Shin Shin Aikido København

Going to Paris to see all the great people at Tenchi dojo. And to practice ❤️ juhuuu

二代目 守弘 素晴らしいセミナーをありがとうございました!!
Merci Tenchi Aikido Dojo, quel groupe incroyable vous êtes
Vi havde en fantastisk weekend i Paris

Tillykke til Troels med sin 1. dan!

Gode minder ❤️

Kold morgen men det varmede med en lille drink. Og så tillykke til Troels der fejrede sin fødselsdag med en god gang keiko :)

Tak for et svært og sjov seminar. Tillykke til Troels som bestod sin shodan test!

En hård, lærerig og sjov tur til Italien hvor Hitohira Saito Sensei underviste en lang weekend. Dejligt gensyn med aikidoka og venner fra hele verdenen. Iwama shin shin aikido er en stor familie som tager hårdt fat men griner af det bagefter. Skønt!

Some theoretical thoughts on aikido :)

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”The secret of aikido is not in how you move your feet it is how you move your mind”. Morihei Ueshiba

For many students around the world the task of fully grasping the universe of aikido appear to be a lifelong journey with frequent dead ends as the student in states of physical or mental agony surrender to the conclusions that understanding aikido is ineffable. Twenty years into the endeavor I personally concur. While I might have a rough sketch of the overarching journey that needs to be trekked I am scratching the surface when it comes to understanding the components that are supposedly combined harmoniously in the making of Takemusu Aikido, such as proper personal character, behavior and virtues (i.e. bushido) along with martial art and spiritual insights.

While the components can be studied and understood from many angles, and in different contexts, the practice of tai-jutsu and buki-wasa techniques constitutes the hallmark of aikido studies. These practices are central, among other, because there are multiple levels of understandings and teaching objectives within each technique. For instance, at one level a technique can teach basic bodily orientation and positioning, at another level it can teach certain bodily and mental attitude or breathing techniques (kiai), while on a third, fourth and fifth level, the student might engage in how to synchronize with, and adapt to, others body movements (awase), foster valor or devote himself to spiritual insights. Figuratively, each technique is a deep well of knowledge that incarnate the essence of aikido. However, while this mental image is breathtaking and beautiful it is also mind-blowing and bewildering and for many students, it begs the questions; How can so much knowledge be stored in these bodily exercises? Without a manual written in a stepwise fashion and chapters indexing the various levels and teaching objectives, how can the information be extracted? There are at least two important answers to these questions. The first concerns the type of system that Aikido summarize to, and the second the medium in which much of the information is encoded.

As opposed to more simple systems and aspects of life (e.g. certain computer engines, dance choreography’s and learning about historical facts), Aikido represent a non-linear system that is not easily decomposable and have constitutive parts that do not interrelate in a simple additive manner. Many of the components are part-whole components that cannot be understood when separated from the entire system (i.e. they are context-dependent) and thereby not intersubstitutable. What is lost to complexity, however, is won in the amount of information that can be stored, and as the student practice the same technique with different partners and in different contexts new information can emerges with each repetition.

Moreover, contrary to traditional information processing that typically take place up front in mental consciousness, conforming to the rules of logic and reason, much of the information in Aikido techniques is cashed out in bodily awareness. To many aikido students the notion of bodily awareness is obscure and carries an indeterminate religious flavor. This might especially be true for students from western civilizations due to their long philosophical and linguistic tradition that give priority to cognition, reason and logic. The concept of bodily awareness, however, has been thoroughly explored in the phenomenological view. Since it is my experience that understanding the concept of bodily awareness can help explore certain aspect of aikido, as very short introduction to the notion follows (1).

A central claim in phenomenology is that we possess body self-awareness at all time. The degree of self-awareness, however, varies. If, for example, I have a pain in my foot, I can examine it as a physician might examine it while at the same time being painfully aware that it is my foot. Such instance of reflective bodily attention might be considered a case of 100 % explicit body self-awareness. In the other end of the scale we can consider cases of motoric performance (e.g. a mindless jo tsuki in a partner practice), where we can engage in action unaware of our bodily posture. However, because the body carry out the intentions and actions, the body in such cases remain a marginal or implicit part of awareness. For instance, when I am pulling back my jo to launch my tsuki, outside of my field of awareness my hand shapes itself in a specific configuration that relates to the shape of the jo. In this example, I can be aware of what I am doing (I am attacking) but not aware of how I am doing it (that I am shaping my fingers). Clearly, some parts of my action are a matter of self-awareness even though others are non-conscious. So, when I express a loud kiai and attack with a jo tsuki I possess pre-reflective bodily self-awareness but if I, with a less fearsome expression, announced “I´m moving my hand and shaping my grasp to prepare my attack” a reflective bodily self-awareness steps in. However, in either cases the body self-awareness percentage is hovering above 0 %. In my experience, the percentage of bodily self-awareness can vary substantially during an aikido class. Perhaps it is wise to deliberately change the percentage within the repetitions of a single technique. One might even speculate if such practice can help fine grain our bodily self-awareness and deepening our aikido knowledge.

Perhaps there´s is no escaping that studying Aikido comes with feelings of being lost and confused. These feelings might even be part of the puzzle. Even so, recognizing that Aikido constitute a complex system that is unlikely to be conquered by traditional “linear” approaches, and that we sometimes need to search for knowledge in non-conscious bodily awareness might help us to be more patient and persistent. Afterall, we have embarked on a long and rich journey.

1. The interested reader is referred to introductory books on Phenomenology such as “The Phenomenological Mind” by Shaun Gallagher and Dan Zahavi. Published October 2020 by Routledge