Rank

There comes a time in everyone’s training where we have to move beyond ourselves. This is, in fact one of the key elements to Aikido training: you are not just working to better yourself as an individual. While self-improvement has its place, it is also rooted in ego and pride. This is especially true when you are dealing with something like a martial art, in which it is easy to slip into a competitive mindset. As a result, in Aikido, a student must eventually start looking beyond what is in their direct control: their training, their schedule, even their instructor (for any student who thinks they have no impact on their instructor is foolish at best). Beyond these initial horizons is a world that is often chaotic, often overwhelming, but also quite beautiful. In this larger world, many things happen that we cannot control. Some of these events happen in our favor, some of them are not.

Rank and testing, is one type of event over which, at a certain point, the individual student has no control. In Kokikai, this point occurs at 2nd kyu. Up until then, it is the responsibility of the student’s main instructor to judge when and if a student is ready to test. Often, despite his or her best intentions, the instructor will allow some inconsistencies while testing. For example, a young student who is highly athletic might be judged more strictly than a student who is older or has an injury. This variation in criteria is not always bad–Kokikai is about maximizing one’s own potential, after all–but eventually, there comes a point where students must move beyond the comfort zone of their own dojo and demonstrate their skills before people who do not know them as well. At first, this change can be frightening and upsetting. Yet, in the long run, students who can move past their fears end up with a greater degree of confidence in their capabilities. Think of a teenager, who has the approval of his parents but then also gets approval from a college recruiter or other individual that doesn’t know the teenager well at all. While parental approval is vitally important, gaining approval from outside one’s family is also very important.

Many of my students are 3rd kyu now and, for the first time, they must gain the approval of someone outside our immediate dojo family to gain additional rank. This can be frustrating, and I am acknowledging now my failure as a instructor to adequately prepare my students for this transition. I hope that these students and I can learn together, and take this opportunity to move beyond our comfort zone, so that we might have the satisfaction of knowing that our skills and improvements are not only recognized within our own club, but within the broader Kokikai community as well.

Let the World Move

I have been recently trying to find ways to articulate a concept I find prevalent in Kokikai Aikido practice. Essentially, I’ve been trying to convey to students that one’s best and strongest position typically results from maintaining the same spatial relationship between your arms, shoulders, and torso throughout a technique. This methodology results in more power being generated from your hips and legs, which seems far more effective, and also seems to follow the methodologies of Sensei Bannister. (Of course, certain leads and movements requires that these relationships change; but in general, I think this idea holds up well.) I’ve finally come up with a way of at least explaining how this idea feels in practice:

Let the world move around you.

A few words of clarification. In Kokikai, we turn the problem of what is strength on its head. Strength is not a matter of external verification (physical size or speed, for example); it is a matter of internal control and confidence. This same concept applies to movement. Too often we think of a technique as the nage moving around the uke, or the nage forcing the uke to move. With the sentence “Let the world move around you”, I am not just referring to the uke. I am referring to the entire world. For a brief moment, during a throw, imagine that you are actually standing still, but the entire planet, including your uke, is moving around you. It’s an odd concept, perhaps, but one that feels very powerful to me when I attempt to execute a technique.