Category: Aikido

Aikido · cycling · fitness · Rowing

The joy of synchronous movement

Sam B1 Comment

I’ve been thinking lately about what I miss most about working out with other people. I mean there’s the obvious social interaction and pleasure in seeing friendly familiar faces. Working out has also been for me one of the places where my life crosses work and educational lines. Aikido was the best for that. But cycling too. And the Y, of course. I got to chat with city bus drivers, emergency service workers, car mechanics, teachers, cooks, and working at home parents. There are more people in the world than university professors! It got me off campus, placed me in a context where I’m not an expert, and I get to chat with people about non-academic stuff. See, I can learn things too. I like connecting with the student side of myself.

Okay, so there’s all that and it’s important.

But there is another thing that I miss and that’s the pure physical pleasure of moving in time with other people.

Aikido is all about moving in harmony with other people. We do basic movements together as warm up, each person doing the same movement at the same time. We also match our movement to our training partners in a way that can feel at its best more like dance than martial arts.

It’s also one of the things I love about rowing. When I rowed outside, on the lake, I rowed in a four person boat, in the third spot. I followed the women ahead of me, matched my stroke to theirs. It’s a lot harder and more technical than that but it also just comes down to working together. When we were perfectly synced, we moved quickly and smoothly through the water. Indoors, on the erg, it was a similar thing. We worked on drills together and it was always easier for me if I focused on keeping pace with the other rowers.

It’s true too in cycling. If you’re riding behind someone the easiest thing to do is find a gear that allows you to match their cadence. It’s the best way to ride in group, close behind other people, and avoid running into them without using your brakes.

I’ve been missing that in my Zwift team time trials because you don’t know the other riders’ cadence.

But yesterday I did a YouTube rowing workout and while keeping pace with the workout leader I noticed I was smiling. It makes it easier somehow and more pleasurable.

The pleasure of synchronized activities with other people isn’t just found in sports.

It’s true too in music. That’s part of why singing with other people makes us happy.

Synchronous movements is known to form social bonds across divides. See Moving in sync creates surprisingly social bonds among people. It also just plain and simple makes us feel good. “Many group activities boost our sense of belonging, but research shows that doing things synchronously can build even stronger social ties and create a greater sense of well-being. Crew rowing, line dancing, choir singing or simply tapping fingers in sync increases generosity, trust and tolerance toward others, often beyond effects seen in more disorderly doings. It can even increase people’s threshold for pain.”

When people ask what I miss being physically distant from others, this is one of the things. It took a rowing workout to get me to realize that. Who knows what’s next? Maybe I’ll see if there are any good Aikido basic movement follow along tutorials on YouTube.

People in martial arts wear kneeling outside. Photo by Thao Le Hoang on Unsplash. I can’t kneel any more but I still appreciate the harmony.
accessibility · Aikido · fitness · injury

Aikido Sundays

Sam B

I recently blogged about my inability to just walk away from Aikido. I still love it. I miss it.  I found myself back on the mat Sunday morning when the opportunity presented itself. Of course, I logged it in the 219 in 2019 group. I wrote, “Most of an Aikido class including some partner techniques, not just basic movements. Still trying to figure out what I can and can’t do with my knee in this condition.”

It’s not like running. I’ll never run again. I can’t. Even if I got new knees, I couldn’t run.

Obviously, I can’t kneel and some of the breakfalls are off limits. But I found I was able to practice some of the falls which made me happy because with the stiff, sore knee I’ve been more worried than usual about falling on the ice this winter.

And the thing is if I met someone with a knee like mine, I would tell them that Aikido is worthwhile. All the things I love about Aikido remain the same as when I wrote about it in 2012.  I love how gentle it is. I love the rhythm and ritual. I love learning to fall. I love the age range and the diversity of the participants. I wish there were a class with modified movements where I wasn’t the only person who couldn’t do all the things.

The question is, can I keep my ego on the shelf and not wish for the knee I used to have? I think maybe I can.

I think, come fall, I’ll visit the Aikido dojos here in Guelph.

aging · Aikido · fall

Falling well and melting into the ground

Sam B2 Comments

A senior resolves not to fall in 2019.

Lots of friends shared this Globe and Mail first person account of falling. It’s a moving piece and it got me thinking about falling, again. I’ve blogged lots about it. I’ve also blogged about fear of falling and its bad effects, since moving less out of fear is also really bad for us as we age.

So much of the emphasis in commentary is on not falling. And I get that. There’s lots we can do to avoid falling: strength training, balance work, etc. We can also wear boots with grippy things on the sole, put snow tires on our bikes, shovel and salt our walkways.

We can also work on strengthening our bones so that when we do fall, we’re less likely to break things.

And yet, sometimes falling is inevitable.

Then it’s important to know how to fall well.

Most of us do things that make falling worse. We stiffen up. We brace ourselves. We try to put off falling as long as possible. We stick out our arms to break our fall. These things make it more likely that we’ll break something.

What to do instead? Relax. Get low to the ground so you’re not falling from a great height. Imagine yourself gently melting into the ground. Curl yourself into a ball. Weirdly, embrace the fall. I’m going to fall with style!

How do you learn this? Muscle memory, practise. You don’t need to be a black belt rock star in a martial art. Go get a yellow belt and practise falling. I went to Aikido the other Sunday for the first time in a couple of years. I was happy to find that I still fell softly on the mats. That class I fell dozens of times. In an advanced class it might be hundreds.

Or take out some mats at the gym and fall and get back up again. Repeat each time you’re there.

Akido isn’t just for young people. See. Here’s a story about a dojo just for older women. The photo below is from that story.

Babushkas fight club

Aikido · fitness · injury

Back on the mat and realizing I’m not ready to say goodbye just yet

Sam B15 Comments

I’ve mourned here for running. See Sam struggles not to run, ever! I’ve said goodbye to soccer.

But I haven’t said goodbye to Akido even though I haven’t been in a couple of years. It’s partly because it’s too sad. I really miss it. I draft posts about it but I never hit “publish.” I left because of my left knee mostly but also because there’s no Akido in Guelph.

Akido and I don’t have a perfect relationship. I love parts of it and struggle with others.

And I think, in my heart of hearts, I don’t want to say goodbye. I want to go back on the mat. And on Sunday I did.

I was visiting my friend Rob, who started Aikido with me, and who now has a black belt and teaches the students at the Western University Aikido Club. My daughter Mallory is also a member of that club.

Sarah and I were in town for Rob’s 60th birthday party Saturday night. There were lots of Akido people at the party and somehow we ended up agreeing to come to the Sunday morning class. They’re a persuasive bunch.

I wasn’t sure how much I’d remember. But the basic movements came back once my bare feet touched the mat. So too did my Akido smile. I miss you Akido!

aging · Aikido · disability · injury · monthly check in · running

Sam’s monthly check-in: What’s up, what’s down, the February version

Sam B

I’m very happy to have a plan for my knee. I’ve had my first monovisc injection. Felt weird but it seems to be helping. I’m continuing physio. And I’m getting a custom unloading knee brace, being fitted March 2.

I’m trying to come to terms with the upshot of all this knee news. No Pride Run this year? Okay. No Pride Run ever? I’m bursting into tears. No more Aikido ever? That also makes me super sad. Of course, then I feel like a baby given how much worse others have it. You know this cycle, I’m sure.

It’s okay to have big feelings. It’s okay to be sad. I know.

Just because others have it worse that doesn’t my situation go away. It’s still sad. It’s still real.

What might help take my mind off all the sad things? A cruise! I’m going on a cruise in the South Pacific with my sister-in-law Susan who blogs here from time to time. She has her own big health news to deal with and I’m sure we’ll talk lots. I’m looking forward to that. But we’ll also snorkel, and drink fruity drinks by the poolside, and look at beautiful islands. Why hello Bora Bora!

I’ve never gone south in the winter before except to ride my bike. And Arizona, while a lovely temperature for bike riding, isn’t exactly steamy and warm. I’m excited. With the new big job, I’m ready to get away and relax.

Before the big trip, I’ve got a work trip to Vancouver. I’m going to fundraising school for academic leaders.

The upshot of all this busy travel is that there’ll be no personal training in February though I’m sure there’s a weight room and a swimming pool on the boat. I’m looking forward to giving pool running and maybe aquafit a try.

When I come back my March focus will be selling my house in London and buying one in Guelph.

Bye bye beautiful old London house!

People keep telling me that moving is one of the most stressful events in life, right after the death of a spouse. Turns out though that that’s not true. When it comes to stressful life events buying and selling houses and moving doesn’t even make the top 20. See here. But it is a lot of work.

And then April is the publication of our book and a lot of launch related activity. I’m gearing up.

Check out my Amazon author page!

So much going on!

[Drawing of a purple rabbit on a small brown boat on water. The rabbit says “I will learn to navigate this new part of my life.” in a pink speech bubble.] By EMM, not Emma.

Aikido · fitness · Guest Post · motivation · yoga

Guest Post: A Compatible Movement Practice (part 2 of 3)

springel2 Comments

Really, yoga is literally right next door to my home: zero commute time, zero extra carbon emissions, frequent classes with highly-regarded teachers… Plus, the people coming in and out just exude a kind of peaceful stretchy wisdom I should want to want for myself. The yoga people are actually very nice, not all of those people are cis-straight women with lululemon bodies. So I suppressed my trepidation.

Over several introductory sessions, I was relieved that nobody seemed exasperated with me for being unshaven, restless, too tightly-wound to touch my toes, and allergic to anything form-fitting. I did feel physically worked-out after each class, and the teacher seemed to be full of insight. My partner had long since gotten with the program. She does yoga regularly and even looks forward to it. It’s so clearly good for her. We could be a happy yoga household, right?

Yet I remained lukewarm at the prospect of going back, setting up the colorful mat that would define my bubble for the hour, and imitating pose after pose. If that first series of yoga classes felt like a sustained insult to my mildly butch self-image, surely I should embrace this as the spiritual challenge of working through the yuckily gendered semiotics of my embodiment. (“My ego feels like it’s in downward dog the whole time. Is that a good thing?,” I asked my friends.) Who was I to reject stamina and coordination and enlightenment? Something about the bodily discipline of yoga felt vaguely stifling, as though I might be able to visit, but could not make a home for myself there.

My yoga-loving partner listened patiently to my ambivalence. She did not crave the things I had treasured in past practices — things like laser-focused intensity, swinging hard at things, having to react quickly to shifting stimuli, being occasionally upside-down and underwater with my legs wedged into a boat. But she listened. I began to own my yearning for adrenaline and kinetic challenge. I yearned for these things, during yoga, the same way my kid craves coffee ice cream instead of the rest of the rice and veggies on her plate.

But here’s the hard thing about self-knowledge: Knowing that I crave something is not the same as knowing whether it’s good for me. And I felt as though the whole world had begun quietly chanting at me that it was time for my middle-aged self to learn to Eat Those Veggies. (My partner, meanwhile, loves all vegetables openly, and doesn’t understand how eating them could seem like a chore.)

Luckily, my therapist dismissed my yoga-vegetable-guilt-complex and forged ahead with brainstorming further ideas for a workable fitness regime. As I parried each suggestion with logistical objections or a picky aversions, I braced for a lecture about rationalization, laziness, and self-sabotage. Instead, she urged me firmly to focus again on aikido. She had seen the way my eyes lit up about aikido when I narrated my long history. “Scour the internet!,” she said. “Get leads from every dojo in driving distance, email friends of friends of friends to get recommendations for freelance instructors. Put out an SOS on craigslist, if that’s what it takes!”

Aikido and I had been seriously together for only a year, back when I was about 30. A relationship can only develop so far in one year, but I was a single and child-free itinerant academic when we met, so I had been able to immerse myself in dojo life, learning from an elegantly-bearded and compact Burmese sensei who radiated gentleness and precision. When I left that city because of a job, I found myself in a place remote from any aikido community. At the time I didn’t grieve much, since various projects kept me busy. But whenever I talked about it, there was a telltale sigh of loss.

So of course I rolled my eyes at this therapist and told her I had already done plenty of looking, and I was rusty at aikido by now anyway, so this yearning was pointlessly nostalgic. Surely I just needed to grieve like a mature person for not having an aikido connection anymore and find a way to hang in there and fall in love with… yoga?

But I promised I would put in a good faith effort at finding an aikido connection again. And on that Monday afternoon, my online search turned up an actual dojo within a workable half-hour drive, with all the right signs of hosting an active and friendly community. (I swear, it was hiding from google last time I looked!)  I dashed home, rummaged through storage for my old wrinkled gi, and drove there just in time for the 6pm “basics” class listed online.

See Part 1 here and Part 3 here

Aikido · fitness · Guest Post · motivation

Guest Post: A Compatible Movement Practice (part 1 of 3)

springel2 Comments

I’m back together with an old flame after years of being apart. People see it on my face and ask my what this radiant energy is about. I find myself gushing about how — despite the larger grim picture of the world — everything is right with this little tiny corner of life!

I’d been drifting through the fitness doldrums for years. Satisfying bursts of activity came around now and then, like the out-of-breath exhilaration of shoveling just enough snow or being drafted into a little kids’ soccer game. But these were serendipitous. There was no libidinal zing drawing me forward between one workout and the next. It seemed my choices were to go without physical rigor altogether or to settle — to press forward into patterns of exercise that didn’t really fit me well.

So, what makes a fitness practice fit? Perhaps it’s not so different from how it is with intimate relationships. We carry visceral and often inarticulate cues about what works and does not, and yet all the noise of social norms and local expectations can obscure and distort these cues. And ultimately, as it is with a partner, compatibility has everything to do with quirks of embodied temperament. A practice can possess many of the virtues one wants to want, yet fail to engage us fully. Having to explain (spoiler alert!) why I wasn’t warming up to yoga, for example — to people who love yoga! — felt like trying to articulate to someone why I could not reciprocate their crush on me. I might end up reassuring, apologetically: “Hey, it’s not you, it’s me.” But of course it is you (talking to you now, Yoga!) who is not a good fit for me.

I should clarify that it’s not as though I haven’t had some great satisfying flings over the years with various ways of getting my body in motion. Among these I’d count soccer, racquetball, hiking, aikido, bicycle-commuting, tai chi, parkour, and kayaking. It’s just that things (always different things!) have gotten in the way each time: I had injuries, moved away from facilities and playing partners, had a child, moved again, got too busy, got left behind when teachers moved, and balked at the new commutes and scheduling obstacles. Despite heartbreaks and missed connections, I would intermittently cast about for more satisfying ways to move my body. It’s just that the trend was discouraging. I was getting convinced that I am just too damn picky.

springer_kayak_looking_up_at_roots
“Everything can be messy:” author sits in long thin wooden kayak at the edge of a river, touching and looking up at a massive tangle of roots exposed when a silver maple fell away from the river.

Now, I really do hate those romantics who insist that there is exactly one fated bond, which will come into our lives just when we demonstrate sufficient faith. Given how messed-up the world is, our options when it comes to exercise are compromised too — by distorted ideals of body and gender, by dynamics of class privilege and ableism, by forms of cultural imperialism and misunderstanding. But of course that’s true of virtually every social endeavor worth undertaking. It’s nonetheless worth holding out for those relationships (with persons, with community, with work) that will meet us half-way and make the whole experience very much Not A Drag. It’s OK to insist on an exercise practice that is not a drag.

Some months ago, my therapist agreed that it was time to help get me unstuck with respect to exercise. Self-knowledge Lesson #1, we agreed, was that I needed SSRI: Scheduled Social Reality Involved. If there are zero expectant faces to whom I must answer, I am depending on my own arbitrary and painlessly revokable decision to “work out” at this or that time. And something always seems more urgent to me than even a 7-minute workout: fretting about bills, surveying the laundry, staring balefully at the sinkful of dishes, grading and writing or feeling bad about overdue grading and writing, reading and commenting about terrible (or wonderful) things online. I needed to find a “This-Happens-Now” kind of thing.

Also, ROTC: Realistic Ongoing Time Commitment. In other words, it couldn’t be like the very sexy kayak gathering that required me to load up and drive over and paddle across and roll around and drive back and hose down and put gear away for a total of six hours on Wednesdays — which meant (given the pressures of life, work, and parenting) actually giving my upper body an isolated workout about twice per year. I needed something I could follow through with, and that wouldn’t penalize me or anyone else for occasionally dropping the ball to deal with a household illness or a work deadline.

Also, NAAK: No Aerobics of Any Kind, and that also means no Zoomba. Nothing where somebody else chooses a soundtrack for my ears to swallow, nothing where the social vibe is around rhythmically sexified bodies, nothing where the main advertised benefit is calories burned — as if one needs to earn permission to eat.

Those three conditions seemed picky enough. So I half-heartedly signed up with the excellent next-door yoga studio. It seemed like a good idea at the time.

See Part 2 here and Part 3 here

Guest Post: A Compatible Movement Practice (part 3 of 3)
Aikido · fitness · Guest Post

Guest Post: A Compatible Movement Practice (part 3 of 3)

springel

Dear reader, it had been fifteen years. At the end of an hour of clumsy but exhilarating practice, I felt more than a little queasy. I had, after all, stepped into the equivalent of three dozen tight loop-de-loop rides in short succession. I’d been moved around more than my stomach was ready for.

But I also felt moved in a good way, by the compatibility of it. Like the relief of being in a relationship where no sliver of the self is compelled to shut up and hide under the table. (OK, the sliver of self called my left knee does seek to be excused from most of the ankle-sitting time in aikido, but accommodation is a thing!) Severe stiffness in my core muscles set in by Tuesday night; I was so sore I could hardly move, and I couldn’t wait to go back.

You can find out lots about aikido if you’re curious, but I’ll offer my own unofficial sketch. Aikido* is a 99% defensive martial art that hinges on this insight: a person who engages in an aggressive attack necessarily loses their center. Learn to perceive accordingly, and you (the target of the attack) can choose to keep your center, recognize the instability in the aggressor, and re-direct all that incoming energy. With practice, you can move into the eye of the storm, deflect, trip up, confound, and frustrate a wide range of attacks — so long as your focus is not on hurting the other but on responding dynamically to their projected effort.

Practice involves watching a technique demonstration, then pairing up to alternate turns for a while. Intermittently, the teacher adds a tip or a variation and has everyone change partners. Performing the techniques (being the nage* or thrower) means orienting to an initially unmanageable constellation of pointers about hands and feet and head and hips, but all these gradually give way to an inarticulate muddling-through. As the technique is mastered it requires less and less muscular exertion.

Taking the fall (being the uke*), however, is always a workout. In a good dojo it’s a safe workout, as proper forms of falling and rolling are top priority. But to be helpful, if you’re the uke, you present as much of a sincere blow or grab as the partner’s skill-level can handle. In the same practice hall, each pair quietly finds their mutual wavelength, some playing hard and fast, others deliberate and gentle. The partner aims to recognize and side-step your move, to harness all that excess energy (think of a baseball swing that doesn’t connect), and to send you tumbling. If the technique is done right, you will tumble exactly as hard as you swing or grab. Choose your adventure!

I had virtually forgotten about some of the things that make aikido a good fit for me. It might be the most intensive quasi-agonistic contact activity that simply does not classify bodies — not by gender, by sex, nor by weight. In the dojo, I am just about entirely free of the pressure to perform gender one way or another, whether it’s coping with machismo and vindicating my not-male body (OMG, ask me about parkour), managing sexualized body contours, or worrying about how flimsy my upper arms are. And the basic uniform — the gi* — is comfortable and minimally revealing. It doesn’t broadcast or amplify how our bodies are gendered, whether legs and underarms are shaved and/or dreadfully pale, what our waist-hip ratio is, and so on. The gi itself is boring, I admit. But the hakama* split-skirt worn by black-belt level practitioners is graceful, grounded, and handsome as hell. I’ve never seen a person who doesn’t look stunning in a hakama.

Here’s another thing: I am thrilled that this social encounter is more than what developmental psychologists call “parallel play.” When aikidoists help one other rehearse by modeling threats and responses, it matters that there are different people with different physiques, different styles, different resistances. I don’t have to be an extrovert in class (hooray!), but I do have to tune my senses — proprioceptive, visual, balance, haptic — again and again for each person standing or kneeling before me. Small adjustments in technique and attitude will make all the difference between being swept up in the dance of momentum and being awkwardly stymied by some nagging detail. Either way, we often smile at the chance to get up and try again.

There is, of course, a “point” to aikido as a defensive art; I might eventually find myself coping with a physical aggression with the aid of trained reflexes. Also, it’s great to know how to fall and roll smoothly! But the more mundane practical application is symbolic: a thorough habituation to remembering how to stay grounded, how to recognize aggressive energy and to find ways to defuse it with minimal harm to the other.

The dojo I’m joining has a woman at the helm, and regularly draws students of various physical builds, ages, and gender presentations. The world of aikido is not uniform; there are multiple branches of the practice, each with a somewhat different history and flavor. Few teachers have made progress on translating aikido techniques and rituals into forms that do not presuppose a particular template of upright embodiment.

I do realize aikido is not the exciting resolution to everyone’s fantasies. But I hope for a world in which each of us finds some satisfying and compatible practice that takes us as we are, and keeps us coming back for more.

*All these terms follow Japanese pronunciation rules: the vowels are the same as in Spanish (ah, eh, ee, oh, oo), and every ‘g’ is a hard one, as in girl or get.

See Parts 1 and 2, here and here.

 

 

Aikido · Guest Post

Being okay with what is (Guest post)

Michelle Lynne Goodfellow3 Comments

img_8717

In a recent post (What if this is a good as it gets?), Sam mused about whether or not to quit aikido, or continue training – possibly forever as a green belt (4th kyu). I read the post with great interest, because I’ve recently struggled with the exact same dilemma, and I was curious to see where Sam landed. What if I, too, am a green belt forever?

I recently moved to a different city a couple of hours away from where I lived before, and have had to leave behind my (and Sam’s) dojo for a new one. It’s made me very reflective about aikido, although it’s not the first time I’ve pondered my long-term commitment to the sport.

There are many reasons why people practise martial arts. Some really like physical fighting, and enjoy learning techniques and improving their fighting skills, to get better at winning fights.

Some people like the physical exercise involved in martial arts training – the calisthenic warm-ups, the full-body workouts from taking a class.

Some people “chase” belts, and value the status from achieving a high rank in a martial art. Some people like the community and the camaraderie. Some people like all of the above.

Myself, I was initially drawn to aikido because it was beautiful and graceful and powerful and thrilling, whether I was performing one of aikido’s unique self-defense techniques, or on the receiving end of a technique. The movements were completely foreign to my body, but I loved learning to move my body in new ways. I loved seeing my progress as I gradually picked up the movements, learned the names of the techniques, and became proficient at some of them.

In the case of aikido, I also love the philosophy behind the sport – the idea that if you are attacked, you can have a positive impact on a situation, redirecting the energy and leaving the situation better than it was. This lesson really hit home off the mat when I was diagnosed with breast cancer over a year ago, and I realized that I was reacting to my diagnosis in a very unusual way because of my aikido training.

Which is not to say I haven’t thought about giving up aikido at any point over the past two-and-a-half years. In fact I’ve entertained the possibility more than once, as I’ve struggled with overuse injuries to my knees and right ankle. As much as I love aikido, I also want to be highly mobile for as long as possible, and I don’t want to risk permanent injury. At their worst, my chronic injuries have had me hobbled, and in constant pain.

Over the past year I’ve also had many, many conversations with a good friend who is an aikido black belt, and who was also facing the possibility of giving up aikido for the sake of his body. We talked about whether modifying aikido to accommodate our injuries was a game changer. With my knees the way they are, there are several kneeling techniques that are difficult, if not impossible, for me to do without pain.

At my old dojo I felt confident that I had the support of my sensei and many of the black belts in accommodating my injuries, and felt like I would be allowed to continue to progress through the ranks with modified tests – switching out the mandatory kneeling techniques that exacerbated my injuries for other, equally difficult ones that didn’t require kneeling.

It was hard leaving my old dojo behind when I moved, and a big part of the fear of joining a new dojo was wondering whether there would be similar accommodations for testing. Could I continue to progress through the ranks without doing all the mandatory techniques? I realized that I very much want to achieve at least sho-dan (first degree black belt), which at the moment is four belt tests away from my current level. And if I can’t progress any further in aikido, do I still want to attend classes?

My new dojo (which I have quickly grown to love) is very different from my old dojo. We practise the same style of aikido, but the dojo cho (head of the dojo) has a different teacher lineage than my former sensei. I’ve attended eight classes so far, and there are obvious differences in every single technique and movement, as well as many differences in the protocol and class rituals.

My new sensei is very traditional, and I wanted to come to the new dojo with humility and an openness to quickly adapt to any differences. I didn’t want to appear difficult or resistant to his teaching…  so I was quiet about my chronic injuries (which admittedly are doing pretty well at the moment – partly because there are fewer aikido classes per week at my new dojo, and my knees have therefore been getting more rest).

Last week Sensei surprised me by giving me the dojo testing syllabus, and encouraging me to learn the techniques that would be required for my next belt test. I don’t think either of us are under the illusion that I’m going to be testing anytime soon – my deficiencies in his style of aikido are glaringly obvious, given the multiple times he corrects my techniques each class.

I looked through the syllabus and noted that there are many differences between it and my old dojo’s syllabus. The kneeling techniques that gave me the most problems in the past aren’t required until closer to first dan (black belt). At that point, Sensei will hopefully know me much better, and might consider making accommodations for me.

Or he might not.

My new sensei has talked many times during class about how things must be done just so. When he is directing his corrections at the junior belts, he warns them repeatedly that candidates can fail tests – especially advanced black belt tests – for even small slip-ups, mistakes, or breaks in form. And I don’t doubt that he would fail someone, whereas at my old dojo if you were asked to test you were pretty assured of passing, since it was generally acknowledged that you weren’t asked if you weren’t ready to progress to the next belt level.

There’s an older participant at my new dojo; I chatted with him briefly a couple of weeks ago. He’s in his late 60s, a physician, and has been a student of Sensei’s for 30 years. Despite being a ni-dan (second degree black belt), he no longer practises the tachi-waza (standing hand-to-hand techniques), but only participates in the weapons classes, which are gentler on the body because they don’t required breakfalls and pins.

He seemed at peace with his modest belt level (given his many years of practice) and level of participation. He comes to watch the tachi-waza class before the weapons class, then does weapons, and that’s enough for him.

I’ve realized that for me, my belt level is not important. I would love to teach someday, and need a black belt to officially do that, but I don’t have to teach. What I do want is to keep learning, and I feel like there’s so much I can continue to learn at my new dojo. I have dozens of techniques in my repertoire, and now I can learn them all over again in the new sensei’s way. I love that he’s exacting – I love being precise with my techniques. Even the breakfalls are slightly different. I love that there are classes only three days a week instead of six days like at my old dojo – it’s easier on my body.

I don’t need a certain belt colour around my waist. What I do want is to keep learning. And I can certainly do that where I am now.

___

Michelle Lynne Goodfellow works in nonprofit and small business communications by day, and also enjoys writing, taking photographs, making art and doing aikido. You can find more of her work at michellelynnegoodfellow.com. Michelle has also written about her breast cancer journey on her blog, Kitchen Sink Wisdom.

Aikido

Sam gets more familiar with her wooden sword and gets ready to learn an awful lot more

Sam B3 Comments

It’s not easy being green, green as in the Aikido belt colour. And what if, just what if, for me, green is as good as it gets in Aikido? I’ve been worrying about that.

But I’ve decided to be positive about it and work at being the best green belt I can be. Maybe I won’t ever be able to roll well enough to train for a more advanced belt but I love Aikido and it’s all okay. I don’t need to be all type A, over achiever in all things! I’ve got a Wikipedia page that details my academic accomplishments. I’ve got a PhD. I’m a full professor. Maybe it’s okay to never have a black belt. Can I just be mellow about it?

I’m trying.

Saturday I showed up at the dojo for the first Saturday morning class I’d been able to attend in a long while. I was worried about rolling but I needn’t have been. After a few warm up rolls, we moved on the practice with weapons. I like the weapons aspect of Aikido training but it took some work to get there. See Channeling my inner warrior for my first exposure to Aikido weapons techniques and some of my initial reservations.

Here I am a white stripe ago with my bokken, wooden Aikido sword. (It’s a thing of beauty, made of Purpleheart-“When freshly cut the heartwood of Purpleheart is a dull grayish/purplish brown. Upon exposure the wood becomes a deeper eggplant purple.” Thanks Rob and Sensei Matthew.)

Sam with wooden sword, while wearing Aikido gi, in the lobby of the student rec centre

There was a big announcement in our class about the changing Aikido testing curriculum at our dojo, which will now include weapons techniques and demonstrations. There’s an awful lot to learn. This means that there will be  a pause in testing. Big sigh of  relief here. The earliest green belts can test for brown belt with stripes is the spring. Phew! I was so happy to hear that. I hadn’t realized quite how much testing had stressed me out until I heard that news.

I am also very excited to have something new to learn that doesn’t require getting better at rolling. Also, weapons techniques are very easy to practice outside. I love being outdoors and I am already planning an event with bokkens at the beach.

So expect to hear more about Aikido weapons…

Here’s the first thing we are all working on, Happo Giri, or 8 direction cut.

And here’s Steven Seagal with swords, just because.