

What Might Have Been

Look Again

Remarking On The Remarkable

Monkey See, Monkey Do

Far From Perfect Aikido

What Might Have Been Might Not Have Been

Tales Of Everyday Madness

Working Towards Peace

All Together Now

Mens Sana In Corpore Sano

The Music Of Aikido

It’s A Lot More Like Dancing Than We Thought

Making Beautiful Music Together

Salty Aikido

The Wisdom Of Slowness

Where You End Up Is Never Where You Think

Don’t Quote Me On This

There's Always A Choice

Two Languages Are Better Than One

‎The Possibilities Are Endless

Why I Practice Aikido

Playing With Aikido

Patience Is Not A Virtue

What’s In Your Paintbox

Beginner’s Mind

An Awfully Big Adventure

Glossary

Acknowledgements

Further Reading

FIRST THOUGHTS

This is not a book about aikido technique.  There are already plenty of those.  This is a book about what I think and feel about aikido and how I feel when I’m doing aikido.

When I first took up the art I was always desperate for my next grade, always counting my classes to see if I had put enough time in for the next grading.  It was always push, push, push and sometimes I passed and sometimes I failed. I remember how excited I was whenever I passed a grading; I would rush straight to Woolworth’s and buy a tin of Dylon because this was in the days before the internet and martial arts shops (and when there was still a Woolworth’s on every high street!), and I would proudly sport my newly-dyed belt (and hands) at the next class and move further up the line to the coveted black belt position.  And I remember how disappointed I would feel when I failed, how angry I got with the grading panel and how resentful of others who had passed.  I failed a lot, and I nurtured that anger and resentment to motivate myself to go back to practise and grade again.

And then one day I was kneeling near the top of the line with the other black belts and suddenly first dan did not seem enough.  I wanted to be a second dan, I wanted my own club, I wanted to be called "sensei."

I do not know when I stopped wanting these things so badly, but I do know that since I let go of wanting them and waiting for them, what I need has come to me when I am ready for it.

Naturally my aikido technique has changed as I have gotten older.  When I first started practising I wanted to throw people further, higher and harder.  Then I wanted to throw them better.  Now I want to allow them to fall.  But that is not to say it is how I will feel a week, a month or a year from now.  Aikido teaches us that all things change – even aikido.  But it also teaches us how to respond to that change.  Aikido changes you over time – not just physically, but mentally and spiritually.  Not only does aikido change, and is changed by each generation, but it also changes us. 

Technique itself is easy – it just takes practice.  In his book Outliers: the Story of Success, Malcolm Gladwell quotes the famous study by Herbert Simon and William Chase, published in American Scientist in 1973: 

There are no instant experts in chess—certainly no instant masters or grandmasters. There appears not to be on record any case (including Bobby Fischer) where a person reached grandmaster level with less than about a decade’s intense preoccupation with the game. We would estimate, very roughly, that a master has spent perhaps 10,000 to 50,000 hours staring at chess positions...

It is the intention behind the technique that is hard to find.  Once you know technique it is easy to throw someone with force; in fact, most beginners do.  This is why you will often see beginners over-balance, or even fall, the first time they accomplish a technique without force, or rather, using their partner’s force instead.  It also usually produces a look of astonishment on the face of tori and the rueful question from uke as he gets up: What did you do? To which the answer is usually: I have no idea!  Of course, they will usually spend the rest of the class becoming more and more frustrated as they try to replicate the effect.  This is why I will often tell students, only half-joking, who have just performed a good technique, You might as well go home now – you’re not going to do another technique that good tonight!

In Chinese this act of not-forcing is called wu-wei, which translates roughly as not doing.  It does not mean doing nothing, but rather not forcing, and applies equally well not only to technique but to trying to recapture a good technique over and over again.

Bruce Lee said something similar in response to a letter sent a Black Belt magazine reader in the late 1960s:

... jeet kune do [the eclectic martial art Bruce Lee created] is interested in feeling what is and not 'doing' what was or what might be. In other words, the here and now, the direct experience with one's opponent, the two halves of the whole ... while what is constantly moving, constantly undergoing a transformation, never fixed and always alive.

But if aikido is a way to reconcile the world and make all human beings one family as O-Sensei Morihei Ueshiba said, I believe we have to go beyond astonishing and effortless technique. We have to move to no technique. By this I do not mean like those samurai who could adopt a ready stance which allowed no opening to attack and their opponents would admit defeat without a blow being struck because to me this still seems to be an assertion of domination or force of one man’s technique over another and cannot be regarded as wu wei.

So I suppose I would say that – at the moment – I aspire to the technique of no-technique where there is no attack or defence because there is no desire to attack or defend.

I am not saying there is anything wrong with a good old-fashioned slam-bang around in the dojo at the end of a long hard day.  In fact sometimes, it is the best possible thing, and if I tried to tell you otherwise, I am no longer practising wu-wei; rather, then I am trying to force you to think my way, and if it was an aikido technique, it would produce a very unpleasant, un-aikido-like clash.  After all, we have to practise our technique so we should always be trying to achieve the best possible aikido technique we can do at that particular moment in time, without trying to achieve the best possible aikido technique we can do!

Many of the major world religions recognise the need to act without an end in view.  In the Hindu scripture the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna says to Arjuna:

Abandon absolutely all concern for the fruits of the action – to the work alone are you entitled, never to its fruit ... he who knows that the way of renunciation and the way of action are one, he verily knows.

This is what makes aikido endlessly fascinating.  Ten different aikido instructors will teach the same technique ten different ways and every one of them will inform your own technique in some way, either as something you want to use, or something you decide does not work for you.  And this is a good thing, because if aikido was simply just about repetition then we would fall into the trap of simply training muscle memory and aikido must be more than that.  After all, it is a "do" – a way or a path and not a destination – the trick is to keep practising without wanting to get anywhere or wanting to stop too long at places along the way.

THE AIKIDO PRIEST

I remember an incident that happened many years ago when I was just starting out teaching aikido.  I was holding my class in the local sports centre and we shared the changing room with all the other users of the centre.  On this particular evening I was surrounded by a group of men who had just finished playing squash.  My black belt was sufficiently new that I still got a thrill out of tying it on in public, but it was the hakama that drew the comments.  One of the squash players said:

Careful what we say, lads – we’ve got a priest in here!

And we all laughed, me more self-consciously than them.

That happened over a quarter of a century ago and only came back to mind when I set up my own organisation two years ago, because in that off-the-cuff remark, as with much humour, there is an element of truth.

I won’t deny that one of the motivations when I started practising aikido was to wear the hakama, because the dan grades certainly did look like priests.  And that’s how we treated them; hanging on their every word as if they had not only mastered some techniques, but uncovered the secret of life itself!

Equally, when I started teaching, I was treated in the same way by kyu grades and I’d be lying if I didn’t say I liked it.  As Koichi Tohei says in Aikido in Daily Life:

Sometimes people in the instructor’s seat want to swagger a bit.  The truth is, just because someone is teaching he has not necessarily mastered all of the principles the universe has to teach...For an instructor to consider himself a perfected being is a ridiculous illusion.  Conceit closes the eyes of the spirit and leads to regression rather than progress.

I believe you can see fairly clearly what a teacher is like by the way his students behave.  Students tend to be a mirror.  If the teacher swaggers, so will his students; but equally, bad habits I might find in my own students, may well be a reflection of my own.

Of course, I’m older now, hopefully wiser and less in need of any quick ego boost.  And being the head of an organisation makes you aware of your responsibilities in a way that teaching in someone else’s does not.  And the greatest responsibility is to follow Bruce Lee’s dictum: A good teacher protects his pupils from his own influence.

As a teacher, I want my students to aspire be better than me.  I don’t want them to think they can never live up to my example because I have some secret connection to the universe.  I want them to ask me questions, because I want to test my own knowledge and skill.  If I don’t have an answer, I mustn’t be afraid to admit it, or if a student comes up with a better answer than mine, I mustn’t be afraid to embrace it.  My teaching must also be my learning.

Of course, it is easy to explain something without caring whether the person you are explaining to actually learns or not.  But if a teacher wants to make progress they can do so through teaching, because that in itself is a form of learning.  The author Richard Bach said:

We teach best what we most need to learn.

This is one of the reasons I am constantly returning to the technique ikkyo in my own teaching!  Again to quote Tohei:

A man does not have to be a good swimmer to be a good swimming coach.  To be a good instructor one must kindly and enthusiastically teach others to the basic principles to the limits of his ability.

I encourage my students to go and practise with other clubs and instructors, not just to learn new techniques, but to see that my version is not the only one, and not even the necessarily the best one.  To use an expression that Bruce Lee used in another context:

It’s like a finger pointing away to the moon. Don’t concentrate on the finger or you will miss all that heavenly glory.

It is important for the teacher to know that he is the finger and not the moon.  And it is just as important for his students to realise that.  O’Sensei himself said:

Instructors can only impart a fraction of the teaching.  It is through your own devoted practice that the mysteries of Aikido will [be] revealed.

So we are all learning and growing together, and what we have learned, we should pass on.  Koichi Tohei again:

Do not be stingy with a technique you have learned ... If we give of what we have learned as much as we can we can learn still more.

This is why I study other arts, and go to courses and seminars run by other teachers.  So that I can learn and then pass on what I understand, and in doing so deepen my own knowledge and understanding.  When it comes down to it, we are all trying to make progress, and the best instructors are those who want to walk that path with others.

I have seen instructors who belittled their students verbally, or even struck them for delivering an incorrect attack.  I suppose that they thought they were building character, although I believe students treated in this way will either lose heart and give up or they will make have to make themselves subservient to the instructor.  And if they do that they may think that they will gain access in time to the instructor’s secret teachings; in fact the only benefit going on here is to the instructor’s ego.

I know there is a Japanese proverb which says the nail that sticks out gets hammered down which is usually interpreted as you should conform and follow the rules, but it is not carte blanche to abuse one’s students.  And anyway, if you choose to stand out in a crowd, that takes courage, so maybe the proverb is best translated into English as Better to be hung for a sheep than a lamb.

In short, aikido instructors are not priests; we are simply people who were fortunate enough to discover aikido and who want to share some of the joy it has brought us with others. We want students, not disciples, who will walk some of the aiki path with us before they discover their own.

FEAR OF FALLING

If you are afraid of falling you’ll never learn to fly.  It has often been said (sometimes by me) that you only really start to improve at aikido technique when your breakfalls improve.

There are a lot of reasons for this.  The first, and most obvious one, is that you start losing your fear and relax.  It is hard enough to walk into a dojo for the first time without feeling nervous, where everyone knows everyone else and seem to know everything, or at least more than you do.  So to the basic fear of will they like me? is the added fear of looking stupid which in turn is compounded by the fear of doing something as unnatural as learning how to fall over.  All in all, not a mix designed to induce relaxation, which is a key component of aikido technique.

As an aside here, I can add that, most people who have practised aikido for any length of time will say that looking stupid is something you have to get used to, because it will happen again and again: doing tai sabaki completely out