Safety first!

05 Monday Oct 2026

Tags

Accidents, Aikido, Alignment, asia, Brutality, Budo, Economy, Ego, Endo sensei, Fear, Feelings, Happiness, Healing, health, Injuries, Integrity, japan, Kindness, Martial Arts, Mind, Seishiro Endo sensei

“A torturous lesson in physical terms
The only way some people learn
Stretching the body in every direction
Forcing the joints unnatural flexion”

Alexander Webster

Lately I have been writing more about the philosophical aspects of aikido in this blog. I prefer to not speak so much these types of things on the tatami, because our time there is precious, because it is the NOW. This is a better format to put things into perspective, and connect what we do to the rest of the world.

This time though, I am going to put my finger on some very physical and tangible themes: Various types of injuries in aikido, and strategies on how to avoid them.

We can basically divide them into two types of injuries. Accidents on one side, and long term effects on the other side. In both cases they are mostly consequences of mistakes. There is an element of random chance involved, as with all things, but if we are acting correctly, the probability for the damage is much lower than if we are careless.

I would first say that we should work on things based on two things:

Frequency/probability of that event occurring in our practice
The amount of expected damage in case it occurs

Getting a meteorite in the head would definitely max out the damage potential, but it is not very likely to happen, so it is not on our lists. On the opposite side, we will get minor scratches from your partner’s finger nails, some blue marks from some partners as they grab. It will happen, often, but it is a minor injury easily solved with tape, and we will practise the next hour.

Even though I have shed blood, and have a scar on the inside of my right wrist, from getting caught by someone’s wedding band on kote gaeshi (as the finger clenches the gap between metal and hand is biting), I count it as a not frequent injury (it happened to me only 3 times in more than 20 000 hours, various situations), and not serious. As soon as I was taped up, and blood was wiped up, I continued to practise. And yes, the fix is very easy for this one, so let’s study some more tricky ones, with higher frequency/probability, and greater damage potential.

We can also divide the injuries into different categories depending on who the victim is: Beginners and advanced practitioners have slightly different injury stats. People who practise every day and people who only practice a few hour per month also differ quite a lot. And there is the most frequently injured group who regularly almost don’t practise aikido, but then, during a seminar or for preparing for an examination does a short period of far more practice than regularly. These guys get hurt a lot!

Beginners very often have injuries to the shoulders, neck, collarbones, sometimes the head, from learning ukemi. These are mostly caused by too much stress on learning things quickly, not having enough attention from the teachers. AND when it happens, it is repeated! The same accident happens again and again, making it chronic. Fear reactions trigger the injury to happen again and again, and it becomes a circle. Patience, doing things step by step, enjoying the basic exercises and using diverse ways to build up the ukemi is a solution. But often it is down prioritized. Unfortunately many beginners never get past this, and they leave the aikido society before they find the solution, always associating aikido with the injuries they suffered before they stopped.

Photo from The Royal Children’s hospital in Melbourne

Also, different training societies have different statistics. People doing hard joint locks on each other, well, guess what, most people wear wrist protection when going to class. This one is also an easy fix. Just be kind to each other, and base the aikido on aikido, and not jiu jitsu techniques in the guise of aikido? But yes, this is probably a big one in the aikido world. However, not so big in the part of the aikido world I am most frequently in contact with.

Alignment of our body parts is a huge part of what we do. I would say that the principle integrity is a fundamental principle defining aikido, together with kindness and economy. Being fully aligned will make us able to receive a huge amount of pressure from our partner without receiving damage on our body.

I will try to stick to the general case, and it might not be the exact distribution of probability for just YOU. However, I guess most of these injury types are classical ones, which happens enough to be worthy of our attention.

Long term injuries

I guess the accidents are the most interesting situation, but let’s look at the long term wear injuries first. Hips are a frequent one, but I guess number one on this list is knees.

I would guess that alignment and not smashing the joints is an important factor, not counting the genetic factors. Some people are just simply more robust and can take a bit more before a problem arise.

We are practising on different types of tatami and floor. When it comes to smashing the joints, the properties of the tatami and floor is relevant for taking away the energy from the fall safely. Sometimes the floor beneath the tatami is a bigger factor than the tatami itself. We are talking long term. Tens of thousands of falls. In some dojos the tatami is lying directly on concrete. Even though the tatami helps us survive each fall, the concrete is not giving.

Then there is the other problematic tatami, the friction properties. Not enough friction is also an issue sometimes, where we slide and have accidents from slipping. However, high friction is far more common. This brings us to the alignment part.

Aligning the body is both an in the moment value and a longevity value. When we turn our body, as we do a lot in aikido, it is very important that the feet and knees are aligned during the turn. If the foot is stuck on the ground as we turn we are grinding the knee. This is not something we might notice the first 15 years, but the knee is not designed for turning. The knee is only supposed to extend and bend, never rotating. This is why spikes in the football shoes is causing every football player to have broken knees before they turn 35. This could also happen to us, if we let our feet stick to the ground like if we have spikes under our feet. If we have tatami with friction below our feet we should be super attentive about how we move our legs.

The tatami type with high friction is very often much cheaper than the smoother ones. They also have less potential for removing the big impact from hard falls. When our ukemi is fully developed, we can take care of that also, but I would say that good floor and good tatami is always on top of the wishlist for a dojo.

So let’s talk about the wear from smashing parts into the tatami during ukemi. We will do what we do. If we never practise something different, we will just keep doing what we are used to. There are many, many ways to do the falls in aikido. I would say that nothing is absolute correct and absolute wrong. However, some combinations of things makes problems for our body over longer periods of time. Now there are many ways to change this. My way is to always touch the tatami as if I were a cat: paws down, and gently. This requires practise. I find that it is worth it. A lot of people ask me about these things, but basically, once you understand a few basic points, what you need to do is practise, and no recipe I can write down will change it, unless we practise doing the falls softly, every time, every day.

There is also the opposite solution. Not falling at all. This takes away a huge part of the fun and a huge part of our investment in the art though. I would say that unless we are handicapped, or of an advanced age, it is better to find a way to do it than to abstain from this part of the practise. In our group we have several practitioners in their high seventies, approaching 80 year, and still doing some high falls. They are my idols, and I hope to be able to do it as well as them when I get their age.

Accidents

Now let’s look at the accidents. These are more easy to classify, because we know immediately that it happened, and what caused it. It usually has more than one cause. It is a bit like the rules of fire arms. We can break one rule and sometimes two and still survive. But if you break three rules you die. The reason it is built like this is that you should be able to live with these rules. We do make mistakes. If we make the mistake of assuming that the weapon is not loaded, and at the same time make the second mistake of having our finger inside the trigger guard, there is a chance that we will have an accidental discharge. However if we followed a third rule and kept the weapon in a safe direction, nobody will die even if we made two mistakes. I guess we should have the same logic in aikido. We should have to make more mistakes than one before an accident.

Collisions

This is probably the most common accident in the aikido society I have most contact with. Crashing with a wall or pillar could happen, but very often it is a collision between ukes. Sometimes an uke being thrown into a tori from a different group or a person waiting for their turn. This is both very common and the damage potential is high.

This is a very common and in most societies it is dealt with in a structured way. For the most part.

We hit the same spot every time, so everyone around us knows where we throw
We throw only parallel to each other, and to the same direction
We throw towards an endpoint without ambiguity, wall, pillar, or huge amount of distance to the next group
We always go forwards when taking ukemi (this one is usually where people divert from the common rules)

The last one is usually where the mistakes happen, and people are getting injured. Falling backwards is common in aikido. We even do it for the basic tests. It is in my opinion very dangerous. It is even worse if we fall backwards and in a different direction from what tori is intending. In which case we should not be surprised if we are surprised on our blind way down to the tatami.

When falling backwards we are 100% trusting tori to check that there is clear space where we go. Sometimes the situation change after the throw happens, and our neighbors on the tatami breaks one of the other rules + also sending someone backwards, there we go.

When we follow the same advice as when we are tori, and never move backwards, we avoid these problems. We can see where we go, and can adjust if something is in our way.

There is an opposition in relation to MMA when it comes to where we place the back of our head. In MMA the partner is the threat. They will look for a possibility to kick us in the back of the head when we are down. In aikido the crowd around is the threat. They might kick us in the back of the head, unknowingly, during their ukemi. I have seen it happen. I guess we should position the back of our head accordingly. It is safe if facing the wall or pillar, meaning we are looking into the room. It is also safe if the back of our head is facing the partner, so we observe the crowd around us to the sector away from our partner. In MMA it is different. We place the legs towards the partner in a guard, because they are the ones who most likely will kick us in the head.

Weapon accidents

These accidents are similar to the collision accidents in some ways, but less common maybe, but the damage potential is still intermediate so it is worth mentioning.

The alignment of the groups are important, as most of the accidents I have seen and been part of is people hitting a person in a different group. There are always the odd group thinking that it is brilliant to practice in a direction perpendicular to all other groups. This logic is more common with weapons than when throwing, but the consequences are very similar. When we keep our eyes on our partner and in our kamae have our weapon behind us (wakki kamae), we don’t know what is there.

We need to develop an awareness about the space around us. So when nothing else is moving we should be able to perform the kata without checking, and without touching the pipes, lights, or beams in the ceiling, the walls or pillars. This is a skill that is very useful also for our aikido in general, but it is fundamental when practising in a crowded room. We need to check what is behind us before we start, and then we should know what is there. If a group is going in the perpendicular they are sabotaging this part for every group they are intersecting with.

The awareness about how much space a move will take is fundamental to avoid hitting the person in the group next to us, or the person behind us.

Hakama related injuries

This is the one that I think is least discussed than any of the frequent issues. In my experience it accounts for almost a third of the serious injuries in the aikido society I am most frequently in contact with. Despite of this, it is mostly presented as a mystery why the injury happened. It was a product of bad luck. No explanation of the causality was represented.

I remember when I started using a hakama I saw that these injuries happened, some less serious, some somewhat serious. I actually stopped wearing the hakama until I found out how it happens, and how to avoid it. However, this was a product of my own study. No teacher has ever taught me about these parts.

The accidents happens in slightly different ways, but in every single case I have seen or experienced it was the front leg, not the back leg, of uke getting trapped in tori’s hakama. It can happen both during mae ukemi and high falls (tobi ukemi). The higher speed it is the more severe the consequences are.

The injuries I have observed are:

Hyperextended hamstrings
Broken knees
Spinal prolapse
Broken teeth
Broken nose
Broken collar bone
Broken shoulder
Broken toes
Concussion
Twisted ankle (of the tori actually!!!)

In the case of the twisted ankle, the weight difference was actually so big in between the tori and the uke that instead of hyperextending the leg of uke, which in my opinion is the most common result, tori was jerked out of position and the ankle was injured.

What causes this injury to happen: The space immediately behind the front heel of uke, around 10 – 15 centimeters, tori should not have their legs. The hakama extends forward and out to the sides some centimeters, and if we put up our hakama it can extend more. We need to know where our hakama is. If we are leaving this to chance, an accident WILL happen eventually. The front leg of uke is usually far away if we perform the kata correctly.

Katas where this injury frequently happens:

Kote gaeshi
Kaiten nage
Kokyu nage (including ikkyo, nikyo, sankyo -nage)
Juji garami
Other katas with big mistakes involved

The ones I mentioned are where only smaller mistakes is enough for this to happen. When we are tori NEED to KNOW where we place our legs. This is extremely difficult though. Most of us have no idea where the legs are, until we spend time studying that part.

Some teachers have spoken about injuries of the back leg getting caught. I have never seen this case myself. That does not mean that it could not happen, but I have never seen it. Their advice is to not kick with the back leg during ukemi. I guess that would solve such a situation. However, without kicking, if tori is standing with the hakama in the area directly behind the front leg of uke, the heel WILL catch. This is the case I am discussing here, because this is the one I have seen happen, many, many times.

Let’s list also the different situations where I saw it happen, in order of frequency

Tori is standing in the wrong position, uke’s front leg is caught
Tori was originally in the correct position, but jumped forward after the throw, same result as above
Tori was doing the throw correctly, but then turned to the next uke and flipped the hakama around, away from their body, causing the poor uke to get caught
A bystander from a different group is standing with their back turned, or even walking backwards into where the front leg of the uke will go up.
In group practice, a partner from the same and a neighbor group is returning to the position after being thrown, and when walking by is flipping the hakama while stepping so that they catch the front leg of uke being thrown at that moment.

Basically it is an easy fix: Just don’t put your leg where it should not be.

The reality is that a minority of the aikido world knows this, so you will be in the situation where people will try to throw you in a dangerous way.

Sometimes we can fix it as uke.

Uke moves to a different location prior to the fall, to clear the area immediately behind the front leg
Uke uses a free hand to brush the hakama aside, and hold it in place while falling
Uke jumping to a safe spot and taking alternate ukemi to save ourselves from a nasty injury

There are solutions, but mostly, tori is responsible. It is a little bit like getting shot by accident. It is mostly the person with the firearm being responsible for the accident.

This injury is the reason why I wrote this blog post. It is a great risk to our health, which is a bit under discussed in aikido society. I would say it is a high percentage of the injuries, and it is very serious injuries.

Tatami related injuries

This one is a small amount, but it is still there, and most of us will at some point have this injury during our aikido life.

I have already mentioned tatami with bad floor below, in combination with hardness or lack of energy absorbing qualities. And I have mentioned tatami with problem with the friction. Both too high and not enough friction can cause problems, but it is much more frequent and severe with high friction.

Now let’s look at a different aspect of tatami injuries: gaps in the tatami.

Sometimes gaps are difficult to avoid, especially during seminars. However, in our home dojo, it is beneficial to try to find a solution where the tatami fit together perfectly, and we can safely move on it without risk of getting stuck in the holes. Life is life, and it will be what it will be. So to avoid breaking toes in the tatami gaps, our first protection is our awareness.

How we move our legs is very important to keep ourselves from kicking into tatami edges or stepping into holes. Again I would take the cat as an ideal. I know that there is a large part of the aikido society who prefers to slide the feet along the tatami. However, I was taught a different way from Endo sensei, which he says he got from Kisaburo Osawa sensei. He lifts the legs more than traditionally in aikido, however more closely to how I learned from Kashima Shin Ryu.

I guess there are benefits and disadvantages with every way. However, for me, since I changed my way of moving the legs, the tatami gaps has not been bothering me, so maybe this way is better for this aspect?

Safety

For me safety is the number one priority in aikido. I always search for ways to do things with less risks for accidents, and more long term longevity for both myself and everybody around me. If we have a problem with our health preventing us from practising we will not develop. We miss the hours. If we find a way to keep practising without any risk of further damage to our injured part it is great, but it is definitely a priority to not get hurt.

My second priority is entertainment. With the same logic, if it is not enriching in our lives, if it is not fun, we will also not do it. I don’t believe in forcing ourselves to do aikido. Nobody does it, long term, because they force themselves. The people who don’t have fun will do it less, and then stop doing it. When we are not on the tatami we are not developing. So safety and enjoyment are the most fundamental parts of the practice.

Now I have spoken a lot about the negative parts of our art. Damage which happens to our body as a consequence of when we make mistakes. Mostly we are never safe from making mistakes. And just as with the firearms rules, one mistake is still relatively safe, as long as we don’t make two mistakes at the same time. We have a very low frequency of injuries and accidents in aikido, compared to almost every other activity. The funny part is that most aikidokas are injured when we have been skiing in the mountains or something. Which is consequent with the logic of people get hurt when we do activities we normally don’t do.

There are other types of injuries which I did not mention, of course. However, in my opinion the biggest contributions comes from hakama injuries and people colliding when going backwards. It seems to me the greatest potential for making the tatami more safe.

Practise safely, and enjoy your keiko! Aikido makes people happy!

The Ocean, The Lake & The River

02 Friday Oct 2026

Posted by aikifreak in Aikido

≈ Comments Off on The Ocean, The Lake & The River

Tags

Aikido, Budo, Ego, Fear, Happiness, Healing, life, mental-health, Mind, Mindfulness, philosophy, Psychology, Roppokai Daito Ryu Aiki Jitsu, Seishiro Endo, Seishiro Endo sensei, writing

“I dare not advance an inch,
But would rather retreat a foot.”

Lao Tzu; Tào Té Ching; from chapter 69; translation by Stefan Stenudd

The past decade or so I have been pondering a lot about the paradox of moving without moving. One way to look at the situation is that we can’t move back, nor can we move forward (because we have a partner in front of us who can’t move back). However, in a different perspective, we are moving.

Chapter 69 of Tào Té Ching speaks of strategy of a battle if you take it literally. Most of us will hopefully never be inflicted with the role of leading a battle where people are hurting each other with swords, or other weapons. However, in my opinion there is much more to be taken from this text than the strategy for a general.

In the translations inch and foot are usually used to replace the units 寸 /cun and 尺 /chi. There is a relation of 1:12 between inch and foot, and 1:10 between cun and chi. I guess the recommendation of strategy is to rather than advancing a distance, to retreat a distance 10 times further. For me this at first sounded like running away?

From Fargegaten in Stavanger August 2026

There are a lot of situations where we need to move a leg backwards in aikido. However, very often, if we let our total move backwards we will lose our position. Walking backwards is just not a good idea. Similarly we can never walk forward, because we have a partner in front of us, and unless they are sleeping, or at a much lower level than ourselves, they will not accept going backwards.

At the same time we have a different situation where we are going somewhere with our partner, and we are obviously moving. What is the difference between this and the situation where we can’t move forward or backwards? Why is this possible, and correct, and why was it not in the other perspective of the same situation. Why is it different in this setting? We can feel it. We know it is like this, because of experience, but how do we put it into words?

From Monika’s dojo in Koblach, Austria, September 2026

Our mind is basically run by two forces, and two forces only: fear and desire. We are either scared of something and we are triggered to action by it, or we want something and are triggered to action by this. When we analyse this more deeply we find that fear and desire actually is the exactly same concept. There are no difference between the two. Just like a magnetic field can be observed by measuring how other electrically charged particles will react to them, and so on. We happen to call one positive and one negative, but it is interchangable as long as we are consequent with all positives and all negatives. The names mean nothing in reality, as long as we see the polarity. Fear of not getting what we want is a fear, but it is also desire, and vice versa.

I guess that the sentence about retreating instead of advancing is a warning against the natural tendency of the mind. The mind wants to advance. Even in fear actually, because I believe that the battle where this quote is most useful, is not a battle with a single front. Not even about being surrounded, not only to all directions, but also in more dimensions than we can observe in the physical world. No matter where we run we will advance in that direction, and we might not se the enemy host in front of us as we do it. We will run blindly into a trap. The same goes if we believe we are advancing. We are not aware of the real enemy.

After the Saturday keiko, JuShinKan Aikido in Stavanger, August 2026

Who is the real enemy? And what does it mean to retreat, when the enemy lines are in front of us no matter which direction we choose to face, even up and down. Nowhere to run. What does retreat mean?

I remember there was a period of some years when Seishiro Endo Shihan was starting every class with some exercises with mainly shomen uchi. The exercises had uke putting pressure on tori, by moving precisely and without telegraphing movements prior to the cut. The exercise was happening before the cut happened, as tori was waiting for the event, calmly, seeing the whole field of vision. Attention rose. Both as uke and as tori. We started noticing smaller and smaller things in ourselves, and in our partners.

Endo sensei spoke about two different modes of using our eyes: The Ken Vision, which was focused in the centre of the field of vision (what we usually use in everyday life) and the Kan Vision, where we see everything equally in all of our field of vision. In this exercise we practise to avoid falling back into Ken Vision every time we feel the pressure.

I have an idea now that the retreat may actually not mean any physical movement in space, but rather a stepping back mentally, just as we did in those exercises at Endo sensei’s seminars, to see more widely. To perceive the situation totally. To be aware about what is there, and also see what the other parts are doing. We can see more clearly what the other wants. However, the main thing is that we can see our own fear/desire clearly. Once it is a creature moving visibly in the lighted room, it is often clear to know what it is we should be doing, or not doing. Otherwise we will be doing whatever our childish mind is triggered into. And there can never be any intelligence.

These concepts are relevant for both uke and tori, but let’s stick with the tori role just now, for the cause of making the text shorter. We have the situation where we are in a problem point, with our partner. It could be at the beginning of tai no tenkan, with a firm katate dori by an experienced partner, or at the point of ikkyo, where we almost always are triggered into pushing our partner. How do we use the “retreat” Lao Tzu spoke of? I remember having been told many times by teachers to avoid the problem by changing to a direction not blocked by the partner and coming back stronger. Sure, that might solve the situation on the tatami, unless the partner is experienced. But with an experienced and intelligent partner the problem will be still present after our dance around the porridge. Also, we neglected to study the situation we are there to study, which will have relevance outside the dojo when we are in a conflict situation we can’t run away from. Anyway, unless we escape the exercise again by making excuses, blaming our partner, we still have a chance to study.

Post keiko photo at the seminar in Koblach, Austria, September 2026

I guess what I found most useful is to widen my field of vision. Without moving backwards, I step back and observe my body from the eagle perspective: I can see that I am bent forward, my shoulders are tense, my legs are off line, the knees are stiff, the weight are unintelligently distributed between the legs, my face is tense and my eyes has lost their freedom of a natural flow and my breathing has been perturbed. On the next level, I will notice the same kind of things about my mind. By retreating inside, I can see a wider field. I can through observing my own mind, see also my partner’s mind. I can observe the whole battlefield.

The line preceding the one about retreat is: “I dare not be like the host, But would rather be like the guest.” This one connects very well with a few lines from chapter 15 describing an ancient sage (masters of old): “Cautious, like crossing a river in the winter. Wary, as if surrounded by strangers. Dignified, like a guest.” It seems to fit together as one logic.

Then of course in the end we need to enter, because this is the form of the kata we are performing. Movement is part of the kata, the physical form we are doing our exercises in. However, if it is happening in accordance with the Tào it will not be an action done by us in the role of tori. Nor will it be done by uke. The art of sailing does not involves rowing with oars. The art is to use the wind, even if it should not blow in a favorable direction. Tori are in charge of setting up the situation in a way that the action can happen. Uke can also do this, if the situation is so that Tori does not have that level yet, but it is primarily, in my opinion, the job of tori, to do this part.

Post keiko photo in Genkan Aikido Dojo in Bratislava, Slovakia, in September 2026

So there is the situations where we are in a (constructed) conflict situation with our partner. In the keiko, we call this the meeting. We are meeting ourselves on the battlefield, and we are surrounded on all sides, below and above, by ourselves. No matter which way we run to escape we will advance against the host of ourselves. This is the situation. Advancing, running away. The same action. And it does not go well. Then there is the option of the retreat Lao Tzu spoke of, to widen our view. Looking at the battlefield. To find the openings in the siege lines. To send our brave peace makers, to make peace with our own mind. Once we are at peace with ourselves, we will be able to finally display intelligence.

On the outside we will be able to feel the partner. We are in the lake. We can together drift towards the river, and we place ourselves in the flow of the water and suddenly we are moving together towards the end of the kata. However, it should be tori doing the positioning which makes this situation possible. And if tori can’t, uke will have to do it. Or we will be stuck in the lake forever (actually there is nothing wrong with that, in the dojo, as long as we have patience to keep holding on and not panic).

The situation in the river is different. Now the water is flowing down river. Uke and tori both are going down river. We should of course place ourselves intelligently as we flow down river together. When we are in the conflict mode, we look at each other. Even in ushiro, when tori has her/his back turned to uke, the inner eyes should be at the partner in this stage. We are meeting. The moment it changes to the flowing down river -mode, we should keep our eyes downriver, where we are going, and centre our body parts in the direction we are traveling. In some katas we are returning to a new lake, where we are connecting again, solving a new situation. Eyes on each other. Then the new river flows on as soon as we have found the positions where the water will bring us on towards the sea.

Of course my metaphor sounds like random drifting in the water, or blowing in the wind. But we could as easily have used wind as the image. We have sails and a rudder, and we can sail wherever we want, if we have the technology to use the wind and our equipment to get where we need to go. However, it will be the water or the wind, depending on the metaphor, we choose, to bring us to our destination.

Anyway, these ideas are just mind experiments between classes. The real stuff is happening in the dojo when we do our keiko. This is where we develop the technology. I was just a bit curious about the second line of Chapter 69 of Tào Té Ching. It did not make sense, for a long time in the study that I am doing, but now it does.

Bratislava departure tai no tenkan, September 2026

And to give my opinion on some questions I have received from the previous post: What is the Enemy?

I guess I look at the concept Enemy as an illusion created by the mind. To gain clarity and not be fooled by this illusion we need to increase our awareness about what is. In another way we can look at our own unawareness as the enemy. This is what is causing all the wars and violence in the world. We are ripples in the water. Waves in the ocean. But we are all part of the Ocean.

Aikido is one of the arts where we are working/studying how to avoid this situation. But as it is an illusion, the concept of Enemy will never be clearly defined. There are other arts also working towards Peace. Meditation, Yoga, and others to greater or smaller extent. For me aikido is the one that seems like my natural path to pursue. I procrastinate doing aikido when I should be doing other things (and maybe I should not even do those things?), but I never procrastinate to avoid doing aikido. And then I know that the path is clear.

Enjoy your keiko! Aikido makes people happy!

Concerning friendship and enmity

12 Sunday Jul 2026

Posted by aikifreak in Aikido

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

Aikido, Budo, Conflicts, Ego, Fear, Feelings, Friendship, Happiness, Healing, health, Internal Development, Lao Tzu, life, mental-health, Mind, Mindfulness, Psychology, Spiritual Practice, Tachi Dori, Tanto dori, Táo Té Ching

“To the good I am good,
and to the evil I am good also;
thus all become good“

Lao Tzu, Tào Té Ching, from chapter 49, translation by Aleister Crowley

Bratislava Theatre tai no tenkan with Dominika in July 2026

I remember an MMA match where, somehow, one competitor had a very unlikely accident. He stepped weirdly and broke his ankle at the first seconds of the match. When the guy fell down in pain, his opponent jumped up on the wall of the cage, celebrating his victory. I guess it would have required a lot of practise and hard work to cause our MMA opponent to step wrong and get a TKO by referee decision, without even touching them. However, I am guessing that it was random chance, and no results of any skill from his part except for maybe using a voodoo doll the night before? So what was he celebrating? And why? I guess there is money and prestige in the situation, even though no skill, whatsoever, of his part was involved?

A lot of aikido clubs and aikido societies use the selling phrase “no competition” to describe aikido, and already in the next sentence they invalidate their own words. Usually by saying something about attacking and defending. One example could be the also overused “using the attacker’s own energy against them” or equivalent. So first we say that we don’t compete. And then describe our strategy to win. So we did not really think that thing through to the end?

In aikido we are all equal. We change roles after 4 repetitions. The interesting part is that whatever we do in one role, we need to deal with ourselves in the next round, because 50 percent of the time we are in the other situation. Any athletic solutions will only solve our problem against less athletic partners. If we do it when we ourselves are in the other role, we have increased the athleticism for both parts, which is great, of course, because we are getting more fit. However, we are no nearer to finding the solution to our problem with the kata. So all this about winning and defeating attack and defence does in my opinion not belong in our vocabulary. We don’t attack (although a part of the role of uke goes by this name) and we do not defend. We do solve puzzles with our body and mind of a martial nature, but to find the solutions our relationship to the partner is a key factor.

The Astrid Lindgren Statue with Sanda and Jorma in May 2026

I used to do shoto kan karate do, where the idea is that one single block should break the arm of the person we block. There would also be a counter strike, but the arm should not be functional after our block. We used to practise this by endless repetitions of the movement, up to 30 minutes, slowly at first, fast against the end. We were using pads to get impact practise, and we did it, exact, on our partner, without touch, to know exactly where to aim to destroy the function of the arm with one strike.

I remember finding clearness in my early aikido years, when Urban Aldenklint shihan explained to me that the martial meaning of one of the blocks we did in a jo form: we aim for the partner’s thumb, not the jo! And suddenly I understood that yes, we have this point of aim, but make sure not to touch our friend’s thumb. I prefer this idea to hitting jo against jo at 90 degrees causing a damage to both jos with every repetition. However, by aiming for the jo instead of the thumb we have statistically less risks for broken thumbs if anyone is inattentive. Still, I find it a defining detail to know the real lines, the construction of the kata, instead of dumbing our art down to allow for less a focused practice.

While teaching nikyo, Jan Nevelius shihan has lately been giving the metaphor of finding the hole with the golf ball. You know, if we just stomp hard on the ball on the grass we could probably push the ball into the ground, making a hole, but this is not the sport of golf. Likewise, we could probably with leverage and timing, break the partner’s arm in nikyo, at least if uke is sleeping, or is much smaller, or less experienced. However, the game consists of finding the hole. Anatomically correct movement, for function, for both partners.

With Lenka and Tilman in Myyrmäki in June 2026

I have observed the evolution of aikidokas in many countries over a little bit of time now. And I find that people who are clear about what we are doing, are developing more quickly than people who are confused about the purpose of our art. In my opinion we are friends, practising aikido together. We are not trying to hurt each other. I mean, I prefer to aim for the thumb, but never touch it, rather than hitting somewhere else with less precision. When I do my kata correct it requires me to express gentleness towards my partner. If I am sloppy about the technical details, there is no need for gentleness, because technical difficulties caused by my inaccuracies earlier in the kata will stand in the way of the function of the movements.

Most of the time the differences between the different states of relationship to our partner are very subtle. However there is a difference, especially when it comes to tanto dori, or tachi dori. I prefer to practise carefully, with a sharp knife, rather than using only a wooden stick and do violent things with it. My partner should be safe, as well as myself, during all parts of the kata. There should be no risk in the structure of the correct movement. If there is a risk I would find a different way, a year more, 50 years more, does not matter. If I can’t do it with a knife, slowly, with a friend, doing exactly what I do with the stick, I would not do it. Shiho nage ending with the blade on my friend’s throat is not something I would consider acceptable. In my opinion tanto dori is a way to refine our katas, and not exercises in knife fighting.

Sometimes we move too much as uke, sometimes we don’t move when we should. Both are a problem. The saying that I don’t have to move, so I stay, is a bit like sticking the head in the sand. Sometimes there is a train coming, and we have the chance to step away from the tracks with a gracious movement. However, yes, as some people say, “no I don’t have to move yet”, but once their integrity is gone, it is not a martial arts any more, and we have to take care of them to make sure they don’t get hurt. Of course we should take care of our friend, but we should make sure we don’t make the same mistakes ourselves.

The youth group teachers at Vanadis Aikido Club March 2026

We have the other extreme. We tend to move too early, and too much. Habits are very tricky to get rid of. Sometimes we are bending over, or taking steps because we did the same motion over and over and we don’t move because we should, but because we are programmed to, not from the situation, but from memory of the motion we have been repeating mindlessly for years. We should move based on the situation. We should continuously seek the perfect position for the moment we are in. If our partner moves too much, it is still an exercise for us as tori, to be able to solve it anyway, helping our partner to develop, without criticizing their way.

We raise the bar for each other, by developing ourselves in both roles, we open for development of a higher level for our partner on the opposite role when we are practising together. In my opinion it does not matter if we are practising a strike that will destroy or kill, or if we practise aikido, the way we perform the practice is what matters. If we treat our partner with respect, as an equal, no matter what their attitude towards us is, I find that things happen, and I realize new things.

The interesting part is that every time I meet a more hostile partner which tries to cause injury to me, I develop by finding ways to naturally ensure that the injury not possibly can happen in that specific way. An example is in kote gaeshi, if we have a partner who tries to break our wrist, we can enforce our position by using the other arm to create a triangle, connecting our wrist to our shoulder by an extended arm, making it practically impossible for anyone to bend our wrist, at all. This will help our partner connect to our centre so that they can do kote gaeshi, but no matter how hard they twist they can never hurt our wrist, because when they do, all of our body will move naturally as in kote gaeshi, but our arm will never come to an exposed position. This part is tori’s job, but if tori does not do it, uke have to do it for them.

“The Swedish National Team” (without a Swedish person) performing embukai in Ostrava June 2026

This is how it is possible for experienced aikidokas to practise with people with no experience at all. We always have the potential for development. If the partner can’t do it, we have to do that part for them, and that is sometimes much more challenging than just doing it from the role we normally have when doing that part. Most of the time we develop more in these situations than when we have a far superior partner solving our problems for us. Solutions we find ourselves are usually understood at a deeper level than solutions we got from a teacher, served on a silver plate.

Of course, we should not fall into the habit of doing the other partner’s job all the time. However, if they show no understanding for the concept, if we want to keep the principle, or the health of our wrist, we have to do it for them. We should always appreciate the opportunity for failing, and search for the fractions of failure, always. As soon as we can sense the small disturbances of our mind, we will be able to clean them up. Loss is 50 % of life. We receive skills, we receive knowledge, we receive possessions, and we are going to have to let them go, all of them, before the end. And in my experience, loss is where the potential is for development lies. And it is preferable to study this in aikido, before life forces us to deal with it anyway, without preparation (health problems, financial problems, getting fired or dumped, old age and loss of abilities and so on). There is a 100% probability that we will lose it all eventually. It is just the matter of time.

The Swedish group in Helsinki in April 2026

In our relation to the partners where we are developing these things, I find that the better the relationship is, even with the unfriendly few, we have greater potential for growth. I have found that it gets easier and easier the more hours of experience we have on the tatami. However, this aspect of the art is not apparent, unless we are looking for it. I am deeply impressed by people who keep practising, daring to keep living on the tatami, even after growing up. When I myself one day will grow up, if I ever do, I would like to become one of those, having only friends, everywhere, and out there on the tatami, with them, always.

Enjoy your keiko! Aikido makes people happy!

As above, so below

23 Thursday Apr 2026

Posted by aikifreak in Aikido

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Aikido, Budo, Ego, Fear, Happiness, Healing, Hellfire Missiles, Martial Arts, mental-health, Mind, Mindfulness, Nuclear Weapons, Politics, Psychology, Roppokai Daito Ryu Aiki Jitsu, War

𝕱𝖎𝖌𝖍𝖙𝖎𝖓𝖌 𝖋𝖔𝖗 𝕻𝖔𝖘𝖘𝖊𝖘𝖘𝖎𝖔𝖓
𝕳𝖆𝖛𝖎𝖓𝖌 𝕮𝖔𝖓𝖙𝖗𝖔𝖑
𝕺𝖚𝖗 𝕻𝖗𝖎𝖓𝖈𝖎𝖕𝖆𝖑 𝕺𝖇𝖘𝖊𝖘𝖘𝖎𝖔𝖓
𝕽𝖎𝖛𝖆𝖑𝖗𝖞
𝕬𝖓𝖉 𝕽𝖊𝖙𝖗𝖎𝖇𝖚𝖙𝖎𝖔𝖓
𝕯𝖊𝖆𝖙𝖍
𝖙𝖍𝖊 𝖔𝖓𝖑𝖞 𝕾𝖔𝖑𝖚𝖙𝖎𝖔𝖓

– 𝕵𝖊𝖋𝖋 𝕳𝖆𝖓𝖓𝖊𝖒𝖆𝖓

The World today

The world today seems like even more violent than 10 years ago? We seem to float back to the horrors of the past world wars, and towards barbaric history further into the past. Humans have never been able to keep our noses clean. For 10 000 years of recorded history we have been killing each other. Defining someone on the other side of the river as “The Others” and antagonising them, and finding ways to outsmart and kill them. This is of course insanity. Unfortunately it is the natural insanity of the human mind.

Politicians are allowed to follow this insanity unchecked, because people are scared and greedy. Fear and desire in one stinking mix of the nature of being a human being.

Normal people are in these days travelling to foreign countries to rape and pillage and destroy people’s homes. I will not name nationalities. This has nothing to do with nationalities, but it has all to do with the mind a the human animal. The species we are. We have a problem, and we have not been able to fix it during these thousands of years. The insanity of the criminals, the guys we lock up in prisons, to protect society, is not the problem. The insanity of the normal people is what is destroying our world.

Seasons in the Abyss, released by Slayer in 1990. The quote at the top is from the refrain for Expendable Youth.

Do we need to learn how to defend ourselves against this evil that is threatening us? On the contrary: that is what our problem have been in the first place, for thousands of years. We always want to find things to do to others to protect ourselves by hurting them. We are always searching for ways to dominate. We are always researching ways to make more powerful weapons.

This is also influencing martial arts. However, there is not a single martial arts out there where we can learn something without ourselves being subjected to what we are doing. We want to kick people? Well, guess what? Our partner will kick us? Do we want to strangle people? Well, guess what? Our partner will strangle us? Right?

So no. Defence is not the trick. Aikido is the most extreme for this. We went so far away from street fighting and self defence that we actually lost most of the recruitment potential because after all, most people think like people think: “having control, our principal obsession”. How many popular movies or games are built on violence? Additionally, some aikidokas have been downright lying about what we do in aikido, so we can blame ourselves for the problems with being called McDojo, Bullshido, or the Stockholm Ballet.

Thermobaric weapons. Photo by the Lieber Institute

Classification of our study

Aikido is such a huge field of study that we have to choose which of the subjects to put more emphasis on, and which to touch more lightly. We might not have capacity to work on them all. I found that my area of greatest interest is aiki age and aiki sage.

This is my explanation model for every kata in our art. We enter, and there is a partner in front of us, so to avoid pushing into our partner, we need to pass them. We can pass above or below, left or right, or diagonally, combining the horizontal and vertical axises of movement. This is how I myself would explain, when asked, how any given kata works.

I guess a different option would be just being in the correct position for maximum force. This is also a quality. But 50 % of the time we are in the other role. Then we are also in the correct position for maximum force, so it does not solve the problem with the technique. Being faster or stronger than our partner does not lead anywhere, because half the time we are in the other role. This is why, for me, the passing movements are how the road goes on, beyond learning how to dominate our partner.

Photo by Smithsonian magazine. Castle Romeo, 11 megaton nuke.

In the world of politics it is the same. We see a lot of problems happening in the world, all the time, and in this decade it seems to be even more problems than the previous decade. If we are in the mode of domination and defence we are always going to cause problems. The problems in the dojo is manageable. However, the problems with politicians kills and destroys, and cause mayhem worldwide. Why do we let them do it? Well, because we ourselves are run by fear and desire. We need a higher level of technology to have peace.

The Art of Peace

Aikido is the Art of Peace, according to Morihei Ueshiba, the founder of our art. He just happened to start calling it that after his country was being hit by two nuclear bombs. I wonder if there could be a connection? He told in an interview that aikido came after the war. I just started thinking that it made sense. Earlier what he was doing went by a different name, “Aiki Budo”. I guess the forms did not change that much at that exact point. Over his lifetime he naturally changed the forms gradually. But this name change, to “Aikido”, maybe marks a change of mental state?

These days I am not a huge fan of reading about aikido, or watching videos. I find that it is better to do aikido than watching or reading. However, I had ten years of my life where I was only reading and watching videos. When I was living in a place where there was no aikido, in my youth, that was all I could do.

Photo by We are the mighty. “Don’t worry. Be happy. Unless you are the target.”

When I actually started practising, it was sometimes hard to unify the ideas I had in the back of my mind with what we were actually doing. I started in a student club, and my teachers had a few years of experience, but let’s face it: aikido is an art that takes tens of thousands of hours until we start seeing the perspective. So sometimes the idea of aikido is a thin red line, but we do what we are able to do, and find our way towards this ideal, hour by hour in our practise.

Daito Ryu Aiki-Jujitsu Roppokai

Aiki age and aiki sage are very seldom explained in aikido. These are kihon from a different martial arts called Daito Ryu Aiki-jujitsu Roppokai. Literarily it means aiki up and aiki down. The problem with the names are that it signifies where our partner go, and not where we go. So in aiki age uke goes up. In aiki sage uke goes down. This means that tori will go opposite from where uke is going. This causes a pedagogical problem, because we very often think, and go in the direction our partner will go. This will cause problems.

We have the same problem in every aikido kata. Very often our mind, and our body will go where uke should go. So if we want the partner to go down, we ourselves are thinking down, and our body, very often starting with the head, is going down. We will feel the problem immediately. When we are leading the partner down, we already have to be below the partner, and from that position, we will pass the partner on our way up, and our partner will flip to being below.

This is very counterintuitive. It is difficult to do, because the natural processes in our mind is conditioned to do the opposite. The flip side to this effect is that if done correctly, it looks fake when we look at it! Of course, the YouTube commenters can’t be taken seriously, because they think we are doing something entirely different from what we are doing (most of them think that we are fighting or competing while we in reality are cooperating), but there is also this effect. It looks fake because if done correctly there is no effort. As in tào, if they did not laugh loudly about it, it would not be tào (from chapter 41 in Tào Té Ching).

Photo from Military.com. AGM-114 Hellfire.

Let’s take a look at aiki age. Aiki sage will be the same, but the opposite direction. It is so simple that there are no tricks, and that is why it is so valuable. It is even more simple and fundamental than tai no tenkan. Actually, I would argue that aiki age and aiki sage are constituents, or ingredients, in tai no tenkan. And please don’t confuse simple and easy.

Basically the way we practise aiki age we start like suwari waza kokyu ho. It starts in seiza for both partners and the grab is ryote dori. At the starting point tori and uke should be at the same level of height. The challenging part is to make the shift happen where tori enters below uke, and uke enters above tori, without having any loss of integrity. For tori the challenge is to never arrive at a point where lifting is necessary. For uke the challenge is to never arrive at a point where we are hanging on the partner. So you see. The goals of uke and tori are one and the same. Not lifting and not being lifted, but shifting positions. And no, there are no ways to explain how to do this right. We just need the thousands of hours of practice on it. It is not a technique. It is a study, for life.

Aiki age and aiki sage in our daily practise

We can observe ourselves when we see a video of our kata: Do we go in the opposite direction from where we want our partner to go (correct), or do we unintentionally enter where we want out partner to enter(incorrect)? Very often our head goes in the direction we try to throw our partner. It looks bad, and we will have a difficulty. The partner feels heavy, in this case. If we do it correctly our partner feels light, and it does not depend on body size.

It is possible to do the same when doing suburi with bokken. As the bokken falls, our head should rise. We stretch our neck as the sword comes down. The sword descends, our head ascends. This makes our suburi feel light.

I know there exists the opposite theory as well, having all of the body going down when the sword goes down, to create more power. It is nothing wrong with that. Similarly in aikido there is the logic of when throwing the partner, pushing the partner out of the way with maximum force, and naturally the head and body is moving the way we are forcing the partner out of our way. It is nothing wrong with it.

However, it is always nice to be aware of what we are trying to achieve and which principle we are studying, at all times. Lifting heavy weights makes us stronger. Creating lightness, is a different way. Both ways exist. My passion lies in one, and not in the other. Hence I have chosen my teachers accordingly, and spend my time working on the way I find more meaningful.

It is an exercise building body technology. It is not a technique. The goal is to build our technology, to be used in the more complex katas. Then in their turn we should be doing the more complex katas also, with this goal of building body technology. And the idea is that by working on the body we are also building our mind technology. Our mind technology is what is going to improve our life outside the dojo.

The uke role is very interesting in aikido, because it is the mirror of tori. Very often when there is a problem we are not allowing uke space to enter when we are entering as tori. Sometimes we can feel this more clearly when we are ourselves in the role of uke. We know where we need to go. However, our partner is pushing us away from the location where we should be going in the kata. When we experience this, we receive an insight which can help us do it better, in the next round.

Blowjob Ukemi

Let’s end this with a joke. In daito ryu in particular, but also in aikido, very often we see uke ending up in strange positions. I guess many things have been going wrong before we end up in the ultimate ridiculous ending position, and I find this an interesting thing to study.

All actions of uke should be based on the situation with tori. Depending on how tori performs their part, uke should do their part accordingly. Sometimes the clever thing to do is to keep contact. Sometimes the clever thing to do is to let go of the contact. Ultimately we should always do what would be meaningful for the exercise.

In our daito ryu group we have a standing joke about what we call “Blowjob Ukemi”. Basically it means uke ending up with their head in the partner’s groin area. Sometimes it happens during aiki sage. I guess it is a classical example of holding on too strongly, and not realising when it is time to leave (by taking ukemi). It is a funny one, but a very good example of something which should be considered at every moment as uke. When can we be in a perfect position, and when is it time to move on? Because holding on for dear life when the position no longer is perfect is – well, funny, but all things considered, maybe not the most useful for the development of neither uke nor tori?

Enjoy your keiko! Aikido makes people happy!

Concerning respect

30 Friday Jan 2026

Posted by aikifreak in Aikido

≈ Comments Off on Concerning respect

Tags

Aikido, Budo, Ego, Integrity, Jan Nevelius, Jorma Lyly, Respect, Roppokai Daito Ryu Aiki Jitsu, Ukemi

“If I think that I am better than you I am worse than myself”

Thomas von Gegerfelt

Aikido is weird. Very often the logic found from most other everyday things is opposite in aikido. If we want to move an object from one position to another, we use our hands to grab it, lift it, and move it over to where we want it to be. The object could be light or heavy. If it is heavy we use more force to lift it. If it offers resistance, we lean in and use our bodyweight to make it move. In aikido the object, is not an object at all, it is an equal to ourselves so we can’t move it in this manner.

In aikido, the longer time we spend in it, the more we find that it is “different”. More fundamental laws of nature structures the principles. When we move smaller objects, up to the size of a small car we can still to a limit, act, do action on the object. For objects significantly bigger than ourselves the fundamental nature of nature reveals itself to us anyway. We simply do not have enough physical strength to go against Tào, Nature.

November 2025, Bergen Airport. Rayleigh scattering demonstration at its best.

There are work arounds though. Sometimes us humans find ways to violate the natural flow of Nature, by engineering, creating greater force than what we are able to exert on an object ourselves. Whether or not this is clever, or preventing development, I will not go into details discussing today. The world will progress in a technological way without looking at consequences no matter what we believe in anyway. I will merely look at the possibility for evolution of ourselves through these challenges.

In Stockholm the Aikido population is very grown up. Three of my best friends, were in Japan practising with the masters in 1969 and 1970 already. This was a time when aikido was not very developed in the rest of the world. So to study aikido seriously, it was necessary to go there. A whole bunch of my friends are at around, or has passed, 60 years of being active in the art. They are grown up, so to speak, in aikido. “If the letter scale reacts” it is too much pushing was an expression I heard my friend, Lennart Karlson, used in a class.

From the celebration of the 7th dan Aikikai promotion for Jorma Lyly, January 2026. Roland Hultberg was in Japan from 69, Thomas von Gegerfelt and Guy Rixner went to join him in January 70.

It is an honour and a great privilege to be in contact with such an experienced group, not only as teachers, but also as training partners for the daily keiko. It has shaped me, in ways I can’t imagine that I could have found otherwise. We do need to find a way to get a younger generation into aikido as well though. Because we need them as well. They are the future. I guess in Stockholm, and many places in the Aikido World the main challenge is to renew our population. We need younger people to gain interest for our art. Anyway, this is a subject for another time.

The more time we spend in aikido, the better we become to keep our integrity. Like the metaphor with the letter scale states, if the partner has integrity, pushing and pulling is irrelevant. At first, because of habits of our mind, and how moving around objects on the table works for us, we tend to use our force to try to do the same in aikido. And at first, our partners will move. Because of lack of integrity, or difference in strength, and because they are nice to us. Later on, they are still being nice. I’m guessing that for the people who started in the sixties that somewhere in the seventies, pushing became clear to them as a road that does not lead on. Maybe? What do I know? However, when I make the mistake of pushing on either one of them, the error becomes visible to me.

The first class of Jorma as 7th dan Aikikai, Izanami Aikidoklubb in Björkhagen, January 2026.

At least in my own experience, I am trying to filter away the pushing and pulling and twisting. But what should we do? Our partner is holding our arm and we are going to places, to do the kata. Physical movement needs to happen. How does this make sense without action? The arms need to go up to reach an apex, for example in ikkyo. Then we need to enter forward into the ikkyo. How can we let this happen without first lifting, and then pushing?

I remember Jan Nevelius giving me a very precious advice when my brother was a beginner (2007), and I was unsure about how to perform the ukemi for morote dori. “Don’t help him, but make sure the movement never stops”. For me this was a key to a concept I am still working on today. For me the key to development came from learning how to do ukemi in a good way, even if, at the time, my partner was quite inexperienced (Marius Hatlen, my brother, is now very experienced, and is Dojo Cho and founder for Molde Aikido Club).

Serenity Aikido Dojo Sjøholt, founded Christmas 2001, photo taken Christmas 2025.

There are in fact two bodies in the movement. We very often forget that uke is 50 % of the kata. When something goes up, something else goes down. When something goes east, something else goes west. This is why movement is possible without pushing or lifting. It is a system in equilibrium. The possibility for action without deeds is created.

Since that day I have started working on my integrity. At first grasping at ideas, trying to find ways to explain these things in a logical way for myself, and others if asked. By keeping the principle stated so beautifully by Janne: don’t help (keeping my integrity), but make sure the movement never stops (safeguarding the flow from my side). It really gave me a road to study this concept, from a quite early stage of my aikido life.

Two year anniversary (?) keiko at Molde Aikidoklubb in January 2026.

In my opinion, uke and tori are studying the same Nature, when we do keiko. We are part of the very same electrical circuit; we are part of the falling and rising of the tide; we are part of a system that always returns. There are no processes which only goes one way. There is always a counter reaction. I guess this is the very nature of wu wei: action without deeds, the heart of Tào in my opinion. This is very much the core of what aikido is, the way I see it.

So instead of wondering how I should raise my arm when my partner is holding, without lifting, as tori, I am wondering how I can keep holding and absorbing the movement into myself when I am uke. It is really tricky, you know? Not to end up in strange positions when the arms go up? There should be no force down naturally, because as tori I know that there should be no force up. These will always balance. If our partner makes a mistake, we need to, from our side, fix it for them, without helping, if that makes sense?

Yes, we will be helping, but in the correct way, the balanced way. Keeping our integrity but making sure that the movement flows on our side of the circuit. If the electricity stops anywhere in the circuit, it stops everywhere. No push will help if it disconnected. I need to find how to keep my integrity, and what needs to move, to make sure it flows.

This is fundamentally different from giving up my integrity in the role of uke, to help my partner making mistakes. We do this the first years of practise anyway, because we didn’t learn it yet. But an experienced aikidoka will keep their integrity. They feel heavy when we, by mistake, are pushing them. Sometimes so heavy that it feels like bolted to the Earth itself. And it would be narrow sighted to criticise them for blocking or accusing them for not keeping connection or not giving anything when we try to do violation on them.

Blaming the partner is the biggest dead end I have seen in aikido. It does not matter if we are uke or if we are tori. We can always study, no matter what our partner does. Of course, safety comes first. If our partner is hurting us, we need to tell them. Injuries should be avoided at all cost, both for ourselves and for our training partners. I cannot see a benefit to accepting a form of practise which eventually lead to injuries. When we are absent from the keiko because of an injury, we are not doing our hours, for all those training days! Just imagine all the wonderful things we could have done in that time! However, if it is safe, why ask the partner to change?

Of course this goes both ways. We will be guaranteed to meet partners who do exactly this: tell their partner what they should be doing. I guess it is the nature of the human mind. “I am not making a mistake, but you are!” (the speck and the log metaphor from the Bible) The great potential is, when experiencing a challenge to use the opportunity to study it. We need challenges to develop.

So how do we deal with a partner who wants to tell us what to do? Well, it could be situations where what they say actully gives a clue to what we could try? It can in fact give us an indication of what the situation looks like from our partner’s side, which can be very, very useful. However, exactly what they are saying is usually not directly the useful information. We need to study it physiologically to understand what the root of the problem is. But, sometimes, it is not useful. I really use internally and externally, a lot, a phrase popularised by Eckhart Tolle: “Is that so?”

In my experience, negative criticism is just as often expressed about the way I do ukemi, as the way I do tori. Do I listen? Yes. I consider the things which resonate with my own ideas. I will always remember them, but a lot of the things I hear people say I respond to with “Is that so?” There are many ways. Very many. I will not say that something is correct and something is incorrect, beyond safeguarding the health of the participants in the keiko. Our opinions are based on our history, education and experience. Different people have different history, education and experience, so they will have different opinions.

To return to the situation with the grab. In my opinion, when the hands of tori and uke go up, the shoulder blades of both partners should go down. The shoulders should not come up. When tori enter below the uke, tori gives uke space above. The space we give will buy us the space we need. When tori enters to do ikkyo, prior to entering the space of uke, tori need to open the door for the space uke should enter into. That space was previously ours. We give it, to gain different space. It is a circuit. If our partner keeps their integrity it is always a fair trade. Nobody is cheated. No electricity is running away from the circuit. Another way to look at it is water flowing through circular pipes. There is no way for water to leak out so it can flow one way, or the other, but it can’t be compressed, and it can’t go anywhere unless the water if flowing through the whole system. If we force it we might destroy the machine we are working with. But we will not hurt the water. We can’t threaten Tào.

Genkan Aikido Dojo in Bratislava, July 2025.

Aikido is great, because it teaches us respect. It does not only teach us to respect others, but it teaches us to respect ourselves also. Our partner’s integrity is fundamental. Our own integrity is fundamental. Now when we know this, we can study how to perform the katas, from both sides, respecting our common integrity.

Another very common dead end is the excuse of atemi. Yes, we are doing a martial arts, so atemi is a part of what we do. It is actually integrity itself. However, if we want to enter into our partner’s space and have not given our own space for the partner to move into, we will feel a problem. Telling the partner verbally what to do to solve the problem for us is one common way to miss out on our own development. Another way to miss out is to threaten the partner with a strike if they don’t move. But guess what: our partner can also strike, and most aikidokas are not the most proficient strikers, maybe? Our partner could be a muay thai practicioner, a boxer or an MMA fighter? If we ask our partner to change, we have failed. It does not matter if we use words or physical threat to communicate our discontent with the current situation.

The super awesome youth group at JuShinKan Aikido Dojo in Stavanger, November 2025.

We have a lot of exercises in aikido where we play with connection, and develop the communication. This is necessary. This is a great part of what develops aikido as a language. I called my blog a study of a non verbal language, for a long time. However, in our study in this field, it is very important to remember to respect our partner. If our partner does not want to “play” we should never force them to. Consent is fundamental to our study. It is also very important to study positions. What can we do to solve the problem when the partner does not move, or maybe if the partner moves too much? We know the general idea of the kata we should perform, but we should not require that our partner does much of the active performance, to make the kata happen. I have this attitude in both roles. If my tori is not making it happen, I will, as uke. If my uke is not making it happen, I will as tori.

So the respect to the partner is something I greatly value. A pitfall of the connection exercises is that it is easy to forget the respect to our partner when we “play with them”. So when we play with our partner, I guess nothing could be more important than to remember to respect their integrity as we do it. If we don’t have the respect for our partner, I see no benefit in the exercise, because we will break fundamental rules which are much bigger than our little game on the tatami. We can’t cheat Nature. We might cheat some partners. But then again, there are some partners who we can’t cheat.

In my opinion we should not only respect the training partners who are more experienced than ourselves, but we should also respect the training partners who do not have the experience to keep their integrity yet. We are all of equal worth.

Enjoy your keiko! Aikido makes people happy!

What is the purpose of the forms in aikido?

25 Thursday Dec 2025

Posted by aikifreak in Aikido

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Aikido, Budo, Ego, Happiness, meditation, mental-health, Mindfulness, philosophy, spirituality

“what has a (positive) existence serves for profitable adaptation,
and what has not that for (actual) usefulness”

Lao Tzu; Tào Té Ching; from Chapter 11, translation by James Legge

Nature

In my opinion aikido is a study of the nature of Nature. Nature is both outside and inside us. In my early life I used scientific method to explore the Universe outside myself, with mathematics and theoretical physics. The most fundamental principles, which all the laws of nature are built on, was what I was trying to understand. In these days I am using aikido to study the very same nature, by looking inside of myself.

The original idea for this blog started as an article I started writing in 2007, focusing on how to use restrictions to develop freedom. As I continuously changed my formulations the article was not nearing completion, and after 5 years I transformed the article into this blog.

The paradox about studying freedom is that we are not getting free, without pre-deciding what we would like to study. Even if we are free to do any form we would like to do, we still can’t get around the fundamental principles: The Nature; The Tào.

Very often when we are asked to do jiu waza, which is a practise without so many restrictions, we end up repeating patterns from our mind and body, and are not free at all. How many times did we ever see, or perform ourselves, jiu waza, where it became merely a randomized demonstration of that person’s favorite forms of their favorite katas? In jiu waza, kihon should not appear, right? Just randomizing the order of the songs on an album does not change the songs which are played from the CD. It is not like listening to the band jam live. Experiencing them improvising together. They are using their musical mastery to respect the musical principles, to play correct, however composing something never played before.

Aikido and music are extremely similar in nature. We can’t do anything imaginable and expect high quality. But when we understand the principles, Nature (both in music and in aikido), we can do something new. We can decide what to do. This is freedom.

What I do not consider freedom is the allowance to perform our favorite form, and the permission to neglect forms which we dislike. We are seeking freedom from our own mind. Not freedom from other people’s minds. We are free from other people’s minds, always. However, because we are a slave of our own mind, we might follow other people’s minds, even though we really don’t have to. Our like and dislike is what we need to look out for.

Freedom from Nature is fantasy. We will never do that. Nature, or Táo, is not something we believe in or doubt. Nature is. Nature will do what nature does. It does not matter if we believe one thing or another. Nature will still “work”, even if nobody believes in it. So when we speak of freedom we have an understanding that we will be free within some restraints. We will not break the laws of thermodynamics. So even in freedom without our own restrictions, we will be somewhat restricted by Nature.

Definitions of the forms

What do I mean by forms in aikido? I guess there are different opinions about what the forms are and what the purpose is of the forms. I guess we can in general summarize three type of view of what the forms (we could call them katas or techniques) are in aikido:

Examination curriculum
Weapons
Kata

There are of course aikidokas in between these categories, and some that have a different view on the forms. But I have found that these three are the major groupings in the view of what the forms of our art are, and what they are for.

We do have a group of people in the aikido society not really studying aikido. They mostly just want to have gratification from the society for doing progress. When getting a grade they are disinterested in studying for a while until the next examination is around the corner. The kata is just a means to an end. The curriculum is all it is. It is studied for pleasing the grading committee. They do as they are told, and are frustrated every time there are disagreements in the society about how a form should be performed, because this means that they need to study more than one way to do the kata. This is frustrating, because it will cost more time to get the results they want, than just studying one form until they can perform the kata sufficiently good to pass the test.

Then we have another group of people who have created a shit-storm in social media. They think of the forms in aikido as weapons to be used to defend themselves against evil people. They proclaim that they have skills to fight using the forms, and start discussions with people from outside aikido, defending the martial value of the forms in aikido. However, whatever we fight, we strengthen, and it is almost impossible to express what we do nowadays, without having people looking for Bullshido and McDojos, commenting, thinking we are all in this group. Even a recent post with children learning high falls had comments from people thinking that we are trying to fight, when I think it seems very clear that we are doing something else.

I do understand the misunderstanding. Some of the things we do looks like punches, if we don’t know anything about either subject. And the nature of the human mind is to defend whatever we identify with. So here we are. In Scandinavia we have a popular term called budo-sport, trying to explain something unknown is, by using another unknown word? Is this some kind of trauma?

Also we have the word attack. In the world an attack is defined as something done with the intent of causing harm or killing, or destroying, whatever we are attacking. In aikido it is the initial parts of the ukemi, setting ideal conditions for study. The same word. Different meaning. Even inside aikido people have no clear distinction what the difference is. Usually this happens by participants who never did any other martial arts than aikido, but not exclusively. In Judo, for example, when they go for the arm bar, they do everything they get the opportunity to do to break the arm, but stop when the partner submits. Their intent is to break the arm. So it is an attack, until the fight is over by the loser signaling, to save themselves from a serious injury.

In aikido we cooperate. It is more like professional stuntmen making things look good. Both parts are contributing to the performance. We do it together. Nobody is attacking. Nonetheless we call katate dori and all the other forms for initiating a kata an attack. It is nothing wrong with that, as long as we and the person we are communicating with, know what the word attack means in this context.

Pressure testing is a concept I would like to speak more about later, but this is one of the things appearing in this group of people. In the extreme cases people are trying to “fix” aikido. Because the kata is difficult to perform in a fight, they change it into a jiu jitsu technique, to justify that “their aikido” “works”.

The forms in our society

In all societies we have different systems. These systems are in my opinion based on the mind and not on Nature. We have to respect the existence of these systems. We can choose to do what we want and need to do, but we have to position ourselves to the systems, because we will otherwise be positioned by them.

Lao Tzu writes good things about leadership, but in the systems of the world, the principles he speaks about is usually not followed. The consequences are what we can see in the news, in human history, and in the health of our planet. Even in aikido we have the same effects. The world outside is infecting the aikido society. People want power.

Because the forms in society is based on the mind, I don’t consider it a physical form which is useful to study, beyond having a clear example for the insanity of the human mind. The forms based on Nature are more interesting for me.

Kata

In my opinion, aikido is nature, and the forms are there for the purpose of studying nature. We are learning about ourselves and the world around us.

First we are studying how to position ourselves and to become aware about the outer parts of our body. We study with our teacher, with a mirror and in front of a camera, to become aware about structure and alignment of our limbs.

At the next level we are becoming aware about the inner parts of our body, like our breath, shapes of our shoulder and chest area, bones inside our body, inner alignment. This development has no end. We can become aware of more and more subtle things in our body.

The next level is to raise our awareness about our mind. We spent a lot of time to study our body, to a high degree of precision. This awareness can be also used to study our mind. Our mind and body is very intricately connected. Tension in our body is very often related to “problems” originating in our mind. Often our body makes our mind visible to us.

Using the forms, or kata, as I often choose to call them, to study our body is the foundation to the inner development. We are studying nature, but in aikido, in my opinion our study is to look into ourselves, instead of looking outwards into the Universe to find the secrets.

Pressure testing, if we understand what it means, is always good. But trying to compete with our partner is not going to help us. However, discussing something important to us with a person with an opposing view, without having our pulse rise with a single beat pr minute, is useful. We can pressure test our awareness by keeping our inner peace under adverse conditions. But we don’t have to do this in our keiko. Life will pressure test us at some point anyway. In my opinion, in the keiko, we should focus on improving our performance in the forms.

Practising without forms

I know that there is the temptation of practising freedom by playing without forms. But it is a very ambiguous situation, difficult to extract information from. As there is no difference from one to the other situation, we don’t learn anything from nature. If we are restricting ourselves to follow a form, we will immediately have a clear picture of what is happening inside ourselves.

I mentioned earlier the attempts to “fix aikido” by changing the forms to succeed more easily in our movements. This is something which goes against the purpose of the keiko. We are supposed to make use of the difficulties to grow, instead of just changing the assignment into something less challenging, to prevent the difficult moments.

The worst, I guess, is to presume that our form will be soft. When we are a beginner doing a form, we will fail in being soft. Not because we don’t try, but because we need the hours to know how to move inside, to become more fluid, less substantial, more perceptive to the situation. If we compromise our integrity to just make sure that we succeed in our ego-goal: to be soft, we abandon the form, integrity, and the path. And our softness is not really soft anyway. Because as soon as we meet an obstacle we have no idea what to do.

When I was first starting aikido I was taught to tense out my fingers in a strange shape learned from a photo. No explanation for this form was given. But in all movements we had to keep our “kamae” in front of ourselves. The only explanation was to keep our hands up at all times, to block, if our partner decides to strike us. Then stiffness was explained as ki. Very quickly this became unnatural and we abandoned this form.

Nowadays, based on principles, the form has returned, but without tension. And I understand the reason and the purpose for the form. The hand position is not everything, of course, but it gives us a way to study something intangible.

The first thing we do when we want to become soft is to collapse our arms, because hands and arms are what we use most of the time. In my opinion the outer structure should be quite rigid to create the integrity of our position. The softness should come from our inner parts. By keeping the integrity of the arms we will have the sensation of stiffness, which we can use to remove stiffness from our forms, without merely collapsing our arms. We would like to keep the function, but finding action-less activity in our form.

The principles

Aikido is a complex subject. There is a lot different subjects to study. However, if we try to at least structure the subjects into some categories we could try to divide the areas into clearly different concepts, which in each contains several sub areas of study. In my opinion aikido can be expressed as three qualities:

Kindess
Integrity
Economy

Number one is kindness. We can’t do anything without kindness. We should not only not hurt our partner physically in our keiko. We should be practising in a safe manner, considering the condition of the partner. Sometimes we have injuries, and we have friends in aikido with all kinds of ages and bodily conditions.

The kindness includes the mental and psychological aspects as well. If we see a friend doing something incorrectly, as uke and as tori, what separates an aikido instructor from a bully is how we deal with this. If we just see the problem but don’t know the reason for the symptoms, I would recommend not mentioning the symptoms, because it is for sure remarked already. If we see the underlying reason for the symptom and know how to solve it, then, and only then should we consider how to instruct our friend.

Integrity is a fundamental part, and I guess it could be considered the form itself. Both uke and tori should be exact in our positions, both by ourselves, and in relation to our partner.

Economy is also a natural part of nature. The river will flow a certain path. The integrity of the terrain gives the river its natural way, and it is always the most economical path to the sea. Likewise our kata should, within the limitations of the form, be as economical was possible.

The forms give us a challenge: to perform the movement with respect to these three principles.

Or as Lao Tzu so cleverly expresses in chapter 11 of Tào Té Ching: We build the form, but it is the emptiness we find useful (the walls of the room are necessary, but it is space inside we live in).

The wave

Forms are hazardous, because the mind will grasp onto it. It could start to identify with it. And the pitfalls could be to think that the form could be used to fight others, or using it to promote ourselves. The forms within the aikido society is even more destructive in nature. I would go as far as to say that they are not forms of nature, but rather forms of the mind.

However, forms have a purpose. What that purpose is, is up to us ourselves to decide.

A nice way to look at forms is as a wave.

Photo by Aikido Vinohrady, from October 2014

The wave coming through us: The form does not originate in us, but merely passes through us. Just as the ocean does not itself generate the wave. The wave is caused by causality, and is flowing through the ocean. This is an idea which maybe can’t help us directly when we are stuck pushing at our partner or trying to lift our arm. However, it is a powerful way to change perspective. The system is bigger than just us. First of all there is the partner, which is also part of the movement we are doing, and there is the whole world around us. This understanding will make our mind act in a different way, and this might help us to make use of forms without being captured by them?

Merry Christmas!

Enjoy your keiko! Aikido makes people happy!

The Study of Actionless Activity part IV: The Second Law of Thermodynamics

28 Wednesday May 2025

Posted by aikifreak in Aikido

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Aikido, Budo, Ego, Fear, Happiness, Healing, Ilhabela, Lao Tzu, Mind, Psychology, Tào, Tào Té Ching, The Art of Peace, Wu Wei

The Tao of Heaven works in the world
like the drawing of a bow.
The top is bent downward;
the bottom is bent up.
The exess is taken from,
and the deficient is given to.

The Tao works to use the excess,
and gives to that which is depleted.
The way of people is to take from the depleted,
and give to those who already have an excess.

Lao Tzu; Tào Té Ching, from Chapter 77,
translated by John H. McDonald

Ilhabela September 2024. Photo by Dhyan Fortin.

I will return to my previously visited theme of action which is actionless today. There are a lot of formulations in Tào Té Ching for wu wei, or actionless activity. In many translations it is translated as not doing anything. What is written in the text, I will not say(because I have no idea), but I find inspiration in the idea of a process which refrains from activity causing action (pushing from the human side).

I would say that the first half of chapter 40, quoted in my previous post about this theme, gives us a quite clear idea of what wu wei is. According to the Arthur Waley translation it reads:

“In Tao the only motion is returning;
The only useful quality, weakness.“

In my opinion this could very well be the earliest formulation of the Second Law of Thermodynamics I have seen! More than 2200 years before the heat engine experiments inspired physicists to formulate the physical law which dictates the direction of time in the universe!

I also love that in Chapter 77 we find a comparison to the Way Nature works, and the opposite way the human mind works. If a human makes an investment, we expect our investment to grow. We have constructed a system, contrary to one of the most fundamental laws of the Universe, where the rich will take from the poor continuously. It was the same 2500 years ago, as it is today. The human mind did not change, and of course, the Way will never change.

So what is the Second Law of Thermodynamics? It is one of those laws which is very difficult to write down precisely, because it has so incredibly many formulations, and most of them are long and not very relevant for aikido. But basically it states that the total disorder in the Universe is always increasing over time. In other words the natural flow of anything, water, electrons, stars, you name it, goes from a higher potential towards a lower potential. You could also say that the Universe moves from a less likely state, towards a more likely state.

You can imagine a sand castle on the beach. Things will happen over time, and the result will not be a sand castle forming at the beach from the motion of the sea and the wind. If humans built it, over time the sand will return to the more likely state, with lower potential energy. The Way of Nature: Tào.

This is one of the most fundamental concepts in physics, no matter which genre of physics we are delving into, thermodynamics, classical mechanics, statistical mechanics, fluid mechanics quantum physics, quantum field theory, and so on…

And I might imagine you thinking by now, how does this tie into what we do in aikido?

Before getting to my point, I would like to remind you of a very old computer game, called Pac-Man. It is a pizza with a slice missing looking like a face with an open mouth. And this face is going through a maze filled with tasty morsels to eat, and monsters to run away from. Once we have eaten all the food on one level, a new level loads and Pac-Man continues to run away from the monsters, and try to eat all the food there. The neediness and fear never ends.

We are one. We are whole. We don’t feel whole. We don’t have thoughts of a whole. But if we have a moment of serenity we might see the reality of it. But the rest of the time, we feel like a Pac-Man. Something is missing inside of us. We need something external to complete us. A piece of the sector has been cut away from us and is hiding beyond our goal, whatever our goal is. It could be ikkyo, it could be a job we are applying for, or a partner we are interested in.

The sensation of incompleteness originating in our mind makes us susceptible to being affected by a lot of conditions we don’t control. We are scared of things! We need things! While in reality we have no reason to fear or chase after anything. We are already complete.

The difference is that if we approach our challenges as a complete person we have a much greater chance for success, compared to if we run around like Pac-Man running away from monsters, running towards the food, in my opinion.

Because we are not needy, or scared. We are functioning at our maximum capacity at all times. We never think weird thoughts, or have weird emotions, hence we never do weird things. Like pushing the partner’s elbow during ikkyo.

In my opinion, our desire to do it, and our fear of not being able to do it is the exact same thing, and this is what I can see standing in our way when we practise ikkyo.

The will to do ikkyo makes us move forward; The fear of not being able to do ikkyo, makes us more rigid: Thus we are causing a pushing force on our partner. From the uke’s side it is the same. We can feel the partner invading our space. We desire our space, and don’t see the greater perspective, that our space has shifted, so we cling on to the old position. Or we are scared of the pushing from our partner, so we push back to stand our ground.

As you know, pushing the partner in front of ourselves is maybe the number one mistake in ikkyo, omote. The further we move our partner forward, the furher we have to run after them to pass them in the ikkyo movement. Or, if we have a more experienced partner we will just push into their integrity, and nothing will happen at all.

In ikkyo we push. In shiho nage we pull. We always did, and to some extent we always will. However, over the years, hopefully we will find ways to push and pull a little bit less. When we practise with partners with way more experience than us, and also when we practise with beginners, we will immediately realise if there is any pollution of fear and desire left in us. It really applies to both roles of the interaction. If we are perfect we can do both roles with any partner, and it will never be a problem.

The inside realisation is the only way forward really. There will always be partners who are stronger, faster, more athletic, and technically better than us. However, the quality of being completely free from desire and fear: free from the mind; In total acceptance of the Way the Universe works, is really something remarkable. And it gives qualities which will enhance our life outside the dojo.

Enjoy your keiko! Aikido makes people happy (I always write this, and in my opinion the only way to be happy is to be in the state free from wanting and being scared of things)!

Self relinquishment

17 Saturday Feb 2024

Posted by aikifreak in Aikido

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Lao Tzu; Tào Té Ching; From Chapter 13

The reason for great distress is the body.
Without it, what distress could there be?

Translation by Stefan Stenudd

The only reason we suffer hurt is that we have bodies;
if we had no bodies, how could we suffer?

Translation by Arthur Waley

What makes me liable to great calamity
is my having the body (which I call myself);
if I had not the body, what great calamity could come to me?

Translation by James Legge

I always found this part from Chapter 13 of Táo Té Ching very inspiring. According to Arthur Waley, the word “body” in Chinese, shên, can have two meanings: “the physical body” or “the concept self”. What does this mean? What does the word “self” mean?

Our most basic way to identify our self, is our physical body, I guess. When we say me or I, as a child, we speak of our body. Our identity is inseparable from our physical appearance at this point of time. Of course only a very short time later our physical body has changed a lot, but we might be stuck for a long time with this idea of who we are. And if someone asks us if this person is you when showing us a photo ourselves in the past, we might start to get some idea that yes, it is still me, even though the body is different, because we are older at this time.

Most people will reach the point of maturity where we realise that who we are is a bit more deep rooted than the body. We did not choose who our parents are, or which time or which culture to be born into. It is just a throw of the dice deciding which body we end up with.

Our next identification, as we grow slightly more mature, is usually the mind. We will naturally have some opinions and emotions about different situations and subjects. There are patterns happening to us based on our body, and on the history we have experienced up to this point in our life.

The Gosphel, Heresia and the Serpent from Gustav Vasa Church. I must admit taking the picture from Wikipedia, even though this is just 20 meters from Vanadis Aikido Dojo

As we already discussed, the genetics coming from our ancestors, what we inherit through the body, were not chosen, so therefore it is not personal. Also, what happens to us in our childhood and early life is a natural consequence of where and when we were born and which situations we find ourselves in. So our mind is just as far from personal as our physical body.

If we are not our body, and not our mind, who are we? We do have a body, yes; we also do have thoughts and opinions, yes; and in a way bridging our body and our thoughts, we have emotions. All of the above are random, in the meaning that they were not chosen by us. Is it who we are? Is this our self? Maybe, many will say that yes, this is who we are. And they are willing to fight their friends, and kill them, because they are in conflict with what their friends consider that their self is.

It really does not matter if it is political views, nationality, religion, or any other random classification based on our definition of self. The result is that we end up defending this self (the fake one in my opinion). Killing our friends. Attacking each other. Because we think that ourselves are different from themselves.

Ilhabela (North coast), Brazil, january 2024

Because we are inflicted by thoughts and emotions telling us that the one we see in our inner eye is our enemy. At some level we would be able to see the person if they happen to be in front of us. This is the tool of a politician. It is easy to ask a soldier to kill an enemy they know only by their conspiring whispers. It is a different situation if the soldiers already know each other.

However, at a lower level our mind would even prevent us from seeing the reality because everything is filtered through our distorted view of the world around us. We do not even see them even if they are right there, because our mind blinds us from observing the real world. If we could see we will know that this is our friend. This disease is causing us to perform violence to our friends.

Naturally our friend have the same disease. They perceive us as a threat and will be attacking us. This mutual sickness is feeding itself, because hostile acts breeds more hostility. As we consider each other enemies, and we are always looking at ways of defending the self, there is eternal war.

We arm ourselves. We want to defend our “self”. We build armies and plot, and build up our image of who we are, as something separate from who they are.

The trial of Bruno Giordano by the Roman Inquisition. Bruno was burned at the stake (on this day) February 17th 1600 at Campo de’ Fiori in Rome. Image taken from Wikipedia.

Imagine two armed people meeting in a dark alley. Both are trained to the highest level in drawing and shooting, and they both have the best equipment available. They have been trained to look for hostility in the other. They see each other. They immediately see that the other is not a police officer, and they seem to be armed. Where are the hands of the other, and where are their own hands?

When these two both draw their guns and kill each other. Who’s fault would it be? They were triggering each other to draw at the same time. Was it the alley’s fault, that it was dark there? Or was it the fault of the person making the guns, or producing the ammunition? Or was it the fault of the people teaching them how to shoot? Or does the fault lie with the basic flaw in the mind that we want to defend what we define as our “self”? In reality they were both headed to the same restaurant, their wife or husband waiting for them at neighbour tables.

The mind is responsible for all the factors, except for the natural darkness of some alleys. It makes all environments dark because it prevents us from seeing reality, but some actual darkness will always be in some places. As long as there is light, there will be shadow.

Awareness *keiko*, with Gatão and Tantō in Ilhabela in January 2024. Photo by Joana Corbett da Silveira.

In my opinion our path, or road, in the practice we are doing every day, is to increase our awareness about what is happening inside of ourselves. By being aware of what is going on inside, we have a basis for peaceful communication with ourselves. Not denying thought or emotion, but acknowledging that they are there, and respecting that this is the state we are in, at this moment.

This peaceful interaction with ourselves gives us a fundament to be able to act peaceful in our interaction with the world outside ourselves, even if some of the ones we are in contact with does not share our level of awareness. By seeing the causality of mind state and action, we have understanding when someone is doing something which might be considered not ideal. We understand that nobody can do otherwise than what the mind dictates, until we have the level to see what is going on in ourselves.

Most important of all, we have the freedom to choose independently of our mind when we realise that our thoughts and emotions are guiding us to act insanely.

Ignatius of Loyola trampling on a heretic, Jesuitenkirche in Vienna, picture from Wikipedia.

We are relinquishing our self, by realising in our keiko, a deeper meaning of self. Maybe our self is life itself? What this is I would not be able to say. However, we could start by realising that our self is something which does not require defence. The reality is still true, no matter how distorted people’s opinion is about it is. There is no threat to neither reality, nor life itself.

Our body will die, so will our mind, with all its opinions and emotions. Even everybody who ever met us will die, and we will be forgotten. But life is always present. Just as it is in us now, like it was ten or thirty years ago, even though our body consisted of different physical material back then, and were quite physiological different from now. Life was there then, now, and until life goes on without our body. We can’t kill life, we can’t defend life. Is this our real self?

Keiko with Joana, in Ilhabela January 2024

Since before I stepped on to the tatami, my opinion has been that aikido is the opposite of self defence. It is based on my experience. It has been solidified by my practise. Still, there are no problems practising with people doing self defence (they are quite few, in the part of the aikido world where I go most frequently, but they do exist). They have different experience and different training, so naturally their opinion will differ from mine.

This is no problem. We should practise together. We probably have different definition of some words, we might follow different principles in our physical keiko. However, it is fascinating to study how to do our keiko in a way that can satisfy our needs to proceed on our way. Our path of “The Art of Peace”, as the Founder of Aikido, Morihei Ueshiba called it.

Now, I do not read Chinese, so whether the original sign in Tào Té Ching means body, or self, I would not know. However, I enjoy the observation of Arthur Waley that the word could have both meanings. No matter if that statement is correct or not, it awoke my curiosity, and sparked the fire for this little project of mine: To relinquishing the fake self, while nurturing and rejuvenating the body and the mind, getting in touch with whatever our real self could be.

Enjoy your keiko! Aikido makes people happy!

Dancing with the NOW

22 Friday Dec 2023

Posted by aikifreak in Aikido

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Aiki, Aikido, Ariga Kaname sensei, Awareness, Budo, Christian Tissier sensei, Conflict, Desire, Eckhart Tolle, Ego, Fear, Feelings, Happiness, Healing, Martial Arts, Meeting Point, Mind, Mindfulness, Presence, Psychology, Seishiro Endo sensei, War

A master of deception
Who takes you by the hand
Then leads you to the palace of the damned
He pulls the strings inside you
And plays upon your fears
Your final scream is music to his ears

Robert Halford – Evil Never Dies

What is the meeting point in a verbal interaction? Is there such a thing? Lately I have been pondering upon the concept of the meeting point in a general sense; Not merely in our positional play in our physical structure on the tatami, but our meeting with people in the real world, even over the phone. In my experience, if the partners does not agree upon a meeting point, no exchange will happen.

Photo by Natasha Pankovych from the seminar with Ariga Kaname sensei in Bratislava in October 2023

A common problem in a conflict is that the two parts are blindly focusing on one single aspect, with no attention to the view of the other part. This tunnelvision is a common effect of the human mind, I guess. Sometimes we are so single-mindedly focused on the problem that even if a number of possible solutions are right there in front of our eyes, we will never be able to see them. So the “time-aspect” is of paramount importance as well ass the “space-aspect”. If we are lost in the past or the future, we are absent in the present moment, where all the solutions can be found.

In some cases, one part involved in the conflict has a more developed awareness. By being aware of what the mind is doing, they can still see the world around them, and even if the other part has a too low awareness to see anything outside their own emotions and thoughts, the higher level person could meet them where they have their attention or lead them to a reasonable location for a meeting point.

Christian Tissier sensei said something some years ago which has stuck in my mind: “If the partner does not accept the point, it is not a point.” So if two parts in a conflict are both trying to communicate through their separate meeting points, they will not get anywhere, because they are both having monologues, not a dialogue, because the phone line is going to different connecting places, and they are not speaking to each other, even though they are both speaking.

I have experienced this a number of times, and many times I have been part of this situation. My workplace is a very interesting laboratory for this kind of study (I work in the reception of a big dental clinic). Sometimes even though we see where our partner is, we can’t really meet them. And a great deal of the time we don’t have the level to even see the situation outside the maze of thoughts and emotions.

One situation I find myself in often is that once I shift my own attempt for a meeting to where my partner is, they evade my meeting by starting speaking of an entirely different topic. And every time I shifted to meet them, they kept jumping to a different theme. My theory is that I was mistaken about what the real meeting point was, and saw merely the outer physical contact point of our conversation. It does, to a certain degree, require a mutual level of awareness to come to a point where an exchange is possible.

One can still to a certain degree help the other achieve a higher level. Vice versa, a low level is contagious. So it does benefit the situation a lot if at least one part can see what our respective mind is doing, and through this, being able to observe the world outside ourselves, and noticing the partner, and their meeting point, because we do need to meet somewhere to have a meeting.

In music there are a lot of technical principles, scales, or modes, which transmits different emotions (ionian, dorian, phrygian and so on). In a way music and aikido are very similar in nature, because we are using technical principles to transmit emotions. Of course, in music this communication also is happening between the musicians, but with sound it gives the audience a more complete impression of what is going on compared to in aikido, where we use touch as the transmission medium.

Even in the relatively simple katas we perform with our friends in the dojo is sufficiently complex to easily get confused when analysing the meeting point. The first thing to notice would be that the meeting point is not always the same as a contact point. We might have many contact points, but there is always only one meeting. There are several levels of the meeting happening. But in all levels, and all categories, the partners needs to be in agreement about what the meeting point is.

Of course, this is not something we have to think about during our time on the tatami, because it will happen naturally in our movements. If we have a problem, we will experience the problem. And the grace of the keiko is that by continuing to study, we will close in on this theory with our movements, even if we did not think about these things. Just as a good melody in music can be found without knowing anything about musical theory.

In my opinion, aikido is more than just a physical activity, to keep ourselves fit. It is something which should benefit the world outside the tatami. Thus, it would be interesting to analyse these things, to find similarities with what we face, for example at work, on the phone, with a customer, a colleague, or a person from a different company. The meeting point becomes relevant.

A huge aspect of the meeting point is to be present in the world we live in at this moment. Very often our attention is drawn towards what has happened in the past or towards something we imagine will happen in the future. Even if we are discussing past events, or planning the future with our partner, it is fundamentally important to be in a realistic respect to what is, right now. Because no matter what has happened, or no matter what we want to achieve, the current situation is where we have to start from. No excuses, like “It should be like this!” will work, because what is, is the way it is, right now. And there is nothing we can do about that.

When we find ourselves in a situation at work where we feel stuck. We do understand that an exchange needs to happen for us to get on with our jobs, but we are just not able to. There is the time dimension, where the mind can be holding grudges, or we are acting out of fear or desire for some fantasy future situation. Or we just can’t see the meeting with our partner, because we are blinded by our assumptions, judgement and other pollution from our mind. No matter how hard we try we are just not able to meet our partner. Just as when I was shifting to meet my partner, and my partner was evading me (from my point of view) to a different subject because I did not have the level to see the real meeting point.

We could say that just like the scales and modes are describing a theory for what will sound good in music, the meeting on the tatami could be described as a fulcrum. We have an exhalation phase, we are closing in on the fulcrum, and an inhalation phase, where we are moving away from the fulcrum. At the same time we will have rotations around the fulcrum in any direction.

It is a bit like the gravitational interaction of masses meeting in space. There is a gravitational pull between all masses at all times, but as the masses close in on each other, they start to affect each other more. So they move towards each other, move around each other, and fly apart, with a fulcrum as the meeting point. Their centre of mass might never reach the location of the meeting point, but rather swing around it, closing in, and moving out again. Otherwise we would have a collision, and mechanically, the same principles would apply.

A fulcrum can move, it can even be subject to accelerations. However, in this case it is a relative fulcrum which a part of a bigger system, with more parts, also following the nature of fulcrums, moving in, moving out and rotating around a common centre point, which is the meeting point of the entire system.

A fulcrum protects the integrity of the partners. There is no way we can interact with our partner by pushing, pulling or twisting. Both partners have integrity, and the integrity is needed for the principle to be valid.

So what happens if we try to “violate the meeting point”? We will experience that our partner becomes “heavy”. Even if our partner is not physically resisting us, we will find difficulties in performing our movements. If we use leverage, timing and maybe superior strength, we still might be able to succeed in our movement, but “the lightness of touch” we have with our partner if we conserve the fulcrum, will be lost. And I guess this kind of experience will not help us in the world outside the dojo. You can’t solve a conflict with a person on the phone, or even across a desk, with physical strength.

There is a principle in tào which I prefer to call actionless activity (wu wei). This quality is sometimes translated as non action, or choosing the path of minimum effort. This quality is very interesting, because it is the only way we can have fulcrum conservation. In my opinion “actionless activity” is a good way to describe it, because “actionless” specifies that the action is always neutral, and “activity” means that we are active (not passive).

This is a hard challenge for the mind. We need to be present in the meeting. This means that we can’t run away from things which we fear; And it means that we can’t cling to things which we desire. Just being present in the meeting point, NOW. This is what is.

Very often our focus tends to shift to what tori is doing, and what tori should or should not do, and so on, while neglecting the role of uke. Both partners are part of a martial interaction. If one part moves, it has consequences for all other parts. If one side moves their tanks to strike, the opposing side will not stay in their current position, if the integrity of their ranks are compromised by the movement of the other side. If in chess our opponent moves a piece and will be able to strike at our piece on the next move, we need to reconsider our positions.

In aikido we are doing it together, so it is not like in war or in chess. However, the martial nature is still there. So when tori moves, uke should, in my opinion, continuously be searching for the best position, and not asking themselves: “Do I have to move?” (no you don’t, but then it would not be a martial arts any more, when the partner have the position for a significant strike, and will not because we don’t knock down our friends in aikido).

What is all of this good for? Why overanalyse and create theories about what is indescribable? The Way that can be described is not the general way. I guess, for at least me, it gives inspiration for the study. It is nice to have different aspects to focus on from year to year. We still study the same movements every day of the year. The theory brings spice to our aiki-food. I guess, at least for me, it is also important to relate all our study in the tatami to the actual world outside the dojo.

Besides, in many kata our contact point(s) are quite distant from our meeting point. So it really helps the understanding of the movement to be aware of where the centre of the movement is. As an example in irimi nage or shiho nage the contact point is in the height of our noses, while our meeting, in my opinion is in between our front hips. It does help our technique to be aware of this.

The most interesting moments, the situations where we learn the most, is when we meet partners who are not easy to practise with. This goes both for aikido and in life outside the dojo. We have to study, both the physical form, but even more the awareness of what happens in our mind when we encounter an obstacle.

In my opinion we should never ask our partner to change something, neither as uke nor as tori (unless it is a matter of safety). Every situation is an opportunity to discover new things. And yes, most of the useful things, which can make a change, are what happens inside of us. We can’t stop the greater conflicts in the world with our choices. The development of our species have to start with how we deal with the people we happen to meet. And aikido, in my opinion, is a kinder garden, an educational system for dummies in how to deal with conflicts, and how to live peacefully.

Enjoy your keiko! Aikido makes people happy!

Concerning Shoshin

27 Tuesday Dec 2022

Posted by aikifreak in Aikido

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

Aiki, Aikido, Beginner's mind, Budo, Daito Ryu Aiki Jiu Jitsu, Eckhart Tolle, Ego, Fear, Feelings, Happiness, Healing, Martial Arts, Mind, Mindfulness, Psychology, Roppokai Daito Ryu Aiki Jitsu, Shoshin, Suffering

Do you need what I need?
Boundaries overthrown
Look inside, to each his own

Do you trust what I trust?
Me, myself and I
Penetrate the smoke screen, I see through the selfish lie
J. Hetfield

From the very beginning of my aikido journey I was told about keeping the beginner’s mind. Both my day to day teachers, which did aikido a few years at that time, and the professional teachers I met, who did aikido for a lifetime, spoke of the concept of shoshin. At a first glance, of course, this makes sense. To not become arrogant; To not consider myself an expert; To not stop learning. I considered it as a natural door to learn more. As a beginner this was never a challenge, and to this day those parts (I did not at that time see all the parts) has not been obstructing my road.

However, I think that there is a lot more to this concept than what initially meets our eye. Otherwise the professional teachers would not have spoken of shoshin as such a profound quality. All of them explained it in a way which I could not, at that time, relate to. I guess this subject passed out of my field of study, for a while.

Humboldt Penguin at Atlanterhavsparken in Ålesund December 2022

At the time of the passing of T. K. Chiba sensei, a video interview with him was released. What I perceived from that video was that his most important recommendation to the future generations of aikidokas was to keep shoshin. Even though I never met this teacher personally (I only had contact with his students), I was inspired to put some emphasis into researching, for myself, what shoshin really means, for me. Presently I am also interested in how the concept of shoshin can help support us in the world outside the dojo.

According to wikipedia sho means initial, and shin means mind. So the translation I was given as a beginner: the beginner’s mind, is understandable. The mindset is open for new information, for learning.

Calligraphy taken from Atlantic Aikido, Galway

But does this mean that the state of a person who never did any practise, at all, is of higher quality, than that of one who has been studying all their lifetime? This seems to be a paradox? Why practise at all, if we already have the quality we are seeking in the first place? Why strive for a lower quality than that which we already start with? We could of course escape that koan by saying that we are procuring other qualities, and in that process we should strive to preserve the initial one. I guess that would explain it, to a certain level.

What is easy for the beginner is to receive new information, because there is less content in their mind already, in this field of study. There is less past experience of this kind. Even if a beginner are dreaming of what comes in the future, it is not yet based on past experience, so the dream is easily “exorcised” by exposure to the present moment in the keiko. The beginner will more easily have the keiko as a support, or anchor, to stay present in the current situation, more so than the more experienced practitioner, which is more heavily restricted by the inner propaganda and censorship of the mind. I will explain what I mean by propaganda and censorship below.

The challenge will arise when there is an extensive amount of past experience and knowledge in our system during keiko (or in life). The shoshin is lost when our past memories triggers the mind into generating a projection of our past into a future time, where we will have an expectation of what is going to happen. What we expect might not happen. And the most problematic part is, of course, that our expectation is so strong, that even if it did not happen, we would interpret, and filter, the information we have from the situation, to fit our idea of “what should have happened”. For a scientist this is a calamity!

When the mind has a “reservoir” of information, it tends to label the information to reduce the amount of processes needed to perform a simple task. So if a teacher shows shiho nage, we will not see what the teacher is showing. At the moment our system recognise something we experienced in the past, we will immediately shut down and perform the same thing “we always do”.

Similarly, when we meet our partner to study we might fall into the same trap. It might even happen with the same partner we do keiko together with every single day. And more frequently it would occur during our first meeting with somebody new, at a seminar. The mind still tends to standardise the meeting to what we experienced in the past. Predicting the future, or rather, most likely, constructing a fantasy. As I mentioned before, if the current situation does not fit with our expectation of what the situation “should be”, the mind will hide the parts which contradicts our idea, and put more emphasis, on the parts which actually supports our view. It enhances whatever fits with the initial mind and suppresses whatever contradicts it. So in this way, the words “initial mind” means the exact opposite of what we are discussing here.

We should always be watchful of these things, as words has a way of oversimplifying things. As we saw above. Initial mind can mean many different things, even completely opposite things. We may argue the logic of both interpretations of the word. However, in this particular case the situation is trivial, because it is obvious for us that the word just turned the whole thing around for us. The more intricate situations on the tatami though, might be more perilous. Furthermore, in the complexity of life outside the dojo it is an immense challenge to not get trapped by the mind in this way.

I mentioned the mental labelling, and the mind’s tendency to protect it’s initial idea, protecting it’s “self”. A consequence of this “self protection” (or “self defence”) is the random preferences we tend to fall into, over time. We like this and we dislike this. From the start we just experienced it all for the first time, and some things we enjoyed more than other things. However, we still did not have time for investing our enjoyment in one thing naturally leading us to abhorring it’s opposite.

Sometimes two partners on the tatami have so different preferences (what we like and dislike), and ideas of what we think we should do, that we will experience a conflict. It could really be anything, but I will try to give just a few examples:

During katate dori one might put more emphasis on keeping a complete grab, while the other might put more emphasis on the integrity of the position (in some situations we have to choose a distribution between these two qualities, like 70% – 30%, so they may appear to us as opposites if the partner chooses the other way around);

One might be seeking to strengthen their posture by having a lot of pressure between uke and tori, while the other might be trying to remove more and more, making the contact between the partners more like we are one body working together (these might be perceived as opposites);

There might be a disagreement about which parts of the kata should be performed by uke and which parts should be performed by tori (even though we are agreeing on the form of the kata we have a disagreement about who to do what);

And last, but not least, there might be a disagreement of the actual physical form of the kata (there are a multitude of ways to perform each kata, and there is no lack of aikidokas who will defend the way they learned it as if it were a threat to their life if somebody do it differently).

The otters Nusse, Muffe and Pia at Atlanterhavsparken in Ålesund December 2022

So how do we use the concept of shoshin to help us keep our feet on our journey? In one way, there is no way to lose our way, because whatever choices, or mistakes, we make, and wherever we might go, it is where we have to go, to continue. If we “fail” we will experience some unpleasant situations, and we will have a “kick in the butt” (literarily or figuratively speaking) to evolve to a higher level.

However, some suffering is avoidable, if we already have the level for it. If we have the required level, we can see the activity of the mind during these little “conflicts” on the tatami. They are really small, you know, considering the major conflicts in the world outside. We are children playing in the kinder garden, gaining experience to deal with the “grown up life” outside the dojo.

Once we have the awareness, the simple observation and making a decision which leads to a productive keiko is extremely easy. The life in the dojo is really not that complicated. Outside the tatami however, the situations is very often very complex and intricate. On the level of manifestation there are no correct or incorrect answers. However, if we at least start from a state where we can see the situation, we might be better off than if we blindly follow whatever happens inside of us.

And to return to my initial question? What is shoshin, or a beginner’s mind? And does really a beginner have a beginner’s mind? So let’s take the second question first. No, they don’t, generally (there could of course be exception, but in that case they are usually not a beginner, as they received it from some other study). The beginner is able to manifest the outer form of shoshin even though they do not possess the quality, because the situation is new for them. In other aspects of life they do not have this “superpower”, so a beginner does not generally have a beginner’s mind, in my opinion.

The sunset seen from Atlanterhavsparken in Ålesund December 2022

As to what shoshin is, which we could describe by words, can easily be misleading, because, words have different meaning and association for different people. In my opinion shoshin is a level of awareness of the reactions of the mind. The mind is constantly clouding our vision of what is going on around us. If we are able to see the process of thoughts and emotions and their “haze equilibrium” of defensiveness, we can see the world around us in a different way. We have the freedom to make a choice. Or at least a higher degree of freedom than if we lack shoshin.

In Roppokai Daito Ryu we very often practice in larger groups, doing kakari keiko. One person is throwing the whole group in the role as tori and then shifting to the uke role, and so on. In this situation it becomes super apparent for everybody waiting in line (the ukes), who can see the eyes of tori, if they have shoshin or not. It is like it says in the Bible with the speck and the log in the eye, it is easier to see it happening to others, than to realise when it is happening to ourselves. When shoshin is lost, the eyes get “stiff”. This of course also becomes apparent in the waza we perform, as we will have difficulties with many partners.

Our “idea” of the movement does not fit with the experience from our partners, and in this situation the meeting is changing very rapidly, as every partner is different, and they are arriving in a flowing succession. This way of doing the keiko is one of many ways to check our level of shoshin. The past is not valid in the future. Actually the past is just a memory in the mind and the future is a fantasy from the mind. The only real thing is the now.

Ice crystals in the air at Hökmossen in Stockholm, in December 2022

Enjoy your keiko! Aikido makes people happy!

Thoughts from the Keiko

~ Aikido – A Pathway to the Next Level of Human Consciousness

Safety first!

Long term injuries

Accidents

Collisions

Weapon accidents

Hakama related injuries

Tatami related injuries

Safety

The Ocean, The Lake & The River

Concerning friendship and enmity

As above, so below

The World today

Classification of our study

The Art of Peace

Daito Ryu Aiki-Jujitsu Roppokai

Aiki age and aiki sage in our daily practise

Blowjob Ukemi

Concerning respect

What is the purpose of the forms in aikido?

Nature

Definitions of the forms

The forms in our society

Kata

Practising without forms

The principles

The wave

The Study of Actionless Activity part IV: The Second Law of Thermodynamics

Self relinquishment

Dancing with the NOW

Concerning Shoshin