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I always have a hard time reading Nev Sagiba’s post very challenging because he presents so many ideas, but there is always at least one idea that catches my attention. In his recent post that idea is:

> Two men in a ring with rules, whilst athletic, skilled and courageous, prove nothing more than that their minds are trapped by rules. On the other hand, those having killed, the ultimate of true violence, unless mentally ill, seldom feel good about it. And if not behind bars, are usually tormented souls. Or both. > A true warrior understands clearly that SERVICE TO LIFE means that he may be sacrificed for the success of the campaign at hand; and lives is hope that he is indeed serving the greater good. HAVE NO ILLUSIONS ABOUT THAT! Otherwise he wastes his life as well.

Except for the unnecessary use of upper case, I wished I said that. It is so easy to get caught up in a fantasy of using martial techniques to effortlessly defeat an assailant who clearly deserves whatever injuries befall him (you know he deserves it because of the music that started playing as he entered the scene).

As part of the service at UUCA this past Sunday, a video interview was played with a witness to civil rights era. The predecessor congregation had joint youth meetings with Ebenezer Baptist and they were threatened by the KKK. The fathers walked the perimeter to protect the youth inside. No violence took place, but in the early 1960’s in Atlanta, there was a reasonable expectation that something bad could happen to an racially integrated meeting. Walking the perimeter when violence is imminent is what warriors do. If violence occurred, these fathers would be the first to be hurt and they knew it. They would have died trying to stop their children from being hurt and there was no illusions about their chances against a determined attack. What they counted on was the cowardice of the potential attackers, and based on the number of cars that slowly passed the building the night they were right. What we must prepare for in martial training is the ability to enter (irimi) violent circumstances without regard for the outcome. Of course we want to survive and come out on top, but we must be prepared for death.

The Men Who Stare at Goats is an entertaining and disturbing book. It covers the investigations into New Age/occult/psychic ideas by the US Army with the intention of creating super soldiers. These investigations take some members of the Army in very strange directions that have repercussions in the current war on terror. Jon Ronson starts with a rumor that there was a site at Fort Bragg where people attempted (and in some versions of the rumor succeeded) to kill a goat by looking at it. Whether this really happened or not depends on who is asked, but it does seem that some people took this idea very seriously.

While investigating this rumor, the author learns about the “First Earth Battalion” (see the manual here), an apparently serious attempt to apply the ideas of 1970’s human potential movement to the military. As unlikely as it seems, this was taken seriously and the Army started to experiment with teaching soldiers yoga and meditation. Somehow these ideas were extended to psychic abilities and there was hope that soldiers could, if their minds were trained correctly, walk through walls, become invisible (convince the viewer that you weren’t there, not let light pass through you) and kill without touching. These abilities would make the soldiers like jedi knights (this was in 1979, so this was a natural analogy). The author doesn’t mention it, but I thought of the book In Search of the Warrior Spirit by Richard Strozzi Heckler where the author describes his experience teaching Aikido to Green Berets. This is a relatively benign expression of the ideas that were floating around.

Jon Ronson suggests that there is a straight line between the First Earth Battalion and some of the more disturbing aspects on the war on terror: blaring loud music and sexual humiliation to break terror suspects. He also tells the story of the Heaven’s Gate tragedy that he claims has links to the secret psychic training programs in the Army. I found these connections tenuous, there are always crazies in and out of military and these ideas could have come from the general culture event without the First Earth Battalion Field Manual. George Clooney is turning this book into a movie that, based on the trailer, treats the whole story as a comedy. The trailer includes many episodes that I don’t remember from the book and I don’t see how they can get away with calling it a true story.

I just read this, which is Joel Riggs account of the Atlanta Friendship Seminar.  I am so used to Yamada Sensei’s teaching that it is always surprising to me to see how others respond to it.  There are such different expectations of how training should go between different instructors.  I feel great frustration when the class is to much about the instructor talking and imparting wisdom and not enough training.  My personal experience is that the kind of instructor that offers extensive dialog, discussion, question and answer, exploration of any philosophy or attitudinal adjustment behind the movements, and examination of the relationship of mind to body do not produce better students than those that simply demonstrate the principles physically and expect the students to figure things out for themselves.

I have taken classes with some students of Yamada Sensei that presumably had very similar training sessions with him that I have had and had extremely strong and subtle technique that I admired greatly, but were not effectively passing down their   knowledge to their students.  My opinion is that the difference is in the instructional method; to achieve the same results, the training must be presented in the same way.  Yamada Sensei’s method is to present mostly basic techniques preformed in a vigorous way and allow the students to find their own way to recreate the technique.  This is sometimes referred to as the “steal my technique” method, that is if you want to do what I do you must put in the effort to find your own way of understanding it.  Many other teachers present, along with vigorous demonstrations, many analogies and “spiritual” discussions on how Aikido training works on the student.  While I have found the demonstrations and discussions from these teachers sometimes very inspiring, the students that are attracted to this method are of no better quality than those of Yamada Sensei.  The historical record indicates that O Sensei in general followed the “steal my technique” approach, but he could also present very difficult esoteric explanations that demanded extensive knowledge from the audience.  He certainly didn’t make it easy on the students.  In my opinion, this is why his students were often of so high quality, but all very different.  The demands were not from the student on the instructor to present the information in a clearer format, but demands by the instructor on the student to work hard and come up with their own answers.

Mr. Riggs ends his post with:

I met several wonderful people from dojos around the South, and look forward to visiting and training with them again in the future.  I  also found that I felt more deeply connected to my own teacher’s approach to the art and felt more committed to the directions of training and teaching that I have begun in my own dojo.

I am glad that he enjoyed meeting and training with our guests, and I enjoyed meeting him (I didn’t get a chance to train with him, maybe next time). Having read his comments about Yamada Sensei, I also feel even more deeply connected to my teacher’s approach.

Last night I finished reading Hidden in Plain Sight: Tracing the Roots of Ueshiba Morihei’s Power by Ellis Amdur. It was a fascinating and frustrating read. Fascinating because Ellis Amdur is a very experienced martial artist with broad experience who has studied the historical documents of Japanese martial arts with particular emphasis on arts that influenced Aikido. He writes in an engaging style that kept my interest all the way through. In fact it is the first book in a long time that kept me up late reading. It was frustrating because the book seems to promise new insights that might change the focus of my training but in the end the book only confirmed for me the choices that I have made in my Aikido training.

The central focus of the book is the “lost” emphasis on internal training in Aikido that gave O Sensei his seemly super human strength. I can see why Amdur feels that this aspect has been lost in modern Aikido in that when Ueshiba Sensei first started teaching he was able to convince skilled martial artists in a moment that they had much to learn from him. Today, it is an unusual Aikido teacher that can command that respect from other martial artists. In a time when you can watch mixed martial arts competition almost every day on TV and movies are filled with fantasy images of violence, the standard practice of Aikido seems quaint and unrealistic. It takes significant education for someone to see the practical applications of the forms and generally people are brought into Aikido on the promise of a new age notion of harmony rather than a serious physical training in controlled violence. I myself came seeking enlightenment, not really realizing how physical the training would turn out to be.

Having trained for many years, however, I do not consider the concept of power, both external and internal, to be lost from modern Aikido. The fact that a majority of students don’t develop the unusual abilities that were documented in both Takeda Sokaku and Ueshiba Morihei should not be a surprise. They were highly unusual in their time and one should expect that those abilities would still be unusual today. However I have experienced directly very sophisticated application of both external and internal power on the mat with senior students and teachers within the United States Aikido Federation. Taking falls for Donovan Waite Sensei was like riding a powerful wave, yet always safe because of the stability his stance and posture. Sugano Sensei had incredible strength that I rarely experienced directly because he technique led uke to the ground rather than forced them, but I remember him demonstrating kaeshi-waza where I was supposed to preform ikkyo on him. Feeling his extremely muscular arm that contained effortless power, I realized that there was no way that I could control his arm at all. Harvey Konigsberg Sensei used extremely subtle movements to take uke’s balance, even very strong people that were actively trying to resist.

There is much in Hidden in Plain Sight that repeats the common disdain for modern Aikido, particularly the Aikido of Ueshiba Kisshomaru, that is common for practitioners of Daito-Ryu, Iwama Aikido, and koryu (classical japanese martial arts). This tendency is distasteful to me and makes me feel defensive. Ellis Amdur softens these criticisms, but often in back handed ways. He honors Ueshiba Kisshomaru for spreading Aikido around the world while saying that he blunted the techniques and failed to demonstrate the physical power of his father. Ellis Amdur repeats the odd fallacy that there are too few techniques in the Aikido of Aikikai. I have always been confused by this idea; every teacher that I have met within the Aikikai world teach different curricula and I often wish that I had taken notes of all the techniques that I have seen. Admittedly, these are often variations on a theme of a small number of techniques,  but this variety goes beyond the “standard” set of techinques that Amdur lists (ikkyo, nikyo, sankyo, yonkyo, iriminage, kokyunage, kaitenage, koshinage and jujinage). However Donovan Waite Sensei taught innumerable pinning and choking techniques. Kanai Sensei’s teaching includes many throws that are outside of the normal set of kokynage techniques others teach. In fact, kokyunage is such a broad category of techniques on its own that the term is almost meaningless. Yamada Sensei talks about “unnamed techniques” as being as large a category in Aikido as those listed in testing requirements. The fact that Ueshiba Kisshumaru and the current Doshu show only the most basic techniques in demonstrations is not a limiting factor on the huge variety of expressions held under the umbrella of the Aikikai. I see their demonstrations as representing their duty to maintain a consistent public face of Aikido, rather than to exhaust the possibilities.

So what is the “lost” secrets of internal power revealed in this book? Misogi training, taking hard ukemi and weapons training. This is a gross simplification of the thesis, but I believe the other elements that are discussed are no more hidden or lost than these. I start every class I teach with torifune and furitama (rowing and shaking exercises), just as many other teachers I’ve trained with do. In my own dojo, Darrel Tangman Sensei first taught me the form and later I experienced Sugano Sensei’s method (only subtly different). I would say that most students in the USAF are familiar with these exercises as well as focused breathing and empty meditation practice that Amdur mentions. No, I have never meditated under a waterfall, but I consider this a practical matter rather than an oversight in my training (the only times I’m near appropriate waterfalls is when I’m on vacation with my family). As for the empowerment meditative practices, Amdur covers the dangers which I take as a reasonable explanation for why it has never been taught in a dojo context in my experience. One could argue that the average student doesn’t understand the significance and is that sense hidden, but in my experience most students get that the exercises improve stance and centering without explanation. The questions that I receive about it are usually on the details of form or the meaning of the kiai in the rowing exercise.

The idea that ukemi practice is under recognized as a way to build martial sensitivity and strength does not fit my experience. Serious students in the USAF are expected to take a lot of ukemi for their seniors and I don’t believe that any of them consider it to be a waste of time. That the reasons for ukemi are rarely stated explicitly doesn’t mean that its significance is hidden (at least for me).

Weapons training is perhaps a different matter. I have trained in suburi regularly for some time but I do not emphasis weapons in the classes that I teach. Yamada Sensei once described weapons training as “playing samurai”. I have done enough to understand that there is much more to it than that. A student in my dojo who is very experienced in karate and is now studying a koryu weapons system has told me that his weapons training his is replacement for sparing practice in that it refines his understanding of timing. I have not gone deep enough in paired weapons exercise to fully grasp what he is talking about. While I get benefit from my suburi practice, I have always felt an internal resistance to more weapons training that I can’t fully explain. I think that it is the idolatry of the physical weapon that bothers me. While a greatly admire the meditative focus of iaido practitioners, I don’t like the idea of having a live blade in my house. The scent of death is to strong for me. This in no way should be read as a criticism of those that pursue this kind of training, it is just not for me at least not now.

At the end of the Hidden in Plain Sight, I have only learned what I already knew. The only thing keeping me from greater understanding of the power of Aikido is more training. To fully realize my potential in Aikido I need to do solo training in breathing exercises and empty meditation. I need to preform rowing exercise for extended periods to really experience the internal changes that it offers. I need to spend more time on the mat taking falls and developing my understanding of timing with partners. This isn’t really news to me and I feel a certain sadness that I find it difficult to increase my training time. I am reluctant to take more time away from my family and follow O Sensei’s example. There is a cost to this that I’m not currently willing to bear and perhaps never will. On the other hand I know that some of my lack of training is lazyness that perhaps reading this book will inspire me to overcome in ways that don’t require sacrificing other priorities.

To be fair to Ellis Amdur, Hidden in Plain Sight demonstrates his substantial learning and a self knowledge that is admirable. He clearly has done detailed research both on and off the mat in very sophisticated budo. He understands well both the extent and the limits of his learning. I highly recommend reading this thought provoking book. My criticisms of his arguments are on the margins his accomplishments.

I’ve started running as a supplemental exercise after my experience with heat exhaustion.  I tried running when I first returned from New York because I was exercising so much less but I ended up with a knee injury. I’ve been determined to avoid injury this time. My mistake the first time was that my cardio conditioning was better than my leg conditioning so my heart let me run further than my legs would. This isn’t a problem now or I wouldn’t need the running.

I decided, after a little reading, to alternate running and walking to allow recovery during the exercise. The first time I alternated every minute, which allowed me to go about 35 minutes of exercise. I’m sure that I could not have gone nearly that long if I tried to run the whole time, even if I kept the pace very slow. Since that time, I’ve extended the time before changing so that I’m running and walking in the same proportions but I now run five minutes before  I start walking. My plan is to start increasing the running time while leaving the walking time at five minutes to increase the intensity. I am now running/walking about four miles which I do in about 45 minutes.

When I started running, I had a lot of soreness in my lower legs and I worried about getting shin splints. I tried getting better shoes, and while they are very comfortable they didn’t help the soreness. I did some reading about shin splints and found some articles on the web that said that they are caused by heel to toe running. I had read some in the past about pose running, which appealed to me because of the connections that I see between it and martial arts training. I hoped to connect my understanding of correct posture I had gained from Aikido to better running and the idea of conscious running (by which I mean focusing on form during activity as a type of meditation) might help my Aikido in return. My first attempt at focusing on form was to concentrate on the alignment of my feet during running. My right foot has a tendency to point outward in comparison to my left foot. I thought that this misalignment might have caused the knee injury from my first attempt at running. This concentration may have exasperated my leg soreness by causing more tension in the muscles. Pose running talks about meeting the ground with the feet mid-sole instead of heel to toe running and concentrating on using the hamstring to raise the feet up and down as the most efficient way of running. Part of the reason that heel to toe running causes injury is that you tend to pull the toes up to put the heel down which causes more strain on heel impact. Then you tend to push off with the toes engaging the calf muscles. Pose running teaches that this action decreases the efficiency of running. I found that by changing my gait to mid-sole contact and concentrating on relaxing the muscles in my lower leg throughout my gait gave me immediate relief from the leg soreness that I had been experiencing. This gave me immediate feedback on my running form.

I see a connection between this and the “unbendable arm” in Aikido training where the arm is kept relaxed in natural as a way to accept force. When running down hill I try to avoid reaching with my feet to the ground, but instead keep the knees slightly bent with the lower leg muscles relaxed just like with shomenuchi ikkyo you shouldn’t reach with you hands but keep the arms curved and relaxed at contact. Pose running has more to teach, but from what I see it has connections to some of the same universal principles that are used in Aikido.

I’m exercising in the morning on the off days from the Aikido morning class so now I’m waking at about the same time every day during the week. I usually sleep in one morning on the weekend so that I’m running three days a week. I’ve already noticed some benefit to my endurance on the mat, but I consider the first real test will be the Fort Lauderdale Winter Seminar (for which I’ve already bought my plane tickets). I’m worried about maintaining this schedule when the weather gets colder. Ill have to get cold weather running clothes.

Last weekend, our dojo and Peachtree Aikikai hosted a joint seminar with Yamada Sensei instructing. The event was a success with a good turn out from both dojos  and from out of town. The weather was very hot, so the training was slow and difficult. Beyond the importance of the event as a symbol for the improved relationship between the two dojos, the training was significant for me in two ways: learning about my health and seeing new aspects of Yamada Sensei’s technique.

On Friday night, we trained for about 1½hours in extremely hot conditions. For sometime,  I have noticed that my endurance has not been as strong as it once was. I have been teaching more than I train and while I try to train with my students when  I teach, I know that this is not enough to develop better endurance. While I’ve been planning for sometime to increase my training, I know that I have to control my exertions on the mat at seminars. I remember feeling tired during the training, but not unusually for me. After training, I sat to fold my hakama on Peachtree Aikikai’s canvas mat feeling now unusually tired. When I stood up I saw that I left a distinct wet mark on the mat from my sweat. I looked around and saw that noone else had left a similar mark on the mat. I sat down in the very nice lounge area they have outside the changing rooms drinking water and waiting until the sweating stopped before I took my shower. I was talking to friends and was in good spirits, but I noticed that it took at least 30 minutes before I stopped sweating and that my fingers and toes were tingling. All of this felt unusual and a little scary to me. I had been very tired after training before, but it never felt like this. Finally I stopped sweating and went to the seminar dinner at Atkins Park, where we had a very good diner in an upstairs room. I had the rack of lamb which was delicious, but in retrospect the filet might have been a better choice to get enough calories to recover.

The following morning I felt tired, but in normal health. I ate breakfast; again perhaps not enough. I trained through the morning, the day was extremely hot, and again I sweated more than usual afterwards, leaving a large sweat mark on the futon coach while I was recovering. I ate the pizza lunch, but was not very hungery and didn’t finish the second piece. I drank plenty of water. In the afternoon I only made it through one hour at which point I almost fainted while I was stepping off the mat. I sat in the relative cool changing room drinking water and again my fingers and toes were tingling. I tested my circulation by pressing my finger and it looked fine. As before it was a long time before I stopped sweating. I kept thinking that this was wrong; I get tired, but not like this.

It wasn’t until the following Tuesday that I felt normal. On Thursday I went to the doctor, who gave me an EKG and took blood. He didn’t share my concern that my experience was unusual. He said that it was classic heat exhaustion and that I needed to make sure that I ate more and drank more water before training. My EKG came back normal and the blood work report doesn’t come in until Monday. The only thing that gives me pause is that my resting heart rate measured 47bpm, which would be fine if I was a marathon runner, but seems low for someone who is aware of lack of endurance. I have no idea what this could mean, and the doctor seemed unconcerned. My conclusion, until the blood work comes in, is that I need extra work on endurance and have to be more conscious of my caloric intake before training. Today I started running. Later I explain the running program I’m trying.

The classes

As usual, Yamada Sensei focused on basic training. One of his themes, as in many recent seminars, is varying the amount of rotation on tenkan. It occured to me that I had noticed many years ago that his technique was unusual because he didn’t always take the same stance at the end of tenkan. At the time, I thought tenkan was tenkan and I always thought it should be done the same way regardless of the context. More and more I notice the degree of his tenkan, even on old videos. It is easy to get caught up in what one thinks is the right form and not see that the teacher is doing something different.

As always, I am taken by how low Yamada Sensei’s stance is. I have been working on this for some time and it still hard for me to maintain this low stance consistently.

Despite the heat, the general mood of training was serious, but upbeat. Yamada Sensei seemed to enjoy the event and kept the mood light.

This weekend the whole family went to see a dance production by the The Atlanta Chinese Dance Company which we enjoyed very much. The dancers ranged from amateur to professional levels and watching triggered thoughts about what makes the difference in the quality of the dance and the connections between dance and martial arts.

The first half of the production was all amateur and focused on dances based on different ethnic traditions in China. Many of these involved wonderful choreography and were very enjoyable to watch. As with all amateur groups, the skills varied more than one would see in a professional group and I was trying to identify the qualities that made the difference with my very limited understanding of dance. Some of it was the sharpness of form, some dancers were more on the beat, had larger clearer movements and showed more mastery of the form. Some also had more expressive faces and movements even when doing the same dance steps. Teaching Aikido is in part a theatrical activity. A senior student at NY Aikikai made this clear to me when he explained that part of successful teaching is projecting your ego. He’s a professional actor, an experience that I’m sure informed his opinion. I could see that he was correct because the difference between strongly compelling teachers and ordinary was partly their ability to dominate the entire mat with their personality. I began noticing how Yamada Sensei and Sugano Sensei accomplished this. Both did this without much talking but instead with vigorous yet detailed technical demonstrations. I learned from this that the less one talks, the more attention students pay to what you say. There is no way that I can say how successfully I project my ego, as I still feel conflicted about this because of my desire to also show humility because there are many who have much more detailed knowledge. I know intellectually that to be effective I must be confident in what I teach, but as always the knowledge proceeds the ability.

The music was recorded and during one of the dances, there was a chorus yelling as part of the soundtrack. I thought about how much more effective it would have been to have the live dancers yell instead, that is if they could project effectively. Later a professional dancer did a modern dance solo with warrior poses and dramatic movements evoking a strong martial spirit. At a critical moment he let a strong yell, one of the best demonstrations of kiai I’ve experienced. My experience in Aikido has not involved much kiai except for torifune exercise that I like to do as a warm-up at the start of every class as Sugano Sensei did while I was in NY Aikikai. Some teachers, including Kennedy Sensei, use it occasionally as part of technique. Tangman Sensei once told me that Akira Tohei Sensei explained that kiai should only be spontaneous, not a part of form. My brain has a problem with truly spontaneous actions and I don’t think that I have ever used kiai as part of technique. Seeing a dancer use it so effectively has started deeper thoughts on the issue. My sense of humility in the face of the tradition I have been taught makes it unlikely that I would use it much, but I would like to understand better how it could be used.

Prehistory

While I was in high school in Winnipeg, I started to learn about the existence of Aikido. I don’t remember the first time I heard the word but I do remember the sensation that I kept hearing about it in different contexts.

One of the first mentions was in a book my mother had about conflict resolution that described an Aikido model for handling interpersonal conflicts. I now recognize that this model originated with Terry Dobson. I had not yet learned to be appropriately skeptical of fantastic claims, and the magic that was described was very appealing to me. All that was required was practice to effortlessly neutralize aggression. Using the Aikido for conflict resolution involved three steps: observe the energy of the attack, blend with the attack and redirect the attack. From the perspective of years of training, I now see the model as faulty in that Aikido techniques are ineffective if one passively waits for the attack. I still believe that it is possible to practically apply Aikido for conflict resolution, but it involves awareness long before as attack is formulated and the ability to take control before the attack becomes critical. People that are most effective in peacemaking have a loving but dominating spirit that can bend weaker minded people into self defeating aggression, not controlling the violence once it has begun.

Another early contact with Aikido was a yoga class taught at a Unitarian-Universalist youth event at Banff, Alberta. I have very clear memories of this class that took place in a linoleum floored room in the youth hostel where we were staying. The teacher showed several amazing things including standing on a step with legs straight and palming the floor of the step below. She also talked about Aikido, which she didn’t know well. She demonstrated tenkan from a slow tsuki and I can remember the surprised smile on her partner’s face as the yoga teacher escaped the attack and lead her partner in a circle. Although I didn’t formulate it into words at the time, I saw the potential for effectiveness, but more importantly the fun in this brief demonstration.

There was at least a year between this yoga class and the first opportunity to train. During this time a started to seek information about Aikido. This is before the Internet and the only places to find out more were bookstores and libraries. In Prairie Sky Books, a little new age bookstore, I found a book that I haven’t seen since. I now regret not buying it, but I never had much money at the time because I was so allergic to work. I showed mostly basic techniques, but I remember clearly a tanto-tori koshinage or aiki-otoshi that involved ducking under the knife attack. I am now convinced that the reason that I have never seen it since was because it is completely impractical. The downtown library had two books by John Stevens Abundant Peace and Aikido, The way of harmony. These books cemented my then understanding of a pacifist martial art. Violence could be solved without using violence in return and all conflict could end in a master controlling but not damaging the attacker. With enough training one would become enlightened and in this enlightened state the master becomes impervious to attack. When I look back on this now, I see a completely naive view of Aikido.

I would not have been able to admit it at the time, but I was excited by the fantasy of becoming a superhero where no one would be able to defeat. I was nonathletic, very thin and shy with a history of being bullied in elementary school. The superhero fantasy of a weak teenager is in part a sexual fantasy, the capability of dominating other men/boys being so connected to the concept of sexual potency. This sexual aspect of Aikido that is rarely discussed, but significant (in an unconscious way) to my interest.

There was no Aikido in Winnipeg at that time, so I would have to wait until I moved to Atlanta before I could start.