Tag Archives: aikido

tassajara

{01 August 2010}

last weekend was an experiment in being off the grid; for my birthday my brother and sister-in-law treated me to a weekend at Tassajara, the san francisco zen center’s monastery in the ventana wilderness. most of the year Tassajara is a closed and working monastery, but they open up to guest season for a few months each summer. as a mountain retreat, they got it right. getting there isn’t easy: the road in to the center of the remote valley is the bumpiest, steepest, toughest 14 miles of dirt road i’ve ever encountered (even having grown up driving around the backwoods of idaho), so it’s not a trip to undertake lightly, and there’s no quick trips back to town once you’re there. the sense of isolation is complete. they have the required amenities (running water, delicious vegetarian food), but not the unnecessary ones (electricity, internet/phone service). this works because: kerosene lanterns are charming, but outhouse stink is not.

staying at Tassajara is the opposite of being on a cruise ship. rather than providing a day full of activities, Tassajara provides a beautiful, open space, in which guests can just slow down for a little while. there isn’t much to do besides hike, read, nap, and bathe in the beautiful bathhouses (fed by natural hotsprings). zen practice is available for those who want to participate, and though i am fascinated by it (my dojo in chicago also served as a zen temple and many of the aikidoka i trained with were also zen students), it also terrifies me. seriously, the thought of sitting sesshin for five days makes me feel panicky. i can’t even get up the nerve to attend a half-hour zazen. it’s an understatement to say that i have trouble with being still. i’m quite aware that this is something i need to come to terms with. just…i’ll get there when i’m ready. until then i creep around the edges, with things like aikido and yoga and hanging around monasteries as a guest.

in spite of the fact that i’m normally an action-packed-adventure vacationer, there really is something profound about a vacation in which there’s nothing to do. i noticed that i walk differently when i’m not in a hurry. (and i’m pretty much always in a hurry). my posture changes, i relax muscles that are normally tensed, my whole gait & posture change. and this transformation was almost immediate. within minutes of arriving, i found my whole body felt different. while hiking i’d catch myself trying to push further, faster – get some cardio exercise, or see what was around the next bend. and then i’d remind myself to try being deliberate in my actions, just to see what it’s like. there’s nothing i have to accomplish with this hike, no time i’m due back. to notice where i walk, what i see, what the path feels like under my feet. i’d grasp that focus for a few moments, then it would slip away again. like all unfamiliar habits, it only comes through practice. a practice i’m not quite ready to undertake, but i know it’s out there. but for the short duration of the vacation, i found that going off the grid was easier than it seemed. its like quitting a job you’ve worked very hard at. quitting seems like it’ll be agonizing, but once you actually pack up your things and leave, it’s easier to detach than you thought it was going to be (is there an echo of a zen lesson in here? yeah yeah, shut up little bird on my shoulder.)

also, i knocked off a 101 in 1001 list item, by the way — skinny dipping in the creek.

stretching.

{16 December 2009}

i’m a big believer in the “do something that scares you, just a little, every day” adage. i started taking that seriously that a few years ago, and, without wanting to get all preachy or nuthin’, it has made all the difference.

but since i moved to california, there’s something or other in my new job that scares me every day. which means that i’ve not really needed or wanted to pursue other, scary activities in life. working half the evening, then coming home, cooking dinner, writing or zoning out over some tv and knitting, kinda sounds great to me most nights. when the sun was up later i’d go for a hike after work if there was enough light (there isn’t these days, with the winter solstice less than a week away).

but working long hours and hanging out with the cat isn’t really a way to make friends and build a life here. a career, perhaps, but not a life. for a while i was running with a women’s running group, but it closed up shop in october. but with the end of the year coming up rapidly, i was running out of time to do several of the things i had promised myself i’d do this year.

last week i finally checked out a dojo where i think i’d like to train: Aikido of Berkeley. walking into a new dojo, walking in new anywhere, is incredibly hard for me, i’m so fucking shy. but going to class the first time at Shinjinkai was one of the hardest, and best, decisions i ever made. so i went. i’m going to check out another dojo or two, but i’m pretty sure this is a place i’d like to train at.

next on the scary-to-join list is volunteering with One Brick. if you don’t know about One Brick, check them out — they are in the Bay Area, Chicago, DC, New York, Minneapolis, and Seattle*. the idea is that they make it easy for people to volunteer their time – one evening at a time, no long term commitments, and after every event, folks go out for a beer and hang out. do good work, hang out with other cool people. good deal, right? and it was. my burning awkward shyness aside, i did chat with interesting, nice people while we repackaged several hundred pounds of raisins at the SF Foodbank, then went out for Vietnamese food afterward. it made me miss Chicago, where i already had friends and a life and a place and a community, terribly. but it’s not going to get better till i suck it up and find some communities of my own.

next week: going to the community center pool and swimming for the first time in 8 months. i’m not a good swimmer. and gyms are intimidating. but i will persevere, intimidating gym!

*hey, i just realized that i know people in all of those cities.

ramblings in the airport after a nearly perfect weekend

{11 August 2009}

So I was supposed to drive to Ashland and see a show at OSF, but I discovered that the Pothole that Nearly Ate My Car last week actually really did nearly eat my car, and I need two new tires and a NEW WHEEL (wtf?) before the car is road-trip worthy. So much for saving up for a new tv…but, I decided to take advantage of a non-ideal start to the trip. Instead of dropping money on the car w/out having time to shop estimates around, I decided that the repair could wait till Monday. So I played hooky with the rest of Friday, burned some frequent flier miles, and hopped a last minute flight to Chicago.

Saturday morning I played in the Ultimate Frisbee Collective’s Finale Game*. As teams sports go, we were a scrappy group of theatre geeks, most of whom have some innate athletic ability but little or no talent for team sports. But for the past two years, we have played nearly every Saturday, rain or shine (or snow), and the ultimate game has often been the best part of my week.

For my efforts, and in recognition of being the only non-carnivore (also the only girl) on the team, I received a trophy shaped like a piece of tofu with arms and legs,** aptly named the “Facon [Fakon?] Award”. The winning team received a trophy with a piece of bacon on it, also similarly anthropomorphized.

In the afternoon Shinjinkai held the fourth annual fall-a-thon fundraiser, raising money for the zendo (rural retreat center) we are building in Wisconsin. I had planned to drop in, cheer and generally be supportive, but a minor injury sustained by someone in an earlier round meant that i got to jump in as nage for one of the later rounds. In 15 minutes I threw a contestant 305 times! The impressive feat isn’t the throwing – it was the guy taking the falls. Last year I took 206 falls and was pretty sure I was going to barf by the end. Anyway, it was so so so good to see all of my fellow aikidoka. Just being back in the room, the scent of the incense, the polished wood floors and textured mat under bare feet – it all felt so comfortingly familiar. I’ve been short on familiar and comfort, lately.

As I was changing into my gi in the locker room I looked at myself in the mirror and remembered how at first I felt so awkward in my uniform, it felt too big, goofy, poorly fit. I felt too tall, long-limbed, my balance too high in my body, i moved like a dancer, not a martial artist — no grounding, my center of gravity up high in my chest rather than centered low in the abdomen. I know those feelings of impossible awkwardness weren’t just born of insecurity because I see that look in new students, in their faces, in the way their gi hangs on their body, in the way they move on and off the mat. I felt that way for a long time. And I’m not sure when I started feeling at home in my gi, in the dojo, in the martials arts. When i started taking newer students under my wing and helping them through the maze of confusing rituals, when to bow, where to leave your shoes, how to sweep the mat in a smooth, even rhythm in step with the student before and behind you.

I’m not saying I’m accomplished or anything. On the contrary, the point here is perhaps that it took me two and a half years of training just to be confident in the most basic of rituals. Any wonder, then, why aikido is a martial art that takes a life time of dedication and study to master.

Since I moved to California I haven’t made any effort to find a dojo yet – there’s just no time for training. And I know how frustrated I would be if I were training once or twice a week, never moving forward or improving, just see-sawing back and forth. Right now there is pretty much time for work, and running. But being back at Shinjinkai for the afternoon reminded me that this is not a part of my life that I want to leave behind in Chicago. I will need to be patient in order to find the time to resume a proper study of it, but I’ll also need to make the effort to find that time. My profession isn’t one that just hands over free time if I don’t make an effort to wrestle some away now and then.

The trip at once was good for me to shake me out of my all-work-all-the-time routine here and remind me that I am more than the sum of my days and nights, that my life is bigger than the work I am doing here now. But I was confused all weekend that I was on vacation in Chicago and returning to San Francisco. I’d forget which airport I was coming from or going to, invert “back home” and “out here” when I was speaking about my new home or my old one. While waiting for my connecting flight in Denver, I had a moment of confusion when a Chicago-bound flight was directly across the hall from a San Francisco-bound flight. I’m headed home, but where is that? This weekend was restorative and troubling all at once. Restorative because it was a reminder that work is not me. I am not my job. I spend long hours at work, and when I’m there I work hard and care passionately about it. But it does not define me any more than any other single thing defines me. I am a sum of many parts, of preferences and fears and activities and plans for the future. I am martial arts and running marathons and making theatre and crafting things with my hands and wanting to explore the world. I am staying up too late and never getting enough sleep, hating to wear shoes and carrying around deep fears of vomit, spiders and mediocrity, a love for fireflies on Chicago summer nights and lingering over after-dinner coffee after a good meal. I am a terminally off-key singing voice and an aunt and someday maybe a parent, someday maybe a very good production manager. Right now I’m mostly working on the career part. But all in good time. My friend Callie handed me a bit of wisdom a few months ago when she pointed out that the great thing about getting to your thirties and facing big life-changing unrest like moving is knowing that you are not defined by your place. That you are still your same self no matter where you wake up in the morning. She’s right, and it’s a good feeling to realize that.

And it was troubling because being back in the community of Chicago makes me feel more sharply the lack of community in my new life. I’m new here, of course, and I know it takes time and work. But it’ll be an uphill battle, I think. Mill Valley is not a community where I am going to find like-minded artists or people my age. It’s an adorable and ritzy little Marin County hamlet that eschews chain stores and has polymillion*** dollar mansions in the hills where successful doctors and lawyers who commute to the city for their jobs raise their kids, disaffected spoiled teenagers who slump around downtown and congregate on the lawn in front of City Hall after it closes, looking as bored as one can possibly be in a town filled with the most spectacular weather and nature that one could ask for. I will have to go further afield to find my community.

* For some reason, the west coast is responsible for breaking up the band: at least four of the core players are in the midst of either executing or contemplating moves to various west coast cities.

** which seems to be working at cross-purposes, doesn’t it? Anthropomorphizing the thing that people eat who don’t like to eat things that have legs or eyes?

***I’ll make up words when I want to make up words. This is my blog. Bug off.

more from the training log

{20 April 2009}

more stuff from the training log. i passed my 4th kyu test in aikido! this is something i’ve been working toward really for the entire past year, ever since testing for 5th kyu in april last year, but for the past two months i’ve been very focused on it and logging a lot of hours on the mat.

i passed! by the time i got to the end of the review week, i was no longer really worried about passing. i definitely didn’t have a perfect test, by any means, but i felt good and focused throughout.

so the 5th kyu test was first, and i sat through all of that, trying to make sure my legs didn’t falling asleep in seiza. when the 5th kyu test was ending i could feel my heart starting to pound, fight-or-flight instinct kicking in a surge of adrenaline, and i tried to summon calm and focus, breathing through it. then Sensei got that cheshire cat-like grin on his face and said, “we’re going to try an experiment.” what? as experiment? now? shit! he placed two sheets of paper in front of him, and said, “in xx other dojo…” and for a moment i thought what he was about to do was test me on some other dojo’s test requirements. then he went on, “…they conduct different level tests simultaneously.” so he called both me for 4th and tom for 3rd up at the same time, and conducted our tests simultaneously. which was chaotic at times, but otherwise worked just fine. a couple of times where the stages of our tests didn’t line up, he’d call for one of us to sit down. which actually meant that i got a 3-4 minute rest twice during my test! which, though it was nice, i didn’t really need. the endurance training i’ve been doing all spring came through for me, and though i was breathing hard and sweating, i never felt exhausted, never felt like my form and focus were suffering for exhaustion, something which i often see on other students’ faces at the end of tests.

my weapons work was not great, nerves and a serious case of sweaty palms (it was at the end of the test, in a warm room and i was a sweat monster at that point) made the jo stick to my hand and not run smoothly, and it showed up my lack of basic training. also i had been working on getting the correct knee down during ura and omote sankyo pins, and on friday Enmei had showed me i was using the wrong knee in both cases, and once i tried to fix them both i got them so tangled in my head that i could no longer remember which was which. and it seemed like i did a LOT of sankyo. he called sankyo for practically every attack on the test requirements. the other thing that really tripped me up was in opening taisabaki, Sensei called for ai hanmi katatedori ushiro tenkan. what? ushiro tenkan? that was definitely not on the test requirements. so i struggled with that one, my brain trying to parse the japanese, backwards and turning, backwards and turning, and with some recommendations from sensei i fumbled through it and he assigned it to me as “homework.” not the most brilliant start to the test, but i recovered. i f’d up the ura version of ushiro ryotedori ikkyo the first time, turning it into sankyo somehow, but the second time i got it right. and, most importantly, i didn’t freeze up over kokyunage. i biffed one attack, but otherwise the kokyunage went pretty smoothly. and i did a pretty good job of remembering to show variations before i was asked. i’ll get more specific feedback from the instructors and yudansha over the next week or so.

i’m most pleased with my endurance, and with my focus. i was almost completely unaware of the other students on the mat, it was just me, uke, and Sensei’s voice barking commands or corrections.

and i really feel so much more competent having done the work for this test preparation. i’ve made more connections in my head between attack, taisabaki, and technique. i have a long way to go, but i can see the glimmer of those connections much better now than i could two months ago. i’m also really really sad about leaving this dojo community. i will certainly benefit from broadening my training into other dojos and styles, of course. but i heart the people here. funny, that i can write “i heart” with regards to people who routinely inflict pain, isn’t it?

friday night i posted something on my facebook status page regarding the test, and someone commented, “you’re a martial artist?” and it made me kind of feel awesome to be able to say, well, yeah. i am. i’ve accomplished something here. i am different than i was two and a half years ago. in many ways, of course, but this is one of the significant ones.

fight club, with a japanese twist

{28 July 2008}

who will put up $10 to see me get beat up?!

(it’s for a good cause…)

8.3.08 addendum:

fall-a-thon was a success – i took 205 falls in 15 minutes – that’s one every 4.4 seconds! and the event raised nearly $14,000.

a huge thank you to the friends & family who pledged their support (and $). with your help Korinji Foundation actually initiated the purchase of a piece of land in rural Wisconsin this week. this fall we’ll be organizing trips to the site to do work projects clearing the grounds, camping, and training outdoors. ever since i’ve moved to the midwest i’ve missed the camping/hiking/nature portion of my life in idaho. chicago is full of great big city things but i do miss the natural world. now i’ll get to combine my new pursuit – aikido training – with my lifelong love of being in the out-of-doors.

my friends: you are the best. (also, it’s not too late to make a donation now if you want/are able to do so).

(don’t worry mom i’m not falling on my head in this picture, i’m actually executing a roll over my arm/shoulder/back.)

{01 May 2008}

in the context of my own small cosmos, two important things happened last week.

1) spring arrived in chicago. there was that day, that one day when finally the trees went from being black tree skeletons silhouetted against the spring-blue sky to fuzzy green canopies shading out the sky. i wore flip flops to work. flip flops! i dearly love to be barefoot, i take my shoes off every moment i can (under my desk, as soon as i walk into an apartment), and it makes me terribly happy to be able to walk around nearly barefoot in the summers. the fields where we play ultimate turned from mud puddles to emerald green grass seemingly overnight. i am sprouting heirloom tomato, bell pepper, basil and cilantro seeds in my windowsil (the danger of frost not yet being past). summer in chicago makes life good.

2) the other item of note is that i passed my 5th kyu exam in aikido on april 19. i started my aikido training in january of 07, so this represents a big milestone. the way rank work in my dojo, you begin training unranked, then move through the kyu (grades) 5th, 4th, and so on up through 1st kyu. after 1st kyu you test for shodan (first blackbelt), and then most up through the grades of yudansha (blackbelt). most aikido schools don’t use colored belts other than white and black, but it’s the same general notion.

the format of the test, for those not familiar with it, is that each of the students taking a particular test (this time there were three of us testing for 5th kyu) is called up on to the mat. the rest of the school sits in seiza along the edge of the mat, the test committee (made up of the yudansha) sits at one end, sensei sits at the other end. from there we are asked to demonstrate any of a series of techniques. for those that require a partner then another student volunteers. there’s a lot of ritual and a lot of formality. the pressure can be really intense. i remember leaving the first test that i attended (would be a year ago, last april i guess) sort of open-mouthed, thinking, i have to do that?

anyway, i’m copying another passage here that i wrote into my training log. beware a lot of waxing poetic and circular thinking.

april 19. 5th kyu exam.
first, the important news: i passed! this was not a total surprise, i was fairly confident that i was going to pass, but regardless it’s a relief to actually get there and have that validation. i arrived at the dojo early enough to watch & take ukeumi for the kids’ test, which was ridiculously cute. kind of amazing to think that a 6-year old can think that rondori (multiple attackers) is the most fun game ever, when to us adults (well, at least to me) it’s positively terrifying. here’s a rondori clip for you non-aikido folks. note the awesome 80’s hairstyles.

now on to my test. what i was most pleased with myself was the amount of focus i felt out there on the mat. i had a moment or two of blind panic right at the beginning, but after that i felt very calm and focused. i was aware of my uke, aware of Glen calling the test requirements, and aware of Sensei (being called first i ended up in the right-most position on the mat closest to where Sensei was seated, which, as he pointed out, meant i got extra special attention). aside from those three people i was pretty much oblivious to the rest of the room, which was good. i didn’t get tangled up thinking about who was watching me or what i must look like, or if i had screwed up that last technique or forgotten to do something, etc. i didn’t even look over once to see how the other two guys testing with me were doing. (which also means that i never had to cheat and look over at one of them to figure out what a technique was).

there were definitely things i got corrected on, but they were the things i knew i was weak in (inexperienced in suburi, strikes that weren’t sharp/aggressive/martial enough, the occasional extra step that leads to sloppy technique, the proper form for mae ukemi (forward breakfalls), the fact that i nearly always do ushiro kaiten ukemi (backward rolls) on the same shoulder). but i felt like i took notes pretty well and didn’t get flustered or distracted. i was able to take and (hopefully) apply the correction and move on to the next step. i think i even parsed the japanese pretty well, though the tester usually followed the japanese call with some or all of it in english.

the test felt really long. we were out on the mat for more than 40 minutes, by my best estimate. i remember sweat just rolling down the sides of my face flushed red, feeling tired but thank god for my endurance training because i was able to reach down and push through that tired and keep going and keep my focus. if one thing stands out in my memory of watching other tests in the past it is seeing the student testing get physically and mentally exhausted and then just start to check out, lose focus, speed, precision. the endurance training i think really helps with that.

my friend marci kept promising me the value of passing my first rank exam would be that i’d feel more confident. she’s right, but i realize that the confidence doesn’t come from passing the test and knowing that i hold a rank as much as it comes from the mastery of skill that i had to go through in the past month of intense training.

i’m at a new place in my training, now. i feel on the verge of making connections that i didn’t have before. the question is whether i will go forward with it or lose that momentum? aikido has been a big cloud sort of blocking out the sun for the past few weeks, stealing my focus from other parts of my life (which i’ve given over willingly because i wanted this goal). there will be times in the future where tech, or marathon training, or other things will block out the sun and distract me from aikido.

and if i’m going to be serious about this, how many other things will i need to sacrifice to make room for this thing that has muscled its way into my life? i’m lucky that i’ve made some friendships in the dojo in the past few months, because aikido can be really hard to talk about but i often feel like i’m full of thoughts/ideas/questions that i need to process with another person. the nature of training and fighting and conflict. and why i’m doing this in the first place, come to think of it. it’s a martial art. it’s not dance, it’s not tai chi. we don’t learn the kata (forms) to perform them beautifully. we learn them because they are effective. the samuri, whose sword work is one of the sources for aikido’s largely open-hand techniques, used real blades. sharp, killing blades. i feel strongly that one has to examine the root of something in order to understand its fundamental purpose and nature. (e.g., guns were designed to kill living things. that’s what they were made for. any attempt to decorate them, make them into art, distracts from, but does not alter, their fundamental nature as killing machines. if we are going to worship and admire and fetishize them, we should acknowledge that we are fetishizing their killing nature, not just the pearl handle or the flawless steel construction.) so at the root of what i’m doing is the word martial. but aikido is also roughly translated as the Art of Peace (among other things). talk about a contradiction in terms. how do i process this paradox? aikido turns the form inside out, it repurposes the attacking/fighting/killing movements into the art of dealing with conflict in an effective manner with concern for the well-being of the attacker. the founder of aikido, Morihei Ueshiba (O-Sensei), wrote that “to control aggression without inflicting injury is the Art of Peace.” that is the nature of aikido. it is fighting repurposed into training. but to what end do we train? see how i go in circles on this?

while i don’t want to get hurt (if we’re being honest here, i’m pretty afraid of getting hurt, which seems logical of course but i don’t think everyone i train with shares that fear), i am tough enough to take a few bumps and bruises, and i realize there is risk in anything worth doing. but aside from not wanting to get hurt, i’m not interesting in fighting, in physically besting my partner on the mat, in risking hurting someone else. and if i just wanted to be sure i could fight off a mugger, i’d take a couple of self-defense seminars, learn how to kick a guy in the balls, and go on my merry way. but aikido is something different. it is the path, not the end, that has the value. it turns out that having a goal like a kyu exam was important, not because of what i achieved at the testing date but what i achieved in the weeks of training leading up to that goal.

but honestly, do i have the guts, the belly-fire for this? how do i reconcile my own desire for pacifism with the reality of conflict (physical/spiritual/emotional/political) in the world? how will i grow as a person from studying this? will my belief in peaceful negotiation be strengthened as it is challenged or revealed as naive fallacy?

about aikido

{25 March 2008}

i wonder that i don’t blog more about aikido here. it’s a pretty big part of my life. maybe because there’s so much about it that i hardly understand that it’s hard for me to wrap my brain around trying to explain it to readers who know even less about it. i realize that i don’t talk about it very much except with my friends in the dojo. it’s…too hard to explain. at the same time, i love it. it’s changing my life, changing me. so, maybe i’ll just start trying to blog it here more often and see what comes out. i’ll try to save the nitty gritty details for the training log, since that’s mostly for my own reference anyway.

what brought this subject up was that i was reading a friend’s blog, which is mostly focused on aikido. he was musing in a post about the subject of ego in the dojo and whether it’s different for men than for women. oh, kittlings…those of you who know me know that questions which reek of “men are from mars, women are from venus” make me hiss and spit and arch my back like a halloween cat. so i started to comment, but then it turned into a long long diatribe about aikido that was less about gender and more just about me. i didn’t post it to his blog because, well, i got more than a little off topic. but so i’ll post it here, because this is my blog and i’ll get off topic if i want to:

answering this post is something of a paradox, or at least an exercise in frustration, because i hate being called upon to speak for my gender. i’m only one person. i have no idea what it is like to exist in someone else’s skin. the fact that we both have boobs doesn’t automatically buy us much in common. and i don’t subscribe to the notion that there’s is this deep divide between men and woman in terms of behavior, even with regard to learned patterns of behavior in our particular society. i am resentful of any axiom that tells me that my gender is the reason i am apt to behave in a particular way. that’s like taking free will from me and handing me a package of determinism, all wrapped up in pink (girls like pink, apparently, altho i do not).

but, putting gender rants aside i’ll try to answer your question about ego on the mat at least from my own (female) perspective. i don’t often feel a sense of competition, of one upsmanship, on the mat. when sensei reprimands the class for fighting one another, i never feel like it applies to me. so maybe that means that there are a lot of guys on the mat who approach me differently because i’m a woman. does that mean that we can learn more from one another, train better in a cross-gender situation? maybe. i can’t speak for what it’s like for guys any more than i can speak for what it’s like for other women.

i approach most of life and particularly athletic challenges with a sense of competition with myself. i don’t care if i can run faster than the guy next to me as much as i care if i can run faster than i did last week. my sense of self-worth is all tied up in my pursuit of self-improvement (with a healthy dose of catholic guilt tossed in on top to provide necessary motivation).

but on the occasion that i do meet with a training partner who is too rough with me? i do feel that desire to prove how tough i am, that challenge to my ego – not through muscling him to the ground (my skill in aikido is always going to be about technique, not strength) – but through proving (however stupidly) that i’m tough enough to take what my partner dishes out. i HATE to have to tell my partner to back off a little. it’s rare that i need to, and even more rare that i actually do. on the other side is the partner who is too careful, perceives my inexperience (or my gender, or some combination of the two) as a weakness and treats me like a china doll that could break if it hits the mat with any force. a good training partner finds my boundaries and pushes them, ever so slightly. this makes me better. i imagine it takes years of experience to get good enough to be able to truly to perceive your partner’s skills, weaknesses, thresholds, and to adjust accordingly. while i strive for that, i suspect i err on the side of being too careful myself. i’m a pacifist. physically besting someone at the risk of his/her injury will never bring me satisfaction.

so what’s a pacifist doing in a martial art? it’s a reasonable question. i guess the answer is that i recognize that the world of is made up of conflict. to avoid conflict is to imply that all conflict is bad. but conflict just is. when you boil down the essence of a good play, it’s about conflict. without conflict there’s no story. no action. no movement forward, no change. aikido attracted me because it is about coping with conflict. engaging with, even encouraging conflict, but dealing with it in a healthy respectful manner that, in the most ideal circumstances, makes both parties better/stronger/happier/safer, whatever. we don’t fight, we train.

i train in aikido because it scares me, just a little bit, all the time. every single time i walk into the dojo, there’s some part of me that wants to skip out on class, to take the easy route, to stay home, sleep in, whatever the path of least resistance is for that given moment. and every time i walk out of the dojo, regardless of whether i’ve had a good class or a horrible one, i’m a better person for having trained. for having faced the things that intimidate me. in that regard, if i am sensitive to my own strength, my own reserves of energy and emotion and patience and skill, i am my own best training partner. i find the edge of what i’m capable of, and i push those boundaries ever so slightly. it takes years of training to become sensitive to your uke, to know exactly what he or she can take. i think it takes the same time to get to know one’s self, to know what it is i can or can’t take. in the process, i often push myself over the edge, take on too much, and then i have to draw back, admit defeat, heal or recover or generally hibernate, and then find the courage to start again. other times i allow myself too much slack, i treat myself like a china doll that i’m afraid of breaking. but you know what happens to china dolls? they sit on the shelf and they gather dust. i joined the dojo at a turning point in my life, when i was starting over, remaking myself and my life. i’d been kicked and i was down, and i was ready to take what the world was dishing me and prove that i was stronger (and in the process, hopefully actually make myself stronger). i decided that i’d rather risk getting broken than staying on the shelf.

fuck, now it’s 2:30 in the morning. how about a little self-discipline when it comes to bedtimes, huh?