by Nick Lowry
So a friend today told me that my old sensei is a much better choice for aikido training for him than I am because “He will give me answers.”
He went on, “….when i ask you and your guys questions, its always something like — well, there are a variety of ways to do that depending on your preferences.”
I smile.
I am indeed more relativistic in many ways than my old sensei; I do prefer a more open ended engagement with the narrative of teaching and discovering what makes aikido tick. Much of what i learned over my 27 years with my old sensei as the “Right” way to do stuff, i have (in the past three years since departing) reevaluated as simply more or less useful ways to do stuff. The “principles” and rules i grew up with are still very useful and i would say even foundational, but after surveying the wider scope of what makes up Tomiki aikido and then stepping beyond that to a more comprehensive peek at Aikido in general , i must conclude that Lots of stuff works and there is plenty of room for variation and preference.
One of the strengths (and weaknesses) of the system of aikido i came from under my old sensei is its strong tendancy to lean toward an absolutist or even a fundamentalist appoach to aiki.
“If you just follow these basic physical rules and strategies and you do not deviate then that is “real aikido”
— any thing outside of these parameters is “doing it wrong.”
There is a grace in such simplicity, for if you have all the the questions answered and all the principles clearly delineated then one can wind up feeling pretty privileged and “knowledgeable.” It feels good to be the smartest technical kid on the block.
The downside is that in such a system it is very easy to cut oneself off from the wider picture of what “real aikido” is to the great mass of aikido practitioners. And if you are going make a aikido DVD or write an aikido book, then that is a myopic and stupid move.
It is easy to wind up in a little self imposed ghetto of technical sophisticates and true belivers. In such a place, little of the bigger picture can get through.
In the old days, such a narrow view was pretty understandable since there were such limited resources where you could actually compare and contrast aikdo from the different perspectives and schools of thought– now we are awash in material via videos and youtube and there looks to be no end in sight. For instance, these days with just a few days worth of digging and a few pretty modest investments in your education you can find dozens of high quality resources for very sophisticated application of kuzushi….. it staggers my mind, for that is literally more than than i had seen produced and avalible in the first 25 years of looking at and digging up this stuff.
So yes I do frame what I teach and how I teach it in a much more inclusive and open ended way, and no i do not often collapse aikido down to a black an white, simplistic model, as was my previous habit.
I do appreciate that simplicity for both its persuasive power and it grace bestowing comfort, but now see that it carries hidden costs in terms of exploring wider potentials and relationships in the aikido world.
I am reminded that Einstein once said, “everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler.”
Still smiling….