Listening to the radio a while ago I heard some really great music.  It was jazz.  As I listened it occurred to me that here was someone who was simply playing musical scales.  Well, of course he was doing quite a lot with those scales: Improvisation.  But, nonetheless, it sounded essentially like he was simply playing scales.

I recently came across a piece online, that first appeared in the 1981 Spring Edition of Federation News.   Following are excerpts of the thoughts expressed by Yamada Sensei in that article:

“. . . Many people are interested in doing fancy movements or techniques.”

“ . . . Please remember that an advanced student doing more complicated or fancy movements is quite different from a relative beginner performing these movements. And this difference is obvious to an experienced Aikidoist.”

It’s “important . . . for a student to have . . . basic elements so that later on . . . if he or she wants to, he or she can perform the fancy movements.”

This led me to think about the basic, warm up exercises we do before every class.  Early in my career they appeared to be simple, traditional warm-up rituals.  We’ve been doing them forever, but I never got a clear explanation of their fundamental importance to the art.  When special guests came to teach at seminars, they started every class with their own version of them.  When Arikawa Sensei came to New York for a seminar in 1978, he spent nearly an hour with us practicing sitting down and standing up.  Yamada Sensei and all of the uchi deshi in New York Aikikai always do them with great conviction.  So, I assumed we did them as a warm-up.  They are, in fact, the basic movements of the art.  My senpais[1] were continually telling me so, but I was not advanced enough to appreciate this information.

After hearing the jazzman playing his scales I realized that these were the building blocks of the awesome sound patterns he was creating . . . out of these simple scales.  It also became clear to me then, that basic exercises are the building blocks of technique.  Eventually I learned that it was these movements that trained my body to be balanced and properly positioned to execute technique.

It then became clear to me that all of the beautiful movements we see our teachers and aiki-ancestors make are essentially made up of these simple, basic building blocks . . .  these innocuous little exercises we do before each of our classes.  By repeating these movements over the years we are imbedding basic movements into our nervous systems.  This enables us later to execute technique without having to think about essentials.

What about those techniques?  I have, in the past, mistakenly explained to curious others that one of the differences between Aikido and other arts, such as Karate, was that karateka practice kata while we always do techniques.  I had then developed only to the point at which I thought that technique was the beginning and end of Aikido.  I was relatively inexperienced and had jumped to an erroneous conclusion.  The techniques we practice repeatedly serve the same purpose for us as those kata do for practitioners of other arts.  If the basic exercises are the building blocks of technique, then techniques are the building blocks of aiki-waza.

I like to remind my students, as I have been reminded many times by my senpai, that the practice of technique is not an end in itself.  It is merely an intermediate step in the application of technique toward the realization of aiki-waza.

I was repeatedly told that, when in my practice I come to a point where movement stops or technique is broken, I must not stop.  I must allow something else to happen.  When practicing a technique, I believe it’s best to stick to the program.  Apply the basic scales to each technique until the technique can be executed effectively in each repetition; no two are the same.  If an impasse is reached then it’s clear that some other technique is called for, and eventually will just happen by itself.  This is the beginning of aiki-waza.

How did we learn to speak our first language of words?  If you watch an infant before s/he has the ability to speak, you may notice that s/he will be moving rhythmically as the parents have conversation.  The baby is learning the rhythm of the language.  Before long that baby understands some of the words and begins to have a vocabulary.  However, the baby will not be able to speak because s/he has not yet developed the dexterity, the fine motor coordination necessary to form words with her mouth, lips and tongue.

It’s the same with any complex behavior.  Whether it’s learning to walk or to run, to swim or to skate or to play the piano, we learn basic positions and movements.  We apply these to simple and complex technique, and only then are we able to improvise freely.

Practice well.

I was talking to my training partner the other day and the discussion led to “being in the moment”.   I added that training in Aikido is about being here (at the dojo) now.  Thinking back to that conversation, I reflected on the topic.  What exactly does “being in the moment” mean?

Being in the moment is a state of conscientiousness that is free of stress.  When we are in this state you are more creative, our thought processes are more active and we respond to challenges rather then react to them.

To get to this state, there are two core elements you need, awareness and response.  My dad always told me, “You must always be aware of what is going on around us.(awareness)”  This is a valuable lesson I learned growing up, but what my dad didn’t tell me was the second part of this lesson is the importance of processing what is going on around us (response).

Awareness and response go hand-in-hand.  Once an Aikidoka keys into this awareness, they are in a powerful state.  They reclaim their attention and can now direct it in purely constructive and creative ways.  Awareness is but the first step because we can only control those things that we are aware of.

Part two of being in the moment is response.  One of my favorite quotes comes from Zig Zigler, motivational speaker and author, “to respond is positive, to react is negative”.  At first read you would think, “what is he saying”? Respond and react are the same things, right?  Well, let’s look at this closely.

When we react, we are coming from a place of limitation.  This limitation is the result of direct experiences that have caused us to narrow our ability to see a situation for what it really is.  These direct experiences causes us to think we know what something is about and what it means to us (good/bad/indifferent), and then when we come upon that situation again we react with a pre-established, pre-defined action.

Reacting to a situation takes us out of the moment, there is no processing performed.  We are not responding to the situation.  We lose the first part of “being in the moment”, awareness. In our Aikido training, being aware and responding is important.  We say we react to an attack, but in reality we are training to respond to the attack.  We are being in the moment, in a state of awareness.  This is most evident in randori training.  Attacks come in all forms with no predefined order and our responses (techniques) are also not pre-established or scripted.

As we continue our Aikido development, let us stay aware of our surroundings and respond, not react, to the situations.  Let us “Be in the Moment.”

Rey N. Robles

Southern Maryland Aikido Center