Disclaimer: The articles that are reproduced on this page contain the opinions and comments of the original authors of the pieces, many of whom have been posted in the Aikido Journal daily eNewsletters. They do not necessarily represent views held by individuals within the Phoenix School for Therapeutic Arts, but are merely interesting pieces on a variety of subjects, promoting healthy discussion and thought provoking views.
Articles
Efficiency, the Aikido of all things by Sensei Nev Sagiba
Missing the Point - The Debate by Sensei Nev Sagiba
The Art of Training Others by Sensei Nev Sagiba
Efficiency, the Aikido of all things
Posted on 14th April 2007 by Sensei Nev Sagiba
Article re-produced by kind permission of the author.
Working smart instead of working hard constitutes the Principle of Efficiency, or Aikido.
Finding the shortest route between two points without taking any shortcuts is efficiency. Efficiency is leverage and a multiplier of potential, The Principle of Light as it exists in the Great Universe from Origins.
Trying to take shortcuts by poor mimicry is self defeating because it is cheating yourself out of earning the real and authentic easy way: efficiency. It takes work to discover efficiency. Much trial and error. Much clear thought often gained in pain. The humbling pain of change and adjusting to Natural law, as it is. We can’t alter the universe but we can make changes in the way we consciously adjust our relationships to all energy. Pursuing this Way may take much effort, much focus, much desire, much intention, much persistence and much sincerity of purpose. This is the price the Universe exacts. If you fail to keep knocking, despite the pain of change, the door will not open.
People who don’t try, never scratch the surface. But people who just try clumsily and who merely work hard, end up burnt-out, embittered and disappointed with the life they alone mismanaged. Budo trainees who fail to learn efficiency end up sick, injured and often prematurely dead from the extreme stresses of physical misuse.
When you learn to take a step forward into exploration of possibilities, sometimes it feels like an act of faith. After persisting, you succeed to discover how to discard the weight of doing it hard, you become literally enlightened and learn to do it easy. “Resistance is futile...”
This is a principle of life. All life. Please understand, Aikido was not invented in Japan or anywhere else. It was always there, ready to be downloaded, because it is the primary programme of the Universe. Aikido is not a set of forms we unthinkingly and religiously mimic without comprehension. Perhaps Morihei Ueshiba and others before him, in finding themselves up against a wall, had to rediscover the principle of efficiency, Aikido, but it was all the while within and all around them, all the time, waiting to be discovered. As it always was and will be for all life forms, for all time.
Like treasure, the potential for efficiency is here and now, all around us all the time. Sometimes you have to be totally worn out and exhausted, and then still have the desire to persist and win, before you can begin to again rediscover it, access it and apply it.
Aikido or efficiency, economy of motion if you will, is the principle and guiding force that sustains and guides the Universe as it is.
Whether web work, photoshop, making money, riding a horse, climbing a cliff, sailing a boat, digging a hole or filling it, driving a car or washing the dishes or whatever it is you do, there is an easy way or a hard way. Patterns and sequences, the language of the Universe are reflected in the body-mind of man and beast alike.
Discovering the best sequence is a key and any training methodology that assists to unlock this principle and bring it to life is valid. We hear it all the time: Less is more! But what does this really mean? What is the ‘just right’ ingredient, the correct ‘less’ that makes the more happen? What is the ‘right’ less the ‘just right’ amount of more force or removal of force? The right use of modulated intention or ki! Too much or not enough and technique fails. It is all about conscious modulation, and constant adjustment to ‘just right’ equilibrium in all things. Could this be the reflection of the Cosmic Dance, the Music of the Spheres?
Elite athletes have learned how to do less to achieve more. “I build my strength in order not to use it” - Morihei Ueshiba. Any Master of any skill learns to apply the principles of efficiency and therefore, leverage and time and space management. Efficiency in action is a defining ingredient of mastery and the secret of success. And then it begins to appear as if magic, force fields and worm-holes. But only to the the untrained eye.
How do we develop sensitivity to ‘just right’? There is only one method known to man. Regular practice.
Efficiency is Aikido and Aikido is efficiency. You can apply it in everything. Or not. In all things, you can do it hard, or you can choose to persist until you find the authentic easy way. Finding it may not usually be easy but once found there is no turning back. Your choice.
Yes, true and sustainable efficiency requires some work learning, setting up and building the infrastructures that facilitate and support it and removing the obstacles that impede it. This work is not readily seen or appreciated by the uninitiated, but once there, is there for all time.
The good news is this. Nothing is ever perfect and the fine-tuning of efficiency never ends. What a grand adventure!
Nev Sagiba Sensei
www.aikiblue.com
Missing the Point - The Debate
Posted on Aikido Journal website on 7th April 2007 by Sensei Nev Sagiba
Article re-produced by kind permission of the author.
The debate about whether to spar or not to spar or whether soft city folk doing Aikido can ever do this or that is a moot argument and arises from a non sequitur. Eroneously trying to fit disparate possibilities. If you want to spar because it fulfills some puerile macho urge, please go ahead. Will a soft city person survive an assault? Usually not, but sometimes they ‘get lucky’ and indeed some ‘dance-kido’ training will help with co-ordination if nothing else. Neither sparring nor dancing are Budo, being no more than sometimes useful training supplements.
Sparring and killing are totally different things, bullying and protecting are opposites, surviving and playing to rules will never meet.
Self-deceived minds are crippled and therefore predisposed to the deployment of deceipt. If you study life from a cause and effect basis you see people blindly playing silly games of futility wherein they eventually they believe their own bulls**t and get lost in the quagmires of their own entanglement. Buddha had more refined words for this but in short, deceit is deceit. Deceiving others and deceiving ourselves is the same thing.
Budo is entirely different. It is a science of enlightenment in the true meaning of the word because it seeks to discover factuality as it is and to dispel deceit both inwardly and outwardly.
Above all, clear thinking sustains and wins everything in the end, particularly when clear thinking is backed up with clear action.
Lucidity brings with it all manner of auxiliary lucidities (sic.). Those developing serious high level skill generally develop serious high level respect for life and philosophical bent. Why? Because they begin to see clearly. Musashi lived out his days in a nice comfortable cave, paid no rent and lived a life of absolute freedom and creative artistry. He sacked his prospective employer by beating him in a fight because Musashi felt no security kowtowing as a menial and becoming a slave to an inferior intellect as so many today do. Why they generally assent that the once, would be, village idiot assume positions of power over them is beyond me. That's why the world is in such a mess.
Today the consensus is to join the crowd in being moral cowards and become followers of betrayers of trust and stand up for nothing in case you get noticed. Fear rules. I have no idea why. This predisposition generally arises because of lack of morality. I'm not talking about sex, which is a natural function if conducted with mutual, consensual respect, although even this popularity tends to be relegated to gutter levels in synchronicity with the other fallen attitudes.
Back to fighting. When a group of individuals attack you with intent to kill, you DO NOT SPAR WITH THEM! If all you've been practicing is sparring, you will spar, and you will die, because they will not be sparring. Simple as that. If you are a dancer, you may succeed in entertaining them to death.
Lets get out of these folly riddled paradigms of contention even if just for a moment and attempt to see clearly. If dancing and sparring fail in real situations, what else is there? I’m talking of REAL situations, not macho bulls**t out the back of a pub, or in a cage with a referee, or bullying someone you know cannot win.
For the rest of us who honestly seek authentic skill and lucidity of mind and strive to avoid conflict...and there it is. Striving to avoid conflict!
Let’s look at this. A serious part of avoiding conflict is mitigating it by striving to make it impossible, by rearranging things and the way we act. This is Budo in its truest sense. The backup is the martial skill. So-called “martial art” sport has nothing martial about it. The military is martial and sportists (sic.) who fight are usually non-creative, idle, bored and unemployed.
Deeply ingrained in the simian and reptilian cortex are remnant vestiges of survival processes which are clumsily reactive as a result of the male brain getting marinaded with testosterone in the womb. This generally stops him from thinking about consequences and generally living at least the first part of his life led by his hormones and not much else. This is not a put down but a simple, scientifically proven fact. In prehistoric days if one male died catching a buffalo the woman still got to breed with the survivors who brought home the beef. If young males thought too much of consequences they would not have engaged in the high-risk practice of hunting and we could well be now extinct. Dead from starvation or too much vegetables. This instinct is exploited by war makers.
Leaving aside the unbalanced aggression and deceitfulness of some minds, if we choose to be creative, our natural state, it often befalls us to have to protect that creativity from the mindless who would simply steal the fruits of creativity, because they either don’t know how to create or make the choice to refuse to go through the pain of change that learning how entails. So they steal.
And so it may fall upon the reasonable person to have to defend himself or herself, their family, tribe, nation, planet and so on...Picking your nose is not a survival tactic. Neither is dancing. And certainly not sparring. Or being bound by arbitrary rules which have no real existence but are a manufacture used to entangle, blind and trap the mind. A trophy is only good for one thing. Hitting an attacker over the head. Paper also has its uses. Skill, actual, factual and real skill, mastery is an entirely different matter. It is alive and cannot be pinned to a wall.
What then is truly useful? The safe practice, refining skills that work, conducted in a controlled setting not bound by extraneous and gratuitous rules. Drilling. Repetition. Kata and testing sufficient to recruit those ancient instincts into the neural pathways of skill, science, real intelligence and practical functionality by DOING! Good sound Aikido practice.
There are no guarantees for anyone, but it will increase your chances. If you want good techniques, go to the rule books of “martial” sports. Go to the pages of banned techniques. Read them. Practice them softly and safely. You will find that most of the “banned techniques” look very similar to Aikido techniques. Why? Because they work in a real situation.
You also seek co-ordination. Well, you don’t have to spend all day beating up a friend for that. Try a day’s work, growing food instead of devastating the land. Try riding a horse or climbing a rock face or carrying or diving in the ocean or sailing and rowing a small vessel without a motor. Try getting out of your square box, the cave you live in as well as the mental cave. Try thinking outside of that box. Try exploring instead of exploiting existence. Try WALKING, that would be innovative. Try LIFE.
Having tried life you will become disposed to appreciating life, its Source and all its expressions and after a day’s sweat there is lessened desire for contention. Try eating real food you have grown yourself, instead of the excrement that is nowadays passed off as food. Try building, healing, appreciating, relationship and art.
All these and more will develop not only co-ordination but also strategic thinking. All these things will lessen the predisposition to aggression and contention. They will increase the desire to protect all things good, beautiful and true and restore harmony where it is lacking.
The most devastating fighters I have ever met were of this class. Why? Because they were protectors and knew what they were fighting for. Their foremost goal was creating value. They never started trouble but they sure knew how to finish it. And that is Budo. The Budo which finds its pinnacle in true Aikido.
And the training of it is found in honest, challenging attack, dealt with by honest defence. And living a variegated and well-rounded life.
The goal of the true warrior is the protection and maintenance of harmony and all that entails: risk, courage, sacrifice and much more. Not merely proving that he thinks he can fight for no good reason other than that he is inwardly insecure, wants to show off, is a frightened and stupid little boy with no manners, no respect and little desire to improve himself as a human being and add value to society.
Contest and Budo are two entirely different paradigms. One is selfishly hell-bent on proving an unprovable tenet and something which changes from day to day. The other is dedicated to service and upliftment (sic.) of oneself, others and the world. One is a pyrrhic victory if you count for the cost in achieving it. The other a victory for all. Until we embrace the latter we will not become human.
The two can’t meet because they are going in entirely different directions.
Nev Sagiba Sensei
www.aikiblue.com
The Art of Training Others
Posted on Aikido Journal on 21st April 2007 by Sensei Nev Sagiba
Article re-produced by kind permission of the author.
The secret of training others successfully is to have their best interests at heart and to have first trained yourself. It is impossible to teach out of a book if you can’t do it!
Example is the way, not gibbering. Words teach nothing. Words mainly provide clutter that gets in the way of learning and well meaning as an intellectual may be, he does an immense disservice with lectures. Understanding comes not from ideas held in the mind but by direct experience after which the mind may develop any ideas it wants to at its own leisure. Ideas, talking and thinking do not cook the rice, chop wood or carry water. Elbow grease does.
Masters SHOW HOW and perhaps occasionally verbalise key points. We learn best by example because example has integrity. Talk is vacuous. Particularly when there is no commonality of experience to act as point of reference.
Some people should never be allowed to ‘teach’. They are a menace to society.
In order to teach you must have some understanding of human limitations, reasonable barriers and have patience. Particularly on behalf of others. You learn this from personal experience.
If you can’t lead by showing how, setting the pace and treading the path, you are a hypocrite. Don’t presume to teach anything. Get a job instead. Sweep floors and clean toilets or something. It’s a good place to start to learn about yourself.
If you can’t lead the way by example, stay away from others. You are infringing on their rights using false pretences.
I used to be competitive swimmer. I got myself to Olympic level by coaching myself. I despise those hypocrites who think they know what your body knows but will not deign to get into the water, get wet and show how. They gibber instructions from the side of the pool. They earn their money by false pretences. Get in, show how, or **** off. I have a brain and can work it out for myself. Not to mention, the scourge of swimming - officials. Dirty, ill fitting men in suits who presume to run something or another mostly with other agendas you can find out about in the news when they get caught.
I had no lust for the plated plastic tinsel of medals and in those days there were no endorsements so I chose my life. I went to the Coral Sea and swam and dived with the original swimmers and divers and gained LIFE. Something not attainable by burning yourself out over a millisecond in a square pool full of chlorine, politics and urine. Real life lives in nature not a box of recycled water. The Universe is in the ocean.
To teach, you must be capable of leading yourself. In insecure who waste their time and that of others pushing people around are mentally ill. If you can’t do it you have nothing to say. If you cannot exemplify, the best place to start getting results is with yourself. This means that four-letter word, WORK. And that other one THINK. Painful but necessary.
If, once you CAN, others use you as a “teacher”, you then have immense responsibility and are duty bound to enact it compassionately and accountably.
The stories of needless brutality, gratuitous, arbitrary and deliberate injury inflicted upon students I have experienced and hear emerging from some “dojos” is pure and simple criminality. These people belong in gaol for life.
Inflicting deliberate injury and destruction in a dojo setting is worse than an honest street thug’s assault. At least the street thug makes no pretence other than being a criminal.
People seek out a dojo and pay their hard earned money to be taught, do so in good faith and trust hoping to learn to protect themselves because usually they have in some way been violated. They are not seeking further violation, abuse or betrayal of trust, but to LEARN SKILL.
The art of training others is to first train yourself and identifying, first hand, the ways to make reasonable progress then to impart this with kindness, albeit sometimes severely, but not brutally. There is a distinction. You do not teach children to walk by throwing them out of moving cars or abandoning them in a supermarket. You watch, let them fall and then offer support where necessary until they get to a stage where they empower themselves. Even then you don't let them run out in front of trucks. You remove the fences and boundaries AS THEY BECOME READY.
Ego plays no part of teaching. Nor hubris of any kind. A TEACHER IS A SERVANT. Nothing else.
If you can’t serve, clean toilets and learn how.
You do your best to ensure “students” become enabled, empowered and consciously assist them bring out the best of themselves.
If you have not brought out the best of yourself you are incapable of teaching. Presume not.
When a person is relatively weaker, has no recourse, is more disadvantaged than you, less skilled or as yet not awakened in certain areas of mind and body, comes to you, you owe them an immense duty of care akin to how you would like to be treated if the roles were reversed. For, rest assured, the day will come when they will be.
To abuse such a trust is not only an act of bullying but criminality as well. If you are that insecure, seek out psychiatric help. You need it.
To presume to be able to teach, particularly Budo, you must first have learnt. And then be prepared to serve patiently over long periods of time, for life, with an intent to bring about upliftment and awakening of yourself, others and ultimately the world.
The best way to achieve this is to continually strive to know yourself by incessantly driving yourself to improve yourself and finding ways to help others know themselves as well. And then back off. Leave them alone to grow in their own time and way.
The secret of training others is to train yourself and to lead the way by example, to increasingly know yourself and help others to know themselves without undue interference but full attention.
And this is a lifelong process which never ends.
If you cannot or are not prepared to comply with these conditions you are not suited to teach anything.
Nev Sagiba Sensei
www.aikiblue.com
