Stuff on my mind

After reading a great book - Waking Dragons - recently I have been thinking about the motivation behind training in martial arts. What is it about MA that keeps people coming back, often to be subjected to fairly unpleasant experiences particularly in the physical arts.

The author of the book almost revels in the pain of training and pushing himself to his personal limits. In a small way I emphasize with this myself but at the same time I am also aware that aikido for me is a greater activity than seeing what I can achieve with my body. There is a personal relationship aspect to aikido in which, if you choose to, you can try to understand what makes people tick, what scares them, what excites them, how to make them happy or sad. This is an intriguing area that I feel I am only just tapping into and one in which I am trying to concentrate on.

I imagine most people come to aikido classes with the idea that they will become indestructible to assailants and would be attackers or muggers. I extremem cases some people might think that a few months or perhaps a year or two of turning up once or twice a week is going to turn them into some kind of comic book super hero, perhaps a kind of viligante going around righting the wrongs of the world.

In reality, although martial artists do have a lot of reasons to feel more confident walking the streets at night it is rare that without a lot of innate talent and even more hard work the superhero is going to appear.

Aikido is about learning about yourself as much as about learning self defence. You find out what your body can do, what situations make you feel out of control and also to what extent to you can try to manage these situations. I believe that a lot could be learnt from purely practicing ukemi (breakfalling) exclusively without even getting into the throwing. Ukemi is often a good measure of an aikido practitioner's ability. If they can't deal with the ukemi then they probably can't control their own body and mind well enough to perform techniques accurately. People who master ukemi early almost always progress faster through the belts; they are able to train harder and are less tense as they know how to protect themselves. By being thrown effectively you are able to understand the mechanics of the throw better. You can learn a lot of aikido by being an uke.

Another interesting aspect of the book is when the author describes his sensei as telling a load of beginners that he is not interested in them until they show themselves to be willing to learn. They have to prove their commitment to learning to his assistants first. Oh, to have a strength of club and conviction not to pander to people who turn up expecting to be spoon fed their martial art. I believe that anyone can benefit from taking a class in aikido, whatever their previous experience, personal and physical issues. That being said, if the learner doesn't want to learn then both the teacher and the pupil are wasting their time. May be one day our club will be so strong that it can turn away students who aren't prepared to sit on the doormat for 48 hours before they can start training. I think that was what they did in Fight Club, yes?