Aikido for 04/20/2009

Before tonight's class, I was thinking about how violence escalates in stressful situations. For my own Aikido practice and philosophy, the initial point of contact between uke and nage should be the peak of violence in the situation, that from that moment, the goal of Aikido is to de-escalate the violence to an ideal outcome of nether party being permanently harmed. When stressed and also when too ego-driven practice, it is easy to rached-up the violence when doing a technique, often in presuit of a finishing "killing" blow or other dramtic act. I have to resist this tendency of escalating violence in my own Aikido practice and I feel that it is an important part of O'Sensei's Aikido-Budo legacy that we focusing on re-harmonizing with the universe when confronted with violent intent, that that attacker has already reached the peak of violence at the moment of their violent action/intent, and we as Aikido students, redirect and calm the violence towards an acceptable outcome for all of us. We can't always avoid violence but we can make choices in how we practice and our response once engaged that minimizes the disruption that the violence causes to you and your local environment.

During warm-up, Joey, Jake, Jim, and I (the 4 J's :-) instead of doing dedicated ukemi practice, I had all of us practice kokyunages from katatedori grabs. The first kokyu-nage was a tenkan and then a slide forward while rotating the wrist, requiring uke to step with his back leg and do a forward roll. After everyone went the through the line twice we switch to a different kokyu-nage where instead of sliding forward after doing an initial tenkan, nage swings his arm up while doing a tenkan, uke then tukes his inside foot behind the outside foot and does a back ukemi roll. By using Kokyunages for ukemi practice, we were able to work on the rolls in actual practice so the timing and distances are different when doing a roll in a technique verses doing ukemi in standalone exercises

For the rest of class we worked on one technique, yokumenuchi sankyo omote. Due to the limited mat space, we practiced this technique in a line and while demonstrating the sankyo, I talked about how easy it is when doing sankyo to continue to escalate the situation by being fancy because of sankyo's control features when applied properly to uke. While this was Jim's and Joey's first encounter with sankyo, Jake understood what I was talking about and so the point of emphasis when I practiced the technique last night was from the point of engagement to de-escalate the situation through the proper and most correct form of sankyo that I know and practice. I feel the whole issues of violence and its relation to studying a martial art, is about our approach and what we want the end outcomes to be. I don't want to practice or teach Aikido as a way to unnecessarily prolong violence but as a way to practice the effective and efficient physical movements of conflict damping with minimal harm to me and my ukes.