I’ve been really physically active this summer, training Aikido nearly six days a week on average. One day, I trained for seven hours. This taught me that eating well and sleeping well make a huge difference. Vegetables make a big difference in stamina and recovery times. I feel best when when I eat lightly steamed vegetables with ground meat, and a generous portion of brown rice.
Today, I joined a construction work team to put up scaffolding around an apartment to be renovated. We had to climb the scaffolding and hand parts up so that the people at top could build it higher. My body feels good now, comparable to how it felt when I trained for seven hours – a full body exercise centering on core muscles. I wouldn’t have been able to do this if I hadn’t been training all summer. All the people working were healthy and fit. The job demands it – they would immediately face the consequences if they let their health slide.
I’m much healthier now than I was when I worked in the office. I would skimp on sleep and eat junk food, no doubt affecting the clarity of my thoughts. Desk work affords more leeway than manual labor, but one shouldn’t take advantage of it. I wonder how much more effective I’d be in the office if I managed my energy and health as well as I’m managing it now – getting good exercise, 6 to 8 hours of sleep, and eating nutritious food.
One effect on me of living a life of leisure was that it made me reactive – not setting many goals, I just basically dealt with what came up. I did various things for fun and intellectual stimulation, like hypnosis sessions and business communications consulting, and while I gained skills from these, I didn’t have the sense that I was moving in any particular direction.
My journey out of this state of mind was given a push one morning at the Honbu Dojo, Yasuno Sensei spoke of projecting intent: Ki wo mae ni dasu!
In the execution of an Aikido technique, there is the nage - the thrower – and the uke – the recipient. Techniques begin with the uke attacking, and the nage accepting the attack and changing its direction, ending with a throw or pin. Yasuno sensei advised us: “Do not wait for the attacker to come before parrying. Maintain control of the situation! Once the attacker moves, go out wholeheartedly to meet him. This includes counter-punching – during practice, your punches mustn’t land, of course, but you should think about punching as part of projecting your intent.” 「皆さんは待っているからうまく行かない。その状況を支配するには、まず相手が動き出したら、全心全力でぶつけていく。当て身の意味も考え直してもらいた い…. 」
This sort of internal shift in feeling made the remainder of practice very different. My partner would come to strike from the side, which I invited, and then I stepped forward decisively to meet and parry, unbalancing my attacker, and while maintaining my balance, redirecting her attack. Though I could not clearly visualize the finish of the throw, I was able to lead the situation. My partner started practicing the same way, too, and the difference was just as noticeable.
A dramatic change in practice, simply as a result of a shift in thought, and it occurs to me that this is the kind of stance we should always take even if we don’t know what the end result will be, because it gives us the ability to lead the action as we see things unfolding.
Our life is necessarily based on goals – they give us direction – almost any sort of activity that we do, for work or pleasure, has goals, from acheiving revenue goals in sales, to scoring points in tennis and soccer, to ascending ranks in Aikido.
We invest an incredible amount of time toward acheiving goals because we think that attaining them will make us happy. Yet, by and large, acheiving goals does not seem to make us happy. Have you ever bought something, and then forgotten about it or realized it wasn’t what you wanted? One of my friends is shopping for a BMW, investing a considerable amount of time and energy, and when he decides, money, over this decision. Yet, I’m fairly certain that after he buys it, he will not be significantly happier than he is now. This is confirmed by one of my friends, who is a Lexus car salesman – she says that people are most happy just before they buy the car, as well as by the research of psychologist Dan Gilbert.
The Aftermath of Achieving a Goal
Many of us have already experienced or can understand this predicament as it relates to material things, but it was my shock and surprise last year when I realized that it also applies to acheivements in general. One interesting comment some friends once made to me is that love is most fun and exciting during the pursuit phase. When people are officially “dating” things become mundane. You should think about this, too, because if you set a goal and have a plan for achieving it, sooner or later, it will happen, and then what will you do? When I graduated, I had set for myself the following goals:
Then, after my best year ever at the company, I found myself in a position where I had acheived all of these goals. Life was comfortable, I had friends at work, and had a good routine. But then, I was beset by a certain anxiety – is this as good as it gets? Because I could see that I would only continue to set more goals, achieve those, and set even more goals.
So are we doomed forever to pursue goals, but not be happy when we attain them? Is life a never-ending pursuit of receding fulfillment?
I thought long and hard about this, and thought – what’s the point? So, I transitioned my responsibilities, quit my job, and went on a one-year sabbatical. I resolved to have a good time – one of the original purposes of a sabbatical year in the old testament is to stop working and devote as much time to study and reflection as possible. Last summer, I went to the outdoor pool in my neighborhood four times a week, Aikido twice a week, then I went traveling with friends in Japan for a month, then started training Aikido more intensively in the winter, and now I train five or six days a week.
No More Excuses
Without any goals imposed upon me, suddenly I had no more excuses for things that I had always wanted to do – I started eating breakfast every day and keeping my apartment very clean. I learned to eat lunch very slowly – at first counting the number of times I chewed my food, but then doing it automatically, and I was really surprised when I met some working friends for lunch, and they finished before I’d eaten half. Realizing I wasn’t getting any closer to my goal of being a published author, I started writing more in this blog… I realized ways in which I’d made work an excuse not to do things.
Yet, enjoyable though all this was, I felt a lack. I distrusted goal setting, yet felt unfulfilled without having goals. The answer to this dilemma came to me through Aikido. Aikido has no competitions, and progress is gauged through passing tests to gain rank. The goal of ascending in rank gives direction to practice. Yet, the vast majority of people are not in Aikido to get rank. Rather, they like going to practice, and this is the way goals should be – they should direct our activities, thereby freeing us to enjoy our daily progress toward them. Goals should direct us, because without direction, we don’t know where we will end up, and we should not base our happiness on acheiving them, but rather the journey. I have rediscovered the principle that life is a journey, and not a destination.
Philosopher Alain de Botton wrote that one of the joys of work is to know how one’s actions that day fit into a larger plan of the week, of months, of quarterly, and annual goals, and that one of the joys of work is to relieve us of having to think of bigger questions, like “what is the meaning of life?” I have certainly benefitted from work in this way, and had fun. Yet, I saw people using it as a crutch – people who didn’t have satisfying personal lives, relying on work completely for their intellectual stimulation, sense of status, and socializing. We are encouraged to search for a “calling” that we can lose ourselves in. But this is very hard – we are complete human beings, able to access the entire range of human experience. Rare is the job that allows us to fully express all the aspects of our humanity.
I do not know the meaning of life, but having clarified my relationship to goals, and placed a few new ones on the horizon, I am ready to go back to working at a company again, in a more balanced and effective way.
During a break in morning practice:
“What’s your name?” I asked my practice partner.
“Hino.” He said.
“I’m Yeoh.”
“Pleased to meet you.”
“Pleased to meet you.”
He smiled, and said. “Shall we?”
I was later reflecting on my morning practice with a fellow dojo member. “I practiced this morning with someone who didn’t grab or pull at all. I learned a lot.”
He looked at me incredulously. “That was Hino-sensei.”
Oh. “I knew something was different.”
Aikido by .
I have been training aikido at Honbu Dojo (Aikikai Headquarters) since February, and steadily ramped up the number of times a week that I train, from twice a week in January, to four times a week in March, to averaging seven times a week now, including about five times a week in the morning, at 6:30am.
Do you remember as a kid running on the playground or park, marveling at how your body responds, testing to see how fast your legs could take you? Or that feeling of freedom when you’d just learned how to ride a bike? That’s the way practicing Aikido feels after you’ve gotten the basics down – every practice session is learning to move with greater freedom.
I simply joined the Honbu Dojo, and thereafter gradually increased the number of practice sessions I went to. I did this without telling anyone outside of Honbu Dojo that I was planning on doing this. In hindsight, this was a good thing, because after doing so, I told some friends and got some friendly jabs about my excessive enthusiasm. These might have deterred me before I had developed the habit-force required to attend morning classes. When I spoke with some people who knew me before I started practicing this much they had some fun with it – which I was surprised by, since it didn’t even occur to me that it was odd that I practiced this much. But these jabs hurt a little. I felt, like, well, a freak. Let’s change the subject.
Within Honbu Dojo, what I’m doing is completely normal. My behavior is “average” – among my peers, many train five or six days a week at the Honbu, then once or twice at a local dojo, and some even attend several classes a day at the Honbu.
Once, before the 7am basics class, I knelt lined up with other students before class waiting for the instructor to come. One woman came in and looked to the man at my left, smiled, and said “I couldn’t stay away!” It emerged that a group of people from the dojo had gone drinking after practice the previous evening until past 11pm, and here they were at morning practice! Habitforce!
So, when making changes and installing new habits
- it’s probably best not to tell anyone. They might discourage you, or they might make you feel good before you’ve actually done anything. Better to wait until after you’ve already done it
- find a group of people for whom what you’re about to take up is normal behavior. They already have the value system and habits that you will need in order to succeed.
At an introductory seminar to Aikido, I learned about how to structure a class for complete beginners, and of different paths to understanding.
Aikido is a martial art, and as such, it’s meant to be experienced. I wish we had spent more time doing Aikido basics, instead of talking about principles and how they worked, but there were certain eureka moments.
A Eureka Moment
A first-timer and I took turns with this technique, but using a wooden knife.
After a few rounds I did a variation. As he thrust the knife forward with his left hand, instead of evading to the side, I evaded diagonally back and to my right. I grasped the knife-wielding hand with my right hand. I explained, “And then, supposing your partner pushes, you can use it to throw like this.” I twisted his hand as I stepped back, and forced him to the ground.
He smiled in a glow of understanding.
“There are a lot of possible variations.”
“And you can adapt what you do depending on the situation.” he said.
“Right.”
—
If I were to structure this class, I would have had the students practice a lot more basic moves in isolation, then built them up, culminating in the combination of moves above.
We did do footwork, but skipped some steps, so I fear that it was not immediately apparent to the students how everything connected together.
Had we gone step-by-step, sensei would not have had to verbally explain as much.
Synthesized over the course of three aikido practice sessions this week, key learnings are in bold.
Starting position: Extend right hand vertically or palm-up. Partner grabs your wrist with his left hand. Extend left hand above. Partner grabs your left wrist with his right hand. You are now in gyaku hanmi stance. Your elbows are are in front of the plane of your chest. They will never move behind this plane.
Irimi: Step to your right and slightly forward with your right foot. Your back foot follows, maintaining hanmi. You are now completely off of your partner’s line of attack (his sagittal plane), with your center of balance between your two feet, while having taken your partner’s balance.
If your partner resists your irimi by pushing with his lower hand: Push back, then change direction of force. There is a “sweet spot” that is akin to the sweet spot in a sumi-otoshi, such that downward force on his front foot will prevent him from being able to step with that foot, and there is an angle where you can apply body weight against the strength of his arm, pushing his hand out. As you do this, turn your palm down. You are now completely off of your partner’s line of attack, with your center of balance between your two feet, while having taken your partner’s balance.
Keeping both top and bottom elbows in front of the plane of your chest, step forward with your back foot, while cutting down thumb-down with the top hand. End in hanmi stance, with your weight mostly on the front foot.
Alternative from ai-hanmi stance: Extend right hand, pulling foot back as partner grabs. Extend left hand above. Partner grabs left wrist. You are now in left ai-hanmi stance.
Irimi: bring back foot out and to the back of your partner’s front foot. Tenkan slightly when it is in place. You are now completely off of your partner’s line of attack, with your center of balance between your two feet, while having taken your partner’s balance.
I have been formulating in my mind a path to mastery of topics – a way to generically apply oneself to mastering anything – to developing an intuitive feel for the art of something. It has been crystallizing through my study of Aikido, guitar, foreign languages, swimming, and through my experiences teaching foreign languages, tutoring in geometry, and my goal-coaching services.
attitude of positive expectation – this is the means by which the inevitable failure are converted into learning experiences. The appropriate self-talk is not “why am I getting it wrong?” – to which the mind will provide dozens of reasons why you’re getting it wrong. This stops learning and movement. Rather, one should say “oops. that’s interesting,” and continue to course-correct.
The steps in training for mastery are as follows:
1. right-brained engagement (unconscious competence). Observe with all of your senses, and try to duplicate. If you’re using your eyes, don’t look at one point, but instead, slightly defocus so you can see the big picture. Use your other senses in an analogous way. At this point, trying to concentrate on any one aspect will put cognitive filters on, actually reducing the amount of information you’re taking in. Most models of learning start with what they call “unconscious incompetence” but I have found that the right-brain is remarkably competent.
My own experience with tennis lessons is that I can hit the ball reasonably well, if I’m not thinking too much. Once I start thinking too much, I lose the feel and my return of the ball deteriorates. The same goes with my experience in Aikido. With languages, I find that the best pronunciation results from listening to a native or a recording of a native, and then repeating as he does, before I start to read any grammar or notes.
This can be said to be imitation of form.
2. left-brain engagement (conscious competence) – a master in any subject has conscious access to his knowledge. The right brain is very pliable, but that is why it must be supplemented with the more rigid right brain. The left brain comes up with reasons that reinforce right-brained learning. In languages, after one has developed a feel for the rhythm and sound of sentences, one must learn the vocabulary and grammar. Music is a similar analog – once one has developed a feel for assonance, timber, and rhythm, one must consciously understand why the music feels a certain way, in order to create or compose it. In Aikido, it is the understanding of what steps and movements must be done in order to properly take someone’s balance.
This can be explained as “after internalizing form, learn why it works.”
3. unification (wholistic competence) – In reality, things happen too fast for the left-brained linguistic mind to process it. Next one must rehearse the reflexes while consciously thinking of the actions being performed. This can be reciting sentences after one has learned the grammar and vocabulary, or in Aikido performing the form – partly relying on “feel” and partly relying on one’s conscious understanding of how it’s “supposed” to be (right foot stepping toward the opponent’s armpit, etc.) In tennis, it is the unifying of feel and theory that allows one to aim the ball.
This process of unification is what makes for non-linear progress. When trying to both “feel” and “think,” one runs into things that before, one was able to effortlessly pull off, but now, because of “thinking,” one has lost the “feeling.” Inwardly, the learning is taking place, but outwardly, progress appears inconsistent. It may be necessary go to a purely “feeling” mode or “thinking” mode as necessary in order to pull it off.
4. entrainment (unconscious competence) – after learning both the feel and the theory to a task, the next step is to rehearse it so that it comes up to speed. The rehearsal is what allows both the left and the right brain to “chunk” information into certain gestalt divisions. In languages, this means that one’s speed improves with rehearsal of spoken utterances, and the internalization of grammatical frameworks allows one to make longer and more complex utterances. To use an Aikido analogy, an “irimi” becomes a gestalt term that allows one to learn other forms that feature it, rather than a complex “step forward off of the opponent’s line of attack while keeping one’s own line of attack facing the opponent,” which is how a beginner might learn it.
Too often, approaches to learning lean one way or the other. The way languages are taught in Japan is purely left-brained: all grammar and vocab without any actual speaking. I also once met a college student studying rhetoric who said the students never gave speeches in class – “That’s too advanced. We only study theory.” The only way to learn how to do something is to actually do it, my friend.
Also, the Suzuki music method over-emphasizes the right brain. It teaches one to “feel” a melody through listening and imitation, but I went through six years of training and never properly learned how to read music – something which I am making up for now by reading a book on music theory.
Criticisms
I have given people advice on learning which has been dismissed as not applicable, because I have an “analytic” mind, my client will say. But I don’t think this is true – I always start with “feel” first. Only after I have a feel do I analyze, and I analyze not for analysis’ sake, but to be able to consciously access why something “feels right” or “feels wrong.”
The method I used to master some 2000 chinese characters in two years is also a both-brained approach. I describe it in more detail on http://www.genetickanji.com. I started out with a purely right-brained approach – writing characters purely based on shape or feel – and my recall rate was about 50% on a week-to-week basis. But unless I continued to develop “feel” by continuously rehearsing the characters through writing, I would continue to forget. I also tried copying verses of poetry – this gave me more practice writing, and started to give me better mental access to how characters were formed by allowing me to think of writing them in the context of other characters, but this allowed me to learn only as many characters as I could remember in poems.
The approach I finally arrived at was one that gave me intentional access to my writing reflexes. I learned small components – which were easy to learn to write reflexively, and I learned more complex characters as combinations of these components. Thus, most complex characters ended up being simply two characters combined together, rather than an amalgamation of strokes.
What I’m excited about
I am so excited about this learning process recently because of my progress in Aikido. After about four months of almost daily practice, with teachers of different styles of explanation (right-brain, left-brain). Which I unified and entrained over the course of many training sessions, I can now look at a video of a new technique and imagine myself inside of it performing the technique. Before – I needed to have a partner to learn any new techniques.
or: Spicing Your Life up with Improvisational Comedy and Clinical Hypnosis.
One of my business consulting clients is multilingual, and is now working in Japan. He came to me one day saying “When I speak in Japanese with people at the company, they often reply back in English. It’s frustrating.”
I told him – they’re probably just trying to be helpful. You can compliment them. Say “Your English is very good – you’re very bilingual, and I need your help to learn to speak Japanese better. Could you reply in Japanese when I speak Japanese?”
Just when I said “Your English is very good,” my client burst out laughing, and took notes.
The principle at work is “Accept what you are offered.”
In Aikido, we are taught that the opponents attack is an offer. If he pushes, you pull. If he pulls, you push. Any attack is an offer of momentum or energy that can be redirected. Directly trying to block an attack is painful, and escalates any struggle. Instead, one accepts the offer, utilizes the momentum to unbalance the opponent, after which one is in a position to lead. Even a “direct” martial art like karate doesn’t block punches directly, but deflects them perpendicular to the oncoming force.
Improv Comedy has this principle, too. Watch brilliant artists like “Who’s line is it, anyway?” and you’ll find that they are making it up on the spot, but they are following certain principles, the main one of which is that they accept all offers. At no point do they say “no” or “but.” They are always building off of each other’s statements into a funny, co-created reality. In a beginning improv comedy class I took, our teacher instructed us to start each sentence with “yes, and” so we could get a feel for it.
Naturally, hypnotists and physicians do this as well. When a client describes what’s ailing him, it is the job of the practitioner to listen and agree. What the client is feeling is the truth, and in order to lead him to a place of better health, the practitioner first recognizes this and agrees – this is as much to establish rapport as it is to make a diagnosis. What’s more, in hypnosis, we find that clients with something like a smoking addiction are obsessive, on just has to re-direct the obsession in the opposite direction. Another term for this is utilization.
So next time, instead of opposing, accept what you have been offered. Utilize. Redirect. Move so that the movement of your opponent is completely encompassed in the greater movement of you and your opponent, in a way that you can stay perfectly balanced. Accepting is not condoning, but it is the first step to redirecting.
Saturday a week ago, I went to Roppongi to dance salsa, but the place I usually go to was empty. A lot of Japanese have left from Tokyo to the west, and a lot of foreigners have left Japan altogether, fearing nuclear contamination. I wholly avoid watching the news because it’s covered with speculation about nuclear disaster. The Yomiuri newspaper gives more balanced coverage, while putting the numbers into perspective. The earthquake and tsunami had impact on large numbers of people – it’s doubly important to control what emotional inputs one gets.
My friends who watch the news are invariably more worried about things than I am. They even speak with other friends who watch the news, and they tell me things that are flatly wrong – because the problem of watching news that is mixed with speculation is that it is impossible to keep it straight in one’s head as to what is speculation and what is true.
My Rabbi has been helping out in Sendai. His friends and relatives have been telling him to flee. He gets a lot of flak for “endangering himself and his family.” Why do people who are not even in Japan feel that they know so much more about the situation and safety than us in Japan?
The real sufferers are the refugees – people who flee are not thinking of lending help. Those who advocate fleeing are hindering the amelioration of thousands of people’s living conditions. Rather than speculate about nuclear disaster and promoting and profiting from the emotion of fear, the media should talk about the help that is needed in the refugee areas, and promote and prosper from the emotion of compassion.
Helping out in Sendai:
www.youtube.com/watch?v=ge5fJB9j1TM
http://chabadjapan.org/blog_e/2011/03/sendai-march-21/
