An end-of-year reflection, by Cathy Okada
“I felt more out of control.” A student had just provided the right kind of energy as uke to her training partner, no pulling back and no rushing ahead. As a result, she took some good ukemi and paradoxically was more in control as a result. This was her response when I asked her how it felt.
To her surprise, I told her that as she continues training, that feeling of not being in control doesn’t change, but your relationship to it hopefully will. You learn to find comfort in the discomfort. You practice being okay with not being in control, but the feeling of being totally in control as uke will never come.
At least, I don’t think it should. We try to practice in a way that it doesn’t. If you practice a very choreographed Aikido where the nage sets you up very comfortably for your feather fall, then you will feel very much in control. And once you have nailed that way of training, where do you go from there? What more is there to it?
A massage client asked me the other day, “So if there is no competition, what is the purpose of Aikido?”. I usually give some wishy-washy answer, because to me it feels like a huge question, and I’m not sure that I know. He may have been expecting an answer like “building self-confidence” or “self-defence,” etc. But unexpectedly (even to myself), I found myself telling him, “Well, it is a practice of letting go of who we think we are.”
A bit of silence…. I carried on…
“…And in Aikido, we spend half of the time falling, and I guess we are physiologically programmed to not want to fall, because on a primal level we associate falling with death. If you fall from a cliff, chances are you will die. So I guess to practice Aikido is to practice dying.”
Probably not what he was expecting during his Wednesday morning treatment, but he did ask the question, and I started to think out loud as a result.
These days I often think of Aikido as a metaphor for life (or death, being two sides of the same coin). I’ve realised that the notion of being fully in control of our lives is an illusion. Of course, we make choices which influence the course of its flow, but things rarely go exactly the way we expect or hope, for better or worse. Though the last couple of years have not always been easy, there have been many unexpected moments of intense joy, pride, and surprise. Perhaps if we do try to over-control, restrict, or rigidly force our ideas of how we think things should go, not only may we be disappointed, but we could miss out on the unexpectedly beautiful, even if it comes with a dose of fear or pain.
“We don’t want to stay where we are. So we do everything possible to preserve our own lives and the structure of our plane so that we can escape the hurricane. There is this enormously powerful thing we call our life, and we’re somewhere sitting in the middle of it in our little plane, hoping to make our way through without being hurt. Suppose that instead of being in a plane, we were in a glider in the middle of the hurricane, without the control and power that an engine provides. We’re caught in the sweeping winds. If we have any idea that we’re going to get out alive, we’re foolish. Still, as long as we live within that enormous mass of wind, we have a good ride.” – Joko Beck, Eye of the Hurricane, Nothing Special: Living Zen
Wishing you all a happy and open new year, and all the best in your continued practice of living and dying!