The 7 Rules Of Aikido

By Mark Peckett

Another insightful set of musings about life, the universe and everything from the perspective of an English Aikido master.

• Language: English
• Publisher: APS Publications
• Release date: Apr 24, 2021
• ISBN: 9798201055554

Book preview

For Sarah and Thomas

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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 Peckett’s first book  ‘What I Think About When I Think About Aikido’ is also available from APS Publications.

Mark can be contacted on [e-mail]

More at www.aikidoacademy.co.uk

CONTENTS

Introduction

Rule #1: Where You Are, Aikido Isn’t

Less is More

It’s All Relative

Kindred Spirits

These Days Are Ours

One in Ten Thousand

You’ll Grow Into It

Stepping Back

Rule #2: Aikido Is Always Heart to Heart

If That’s Your Attitude

Rub Some Dirt On It

The Human Touch

Invited to Leave

Making Peace

It’s Not You

The Space Between Us

Rule #3: When You Have the Jo, You Don’t Have the Jo

An Old Pen Never Lets You Down

It’s An On Again/Off Again World

It’s A Funny Thing

The Power And the Glory

Diary of the Plague Year

The Orchid and the Dolphin

The Way We See It

Rule #4: You Can’t Make It Happen

A Balanced Approach

Far From Perfect Aikido

Not for Prophet

Journey Without Maps

Making the Grade

North and South

You Gotta Have Friends

Rule #5: It’s Never What You Think It Is ...

Hips Don’t Lie

Of Gods and Aikido

The Stories We Tell Ourselves

Bodyworx

Best Foot Forward

Scattergorised

Teach a Man to Fish

Rule #6: ... But It Can Be Anything You Want It To Be

Reading the Signs

Imagine

Another Fine Mess

The French Have A Word For It

Shine On, You Crazy Diamond

Bless You

The Ego of Egolessness

Rule #7: There Are No Rules in Aikido

A Way With Words

What We See Isn’t What We Get

Clothes Don’t Maketh the Man

Travelling Hopefully

Fight, Flight or Something Else

Everything’s Wrong

Ain’t No Rules in a Knife Fight

Glossary

Acknowledgments

Further Reading

INTRODUCTION

In my previous book, What I Think About When I Think About Aikido, I wrote about the ways in which the practice of Aikido had impacted on my life.  This time around, I’ve tried to quantify that thinking under seven broad headings.  It might seem like I spend a lot of time trying to shoehorn Aikido principles into everyday life.  But in my defence, I think everyone who has an ikigai has a tendency to do that.

Ikigai, as you won’t be surprised to learn, is a Japanese term.  Loosely speaking, it translates as a reason for being.  It means that which makes your life worthwhile and gives it a sense of meaning.  And it could be anything – ten-pin bowling, crochet, or stamp-collecting.  Not only is it the reason that gets you up in the morning, it is also something that filters through every aspect of your life.  It affects what you do, what you say, and how you see things.

A dancer might say that every aspect of our existence is movement; a knitter might say that knitting is joining nothing together with knots and it’s all in the pattern of the knots; everyone who plays golf says it teaches you life lessons, and my son would say everything he needed to know about life he learnt from The Simpsons.  And Red Dwarf.

One of the longest living populations in the world resides in the Okinawan islands of Japan.  These people, many of whom are nearly, or even over, one hundred, eat well (foods rich in Omega-3 and others which carry low cancer risks), but they also tend to keep working – not in a career-focused way necessarily, but continuing to help in the family or the community, passing on knowledge to the next generation.  They value themselves and they feel valued.  It can be summed up as:

What do you love? What are you good at? What does the world need? And what can you be paid for?

Obviously, as you get older it may not be necessary to get paid for what you’re good at – your requirements get less, and, hopefully, a pension provides what you need to get by, although if you want to continue at your job, or any job, because that is your ikigai, there is no reason why you shouldn’t.

Interestingly, the way in which Aikido is my ikigai has changed over the years.  I’d be lying if I didn’t say that originally it was that I wanted to throw people through the air with a flick of my finger – I had fantasies of defending my family from burglars and muggers.  That vision of Aikido probably owed more to 1970s Kungfu films than reality, but it was a motivating factor in going back week after week.  By the time I’d achieved black belt, I became more and more fascinated by how the same technique could be interpreted in so many different ways.  Then, over the years, the application of the principles of Aikido to everyday life became the most important aspect of my practice.  But now, after over forty years, I’d have to say that one of the greatest pleasures of Aikido, and what makes me come to class every week to teach or to train, is the company.  I enjoy the shared experience.

Obviously, our purpose in life changes as our life changes.  In Hindu philosophy there are four stages to life:

The first stage is called the student life, and in the West would correspond roughly with being raised in a family and going to school, and possibly university.  It is, if you like, growing up;

This is household life – working, marrying, raising and supporting a family;

Retired life, where you step back and hand the torch on to the next generation;

And finally, the renounced life, where you turn your back on material things, and enter the spiritual life.

I’m over-simplifying, but these four stages recognise that we change as we grow older, and that the nature of our ikigai will also change.  And it may be that our ikigai itself will change, but what is important is that we have one.  Fyodor Dostoyevsky once said, The mystery of human existence lies not in just staying alive, but in finding something to live for.  Viktor Frankl, the Austrian psychiatrist, who developed his theory of logotherapy (literally healing through meaning) based on his experiences in concentration camps in World War II, believed that the search for meaning is the primary motivation of humans, and we can do that by:

Making a difference in the world through what we do or what we create;

By experiencing or encountering something or someone;

And by being courageous in times of suffering.

Now, it might seem a long way from practising Aikido a couple of times a week to making a difference in the world, but I believe Aikido has helped me, to some extent, to achieve all three of those goals.  Certainly, I feel I’ve passed something on (made a difference); I’ve had wonderful times with other Aikidoka, on and off the mat, made lifelong friendships; and learned to cope with failure and physical pain better than I did before I started practising.  And you could say the same thing, I’m sure, if you paint, ski or garden, play guitar or anything else that gives your life purpose.

In the end, we are all on a journey.  We will experience adversity, we will gain companions along the way, and we will be changed and help to change our world.  As Gandhi said, If you want to change the world, start with yourself.  It is no accident that all the great myths take the form of a journey, feature in all world religions and are reflected in the lives of great people.  We may not be a Gandhi, a Marie Curie or a Nelson Mandela, but we allow our ikigai to transform us then we have it in ourselves to transform the world.

RULE #1: WHERE YOU ARE AIKIDO ISN’T

Less Is More:

One of the most famous verses from the Tao Te Ching goes:

Thirty spokes meet in the hub.

The wheel’s use comes from where it isn’t.

Clay is shaped to make a pot.

Where it’s not is where the pot is useful.

Cut windows and doors to make a room.

Where the room isn’t, there is room for you.

I am now going to attempt to explain in about a thousand words what Lao Tzu does so beautifully in forty-seven.  We are all familiar with the idea of less is more. We can see how the spare prose of Ernest Hemingway, the economy of line of a Picasso drawing, or the minimalist architecture and design of Modernism have influenced twentieth century Western culture.  Mathematical theorems are tested for simplicity against the principle of Occam’s Razor, which states that when presented with competing explanations for a phenomenon, we should select the one that is simplest; or, to put it another way, extra assumptions are a bad idea if they don’t improve the explanation.  The worlds of Newtonian mechanics and Einstein’s theory of general relativity are both described (albeit by mathematicians) as simple, elegant and beautiful.

We recognise doing less as generally a good thing.  We are, for example, aware of the dangers of micromanagement – how a manager who makes his team feel they cannot handle work without his constant guidance, demanding to be cc’d into every email, makes them slowly lose the desire to do anything but that which is demanded of them. Such a manager becomes the very bottleneck he was trying to avoid.

Conversely, we all know managers or workers who don’t do enough and we call them lazy whether they knew they could do more and didn’t or just didn’t know there was more they could do.  But is the person who doesn’t know any better truly lazy or at best (or worst) incompetent, and is it fair to judge them in the same way as someone who should know better?

In Japanese Zen Buddhism there is a concept known as mushin which is usually translated into English as No Mind.  Ironically in a blog about simplicity and doing less, this is quite a difficult concept to explain.  Part of the problem is Japanese is a conceptual language and the two kanji which form the word have a number of layered resonances which the English words don’t have.  Mu doesn’t mean just No.  It can also mean not, nothing, without, nonexistence, nonbeing, not having and a lack of amongst many other things.  Alone it is a complicated idea, and then you add shin which can mean heart, mind or spirit.

It is not the same as mindlessness.  That is when you go to work and perform a task like a robot without thinking, or trying not to think about it, or thinking about your next holiday or your last – anything but the task you’re engaged upon.  But although mindlessness can be seen as soul-destroying, No-Mind can seem cold.  The Chinese thinker Wang Tong wrote:

It is because it is empty that the mirror reflects an image.

The thing about a mirror is that it doesn’t care what it reflects.  A mother and baby, a murder, a lump of concrete or a flower – it’s all the same to the mirror.  It’s cold and unfeeling and does only that for which it was made.  There is no relationship between it and that which it reflects.  For this reason, the teaching of No-Mind was popular with the samurai because when potential death faced them on the battlefield, awareness had to be encompassing.  Recognition of danger and response needed to be instantaneous, the body and weapon fully committed in powerful action without concern for the self or hesitation of thought. This made them useful to their lords, particularly in Japan’s Warring States Period of near constant military conflict, as when faced with a choice between life or death, they would choose death without hesitation.

But I do not believe that this is the kind of No-Mind that Lao Tzu is driving at.  I think it is better expressed by Jiddhu Krishnamurti when he says:

When there is space between you and the object you are observing, you well know there is no love, and without love, however hard you try to reform the world or bring about social order...you will only create agony.

The space is created by thinking about ourselves.  In terms of Aikido, the space is the technique and tori’s desire to make the technique work.  At this point, it has become all about you (tori) and your desire to execute a technique.  Uke doesn’t matter at all other than as a piece of meat that ends up on the mat and makes you feel good about yourself.  You are making Aikido happen rather than letting it unfold naturally.

Again, part of the problem comes from the English translation of a Japanese concept – tori.  It is usually translated as the thrower, the one who throws or something similar, but it derives from the verb which means to take, to pick up or to choose.  Would our attitude to technique be different if we regarded ourselves as the chooser or the taker?  We might then take the aggression of an attack and choose to reform or bring about harmony instead of creating the agony of a lock or throw.

Interestingly, uke can be translated as the receiver (of the throw).  Perhaps if we as tori instead regarded ourselves as uke and saw that our role is to allow space to receive the other person, to value them, to care for them and even love them, our technique might become less harsh and less violent, but more effective.  And perhaps in everyday life, if we made our interactions with others less about ourselves and more about receiving what the other person is really saying our lives might be filled with more love and less agony.

It’s All Relative

Recently I’ve been reading a book on quantum gravity called Reality Is Not What It Seems by Carlo Rovelli.  It’s one of those popular science books that are, as the name suggests, surprisingly popular these days.  If I tell you that I have just read that reality is a network of granular events; the dynamic which connects them is probabilistic; between one event and another, space, time, matter and energy melt in a cloud of probability, then you won’t be surprised to learn I haven’t much of clue about what I’m reading. The only thing that reassures me is that Richard Feynman, the American theoretical physicist and Nobel prize-winner, once wrote I think I can state that nobody really understands quantum mechanics.

So, it’s a reasonably safe bet to say that I will finish this book without being much wiser about quantum gravity than I was when I started.  There is, however, one recurring concept that struck me.

When I was at school, we were taught that everything is made out of atoms that consist of a nucleus of protons and neutrons surrounded by electrons like planets in a little solar system orbiting a tiny sun.  Apparently, things aren’t like that at all.  There is no objective reality – electrons don’t always exist – they only acquire reality when they collide (interact) with something else.  Otherwise they just exist as some kind of cloud of probability.

Now this is probably a very poor, or completely wrong, interpretation of quantum mechanics, but it’s an idea that fascinates me – things only exist in relationship to each other.  Quantum theory is supposed to deal with