Aikido Reminders to Self

This is a list I have been adding to ever since I started aikido. It’s idiosyncratic. You’re eavesdropping on my mind, and I might not be able to explain what I mean by a particular line. But what are blogs for? If other aikidoka have such reminder lists, please post or link!

every time

• obtain and re-obtain a signal – relax/pay attention until you get one
• continuous breathing
• upright posture, comfortably standing, centered
• retain sword posture and extension/readiness
• imagine center in motion, often below ground, as on tightrope
• imagine circular saw with gyroscope at its center
• zanshin 360 (observe, interpret, relax, be attentive, see without looking)
• whole body/mind ready
• when time to act, no mind
• when finished, leave nothing behind
• ready to guard your center
• ready to move center in any direction
• blending, you disappear, then assert, like water undermining earth
• if you know the technique well, add ki flow, i.e., smoothness of motion, fluidity, natural reaction and compensation for uke’s micromovements

rising from the mat

• should be centered, easy, solid architecture, quick, with zanshin

simple sequence
zanshin – ma’ai – invite/hiss – blend, shift, blend, shift, … – break balance – keep off balance to ground – pin – release – zanshin

first contact

• unless it is a block, should be soft and stealthy, matching speed and rotation with the attack, contacting and hijacking uke’s momentum more than half way through its natural movement, when it is too late for uke to effectively resist
• first contact can be entering–with assertion of space via arm/ki/hara/atemi

atemi

• focus briefly and intently on the target of atemi – so that warning bells go off in uke’s mind
• occasionally go slow and actually hit uke if uke is not responding (are you not convincing or is uke not paying attention?)
• with rapid small shifts, find paths of no resistance and start coaxing toward ground
• try blend with vector, then shift it perpendicular along z-x plane, then downward along y-?, etc., in wave motion
• working backward from anticipated kazushi point, intend to resist along uke’s strong axis so that uke unconsciously feels and resists, then curve vector while gradually intensifying ‘push’ to spiral into kazushi point.
• ghost atemi: you can give off an atemi without actually initiating an attack (uke will stiffen or change posture slightly as reaction); play with how much of a feint it takes

balance-taking

• occupy the good angles
• incremental variable-speed conveyor belt carrying away uke’s balance
• turn hips in direction you want to channel uke’s momentum
• let hips lead your movements
• guide uke to kazushi points
• weight is dynamic, with multiple centers, vectors, rotations
• your weight can come down via uke
• rear kazushi points are generally more effective
• incorporate ki-flow (willow/water)

pins

• knee should come down to mat with inner shoulder
• heels together, up on toes
• wrap and control at elbow
• capture hand palm up in crook of elbow
• pressure and torque can be applied in either direction along path from shoulder to head (rotational perpendicular to that axis and generally with a feeling of into the ground)
• across and uptown is usually good
• think of what you are going to do next to set up the next attack/response

after pin

• move laterally into uke’s blind spot
• initiate the next attack/response; no downtime

physicality

• arms whiplike energy (dynamic tension, but with no tension)
• hands relaxed but awake
• grip like magnetic glue, not vise, starting with pinky
• wrists and forearms like 20′ sword/searchlights
• shoulders relaxed
• cat-like, but a big cat

ukemi

• punch/strike straight with first two knuckles
• keep eyes on nage amap, even when falling/rolling
• prolong the relationship
• bend
• use nage for support in slow ukemi
• ready to protect from / avoid atemi
• bend head toward nage in shiho nage
• turn head away in irimi nage
• tuck inner leg under
• how to fall softer
• relax as much as possible into pins
• follow nage with your center, staying upright
• attack intelligently — you are practicing your strikes and ability to seize opportunity

jiyu waza

• take time with each throw
• keep moving
• keep observing attackers
• keep all attackers in view AMAP
• throw each uke at attackers
• protect attackers
• pick and attack attackers
• split attackers
• learn direction of throw that follows from each technique, starting with the atemi

ma’ai

• forced commit (if uke tries to creep forward gets attacked)
• subvert uke’s next obvious move, and the next, and the next
• jam up uke’s fighting mechanism
• prevent uke’s natural rotation
• augment uke’s natural rotation
• reestablish presence in blind spot, just within or outside of uke’s peripheral vision

principles

• keep center
• relax and smile genuinely
• continuous 360 awareness
• rotation on multiple axes
• force begets force
• elbows in and down
• invite with open palm
• occasionally do the unpredicted and observe reactions
• snake hand
• one scoop
• if too fast, ratchet back the speed and seek more details
• half speed is close to the maximum you need for daily training
• move as if holding katana, or a medicine ball, or a pack
• move as if wearing a skirt
• lose the ego
• it’s a practice, not a contest, not a performance
• keep your attention constantly moving, internally and externally

my approach

• pragmatic
• simplified
• direct and crisp
• out of the blue – no tells
• anything could happen
• highly targeted atemi
• without ornament
• based on natural analogs (climbing, drinking, catching)

the best students are thieves

a theory about dreaming

I’ve had this theory for years, and have tried to explain it to friends and family over cocktails with little success. Maybe it makes no sense but here goes. It’s based on the analogy of the brain being like a hard drive. I know, I know…

You can’t just write data to a hard drive. Hard drives have to be formatted before you can use them. Formatting is kind of like numbering the pages of a blank book and leaving space for an index and table of contents. After it’s formatted, whenever you write in the book or change something, you update the index and table of contents.

But it’s a little more complicated than that. It’s more like each page has to be formatted, and you can only write so much on a single page, and the pages might not be in order, so you have to leave little “continued” notes at the beginning and end of each page so that someone reading it can trace the story.

And it’s a little more complicated than that. You’d like to be able to categorize your pages but since there is limited space, you can only come up with so many categories and extra bits of information, such as the date you wrote it, the day you modified, who is allowed to read it, who is allowed to erase or modify it, etc. These categories and tags have to be on every page so they better be useful. For example, the way most Unix filesystems are formatted, you don’t know the creation date for a file. It’s just not recorded and there’s no direct way to record it with the file. That saves space on every page.

Okay, the brain is very different. A slowly changing network of neurons, that frankly I don’t know the first thing about. But it does store and retrieve information. I know that if I study something before going to sleep, it’s much easier to learn it the next day. I know that it is difficult to learn completely new things (as in unusual and outside my skill set). I know that my dreams tend to be chopped up absurd versions of what happens to me in real life. I know that we forget our dreams. Massive quantities of dream experience are forgotten by everyone every morning. So if I’m forgetting 99% of my dreams but ’sleeping on it’ tends to help one understand things, what gives?

There is a Russian saying – “Morning is wiser.”

How in the heck does running your brain in high gear (dreaming) and then forgetting all of it make you wiser?

My theory is that daily experience is so complicated that our neural structures (no idea what sort of structures – could be actual connections or just collections of reinforcement in a network?) need to be customized to deal with it optimally ahead of time. Unlike a hard drive which might get formatted in NTFS for Windows, or mostly Ext3 for Unix, our neural structures get all sorts of pre-formatting done to them while we are sleeping, to be ready for the types of experience our brain expects us to have.

That’s the theory. Dreaming is your brain formatting itself.

Signals, stories, notches in the memory board…

I love the idea of the lukasa, or memory board. The lukasa seems to be the most minimal form of data storage possible. The trick to the minimalism is that it is fuzzy data. Some lukasas are representational, depicting tribal land for example, and others are serial notations of a story. They can consist entirely rows of different colored beads on a wooden board.

These static, crude pieces of wood, carved and decorated, go into the hands of a human being, who references basic neural structures through associations with the marks on the board, and out comes a vivid story of heroism, death, comedy, tragedy, or maybe even romance. I imagine that dancers could assist the teller by performing in tandem, illustrating the spoken words. Or if the lukasa is a representation of political power, the tiny colored dots could determine whether or not territorial infringement has occurred, whether the tribe will be at war or at peace.

Inexorably the story must undergo mutations, even with each telling by the same person, even if they have no special motivation to change the story. Mistakes and corrections are part of the fabric of gleaning meaning from signs.

Our memories work this way, recreating experience from clues in the neurons. We do not record experience like a video camera. Every time you remember something, you retell the story to yourself. Every time it changes.