learning

After attending two very interesting events in Brighton (Riding the Storm and Presence) last Saturday I realised something important that concerns the phenomena of learning, and being present. This post is the first one inspired by the above events (there will probably be at least a couple of them that have direct relevance to aikido).

An aikido training is usually about following the instructions of sensei who explains what to do, how to do it, and what mistakes you might need to correct, what parts of movements you need to work on more. However, we can also learn from fellow students because it is really them who we train with all the time, and it is through their help we can improve our aikido. In addition to this, we can learn from them in several ways. The following paragraphs are quite personal on this subject, and I hope noone takes offence or missunderstands what I'm trying to say.

As I teach aikido to children I often think about teaching methods. Kids' attention (in addition to respect) has to be earned as they are not as patient as adults who come to training and can listen to whatever sensei says even if he talks for an hour (he does not, btw). Kids can't practice iriminage for 10 minutes, they get bored after 2. So I need to find what is effective, what is useful, what is fun. Although I don't teach adults regularly, kids' classes and adults' classes I train in give me some idea about how I should teach children, and how I should teach adults when I get to that situation some time. The following paragraphs describe two basic methods/approaches to get to the state of 'perfect' aikido.

I wrote a post about the levels of knowledge in which I described a couple of imaginary scenarios of what people can see at various levels of knowledge or development. Since writing that post I read a book which made it much clearer how one can think about changing levels of knowledge and how a change from imcompetence in a subject can gradually turn into competence.

The following game of thought portrayed and the characters and incidents herein are fictitious and any similarity to the name, character and history of any person, living or dead, is entirely coincidental and unintentional. - or something similar. The main idea is that I was simply playing around with an idea but some people might think it is about them. So no, it is not, it's my own game of thought.

I realised that it's really hard to get rid of bad habits. Even though I believe I make progress things that I don't do correctly or think correctly won't just disappear completely, at least not for a long time. For example, I used to use my shoulders too much when raising my arm when executing a technique. At some point I noticed that I didn't need to use it so much.

I was thinking a bit more about the 7th point of the previous post while cutting a couple of shomenuchis in our room: "Do something that makes you feel better". If this is part of a pattern that is associated with negative thinking and with - wrongly - focusing on what we don't want then there should be at least two types of activities that make us feel better.

As I promised earlier, with my blog posts here I try to follow the posts written in my two other Hungarian blogs. This is the first such post, and I'd like to write here quite often from now on. I'd like to invite you to discuss and think about things inspired by quotes from O'Sensei. I'd also like to share my own thoughts with you to start the discussion.