Part 6 - Resources, Holistics and Aikido, Trust, Injuries

Where can I get more material, a list of events about these different things you were talking about? I'm particularly interested in integral videos as you listed in your yearly plan in your blog that you want to watch one such video each day.

If you are interested in the integral work Integral Naked, which you need to subscribe to. There's some free on YouTube - Integral Naked is not a porn site I’m afraid, it's a website with all these different teachers, from people doing physical practices to spiritual teachers, to business leaders, artists, musicians, all on one website and that's just so much better than anything you find on TV, and that's why I watch it every day now for entertainment and education, usually after lunch I spend a ten minutes every day. So that's one site for that. I run a blog Integration Journal which keeps people informed of a lot of things, and a lot of people enjoy that from around the world. For the business work: look at www.integrationtraining.co.uk; particularly if you are in Britain and you are interested in the business aspects please give me a call. If you are in the States you might want to look at the Strozzi Institute website of one of my teachers - he's a great guy, Richard Strozzi Heckler, or google Conscious Embodiment which is Wendy Palmer, or Being in Movement which is Paul Linden. Aiki Extensions, the charity which I did this volunteering work for and learned a lot of these stuff with, they have a lovely website which is worth a look, get on there and network with some of the people in your country, there's people from all over the world from Aiki Extensions. In terms of off-mat aikido which is really my specialty and I really want to stress that my specialty isn't aikido, it's applications of aikido to outside life. There's some good resources, some good places to start.

If you could talk about the similarities and differences between holistics and aikido... Why would someone do them?

So, why do we do a martial art, aikido? The do bit to me says that it's something that affects your life, and I'll be a little controversial and that if you are not using aikido every day in your work and your relationship and other areas of your life it's not aikido, it's aiki-jitsu. It's a little controversial when I say that and I think there is a reason O-Sensei called it aikiDO. If you read all his writings and look at them and go OK, they don't make sense. All those peace and love and harmony, all this stuff, how do I do that? I just know how to do nikkyo. And so for me what I'm involved in is actually very traditional in the sense that it's really going back to the roots of the things O-Sensei was doing. You know, he would teach various people - dancers, sumo wrestlers, baseball players, all sorts of people - aikido principles and practices. So why do we do a martial art, why don't we just do holistics or just body movements, there's other practices which take aikido principles forward? There's different answers to that. Eight weeks of holistics and someone will get a similar level of insight and practices they can use in their life after about a year of aikido. In many ways it's much quicker because you are able to take out the really interesting stuff and away from the heat of the dojo where there's shomenuchis are flying and fists flying and your heart rate is going, you tend to drop down levels of operating under those stressful circumstances. Whereas in holistics we increase the stress gradually so you are never getting traumatised you are just gradually increasing it and learning to deal with it, so you can actually get much quicker results in terms of the crossover. On the other hand, why do we do a martial art? The martial art still keeps this existential element of... you know, you can get hurt doing aikido, you can't really get hurt in holistics and that actually takes something away, you do lose something and I'll be the first to admit that, you do lose something if you can't really get hurt. And this is why we are training with weapons, again, that can create another level of intensity. We used to train with machetes in Ethiopia which aside from AK47s which I’d asked to be removed as there were children around - are the weapon of choice of people out there and again, that creates another level of intensity. That kind of existential element really does bring you to your edge. We are learning to operate under pressure so we can then reproduce it in physically unpressured environments. But to most aikidoka the level of pressure changes so they might be not scared at all to deal with five people in randori, big guys trying to attack them, but they will be absolutely shitting themselves when they go on a first date, because they haven't learned to apply it, to cross it over. You know, there is old saying “6th dan arsehole”, you'd meet some people, they were 6th degree black belt yet they were alcoholic, they hit their kids, they are womanisers and we would say what's happened there and you'd meet other people who are obviously very developed in aikido and really learned to bring it into their lives. Myself I’ve never hit a kid, have given up drinking, but the rest, I still have problems!
Doing aikido isn't a magic bullet that suddenly makes you a better person, though it can be used in that way if you are conscious, you constantly try to cross it over into your life. So yeah, I think that's one reason why it's still worth doing a martial art rather than just going into this embodied practices which are much more safer and take less time, it's that existential element that's still there.

I noticed in trainings that when there is no connection it's often because one of the partners doesn't trust the other. Is there any good exercise that can teach trust?

Aikido [smiles]. Aikido is a trust building exercise in that you take turns to be powerful and then vulnerable which is what trust is all about. And also, aikido has great potential for abuse because of that, so there's a lot of abuse in aikido. I've also heard they estimate 20% of the aikido population were abused as children, and that's from people who work in the field professionally and have been around much longer than me in aikido. So teachers need to deal with that.
Also, many people are using aikido as a way to abuse other people physically because they are in a position when they know what's coming and they can then be powerful and slam something on, and I say don't train with those people. I'd say make a request to them - and this is something we don't do as often as I'd like in aikido is to say 'listen, what you are doing with my arm right now that's not OK, that's my body, and you don't have the right to hurt me or damage me'. Maybe hurt as in pain is OK but damage is not cool ever, so do actually make that request to people, to say 'No, don't do that'. If they continue doing it don't partner with them, be brave enough to walk away. Say “It doesn't mean my need for safety, I'm not happy to be partner with you from now on”. They might think you’re a wimp but still take the higher ground. And if your whole organisation does that find a whole new organisation because there are whole organisations that are riddled with abuse because of the lack of checks and balances. I say abuse in the physical sense of hurting people on the mat, I’ve been to courses where 90% of people on the mat wore red tape to show there injuries – use your common sense!

In terms of trust building exercises, I use a lot of kind of leading-following exercises, gently, gently, eyes closed, walking around, etc. Blind walks, for example, are particularly good for that. And again, just the whole exercise of aikido is, I think, is just one big trust building exercise which is why it's so good at peace building or “bi-communal” work. I've used it in peace building work with different warring fractions with Aiki Extensions and it really brings people together because of that sense of being powerful, being confident leading and then following, being vulnerable, being on the receiving end and knowing that you are going to get you karma come back to you real quick in aikido. You know, if someone's tearing your arm off just remind them that it's your turn next. So you either get a virtual cycle of looking after each other and connecting or you get a viscous cycle of abuse and hurting each other in which case it's time to bow and say thank you to them and leave.

A low level question connected to this: what was your most serious injury you got in trainings?

I've had most of them: repeated tear of the hamstrings which lasted a year and a half, that was unpleasant; knee ligament damage, that was unpleasant; knocked unconscious several times, that was...kind of fun, yeah; bruised ribs from fists. My most serious injury actually wasn't for aikido, aikidoka tend to hurtthemselves walking up the stairs and picking up laptops and things like that! I damaged myself snowboarding, I ruptured the AC joint in my shoulder snowboarding and I was teaching aikido to a circus in Ethiopia two weeks later, every day, twice a day at least. Basically, my arm, if you just imagine, was just like hanging at my side and I actually had to pick it up with the other arm to shake someone's hand. That was really educational in terms of learning to do aikido softly because these guys in the circus were pretty muscular, gymnastic people. So injuries are very useful, and I think if you train intelligently you needn't have those kind of injuries. I didn't train intelligently when I was a beginner nor do I expect any beginner to train intelligently. Because most young people (men in particular) need to work stuff out. I just encourage people to work that out as quickly and safely as possible and in a way that doesn't abuse themselves of other people. Learn the hard way if you’re too stupid to learn the good way. I've seen Hombu dojo doing some great things, they're trying to change the structure of aikido so people are injured less and I think that tradition from O-Sensei to second Doshu to current Doshu has really continued and I'm really happy about that and I se my generation getting injured less than the generation before and I think that will continue, so I'm happy that trend is working. So how do you keep the edge while taking out the possibility of injury, and to some extent you can't but to a lot of extent you can. Other injuries, there's been broken fingers. I once lay there as an uchi deshi and counted the number of parts of my body that hurt and I think the record was something like 15 parts of my body were hurting at any one time and there's plenty of other things I forgot were hurting. And that educationally develop a very different non-attached relationship to your body when that happens. You know, we don't want to get too much into the macho glorification of look at the bruises on my arm from doing yokomenuchi shihonage blocks as opposed to blends, you don't want to get too much into that like wearing injuries as a badge of pride. Train smart.

So you haven't thought about these injuries as a way to abuse yourself somehow?

I think I was at the beginning, and I've really grown into that and saying I'm abusing myself so I've changed my practice now and I say no to myself a lot more and I'm letting other people abuse me, just letting other people do and say [in stronger voice] "this is hard training, this is real martial art, this is, you know, what it's like to be an uchi deshi, man!" and doing that macho bullshit thing, and now I'm just declining that sort of thinking and saying 'no, thank you'. And, you know, I've never heard the word no in Japanese and I think the word no is something that needs to come into aikido for everybody's health and safety [smiles]. So I've grown into the viewpoint I've given you today about abuse and I've certainly given myself enough abuse and injured a few other people as well in the past which I'm not prod of, it isn't aikido.

I think we can learn a great deal from Mark's answers about the essence of aikido on and off the mat. We could see that aikido is indeed a way of life and not 'just' training, and also, how much our martial art is connected to other areas of life. Thanks!