The Eternal Beginner

Recently, I've been thinking about my learning journeys in the wonderful world of Takemusu Iwama Aikido. In particular, I've been trying to understand the changes in my "learning methodology", for want of a better term. In other words, how do I actually manage to learn a technique, and how has that approach changed over time?

I could go on for days trying to explain this, but I'll try to summarise the main ideas here.

When I first started practising Aikido, I would try to learn a technique by thinking only of my own body movements. I would look at my sensei offering his right wrist, moving his right foot a little on the side, settle his hips, then turn 180 degrees and face the other way, before adjusting his left foot into hanmi. I would then try to replicate the exact movements, step by step, with clumsy results at first, but then progressing to make my moves smoother and more efficient. The whole process would be based on the mindset of "how do I move my body so that I end up in this or that position?".

I later figured that analysing my own would only be stage one (out of many) for learning a technique, and nowadays I try to learn a technique by going through as many stages as possible, as I'll shortly explain.

Stage two is when I start to look at my training partner's movements instead of mine. Different people have different body shapes, different statures, different degrees of mobility, and so on. It wouldn't make much sense to me to learn a technique through one sequence of my own body movement, and expect the same sequence of movements to work without fail on any training partner. Stage two would therefore be based on the mindset of "how do I move my body so that my training partner ends up in this or that position?".

Stage three is when I start considering the communion of the situation. It's not about my own body, or my training partner's. It's about the combination of both: what shapes they make, what balance they achieve, and so on. This is where my mindset goes somewhere along the lines of "how do I move my body to induce my training partner to move in such a way that we both end up in this or that position?".

The next stage is about direction and redirection of energy. This is when I usually focus on the "path of least resistance": if it's hard to move around my training partner in a particular way, then chances are it's the wrong way. For example, if my training partner is pushing, why should I push back? It's a lot easier to follow his/her lead and pivot around that energy vector, modifying (even if only slightly) the vector's components. This then leads my training partner to follow the new vector, so my mindset would then be "how do I move my body to redirect my training partner's energy in such a way that we end up in this or that position?".

I noted that there is a very clear similarity between the last two stages of training awareness, but there is also a very important different: the former is static, whilst the latter is dynamic. I have also noted that all of the above stages are still focused on my own body movements, albeit with very different mindsets, and I find this extremely interesting because, at the end of the day, that's what I think is the actual nature of a martial art: mind over body.

I am sure there are many more stages of training awareness, but that's pretty much where I am at the moment. For example, for anyone knowing this terminology, all of the above are my consideration on ki-hon forms. I haven't even started considering the type of mindset involved in ki-no-nagare forms. Who knows, maybe one day...

M.