Going Bananas

There is a phenomenon in Aikido class where, sometimes, experienced students struggle terribly while beginners do extremely well.  Takeguchi Sensei calls it the "Beginner's Mind".  

The basic gist is that beginners are working off of a clean slate.  They have no other reference but what they are shown.  Without any preconception, they do exactly what the instructors tell them to do.  Meanwhile, experienced students are confused due to notions and ideas they have inside their heads.  Their movements reflect how convoluted their internal environment is.  

Read [Clear As Mud]

What I keep wondering is:  Where do these notions come from?  How do people get so confused?  

Thanks to a bunch of bananas, I think I found the answer.

Recently, I decided to rekindle my love for drawing.  One afternoon, I set out a bunch of bananas as my models.

Simply put:  My sketching session did not go so well.

For a while, I thought my inaccuracies were due to my lack of skills, my misjudgment of the angles, curvature, light perceptions, etc.  And then I realized that even when I can see something, I have a hard time staying true to it when I put my pencil on the paper.  It was really odd.  It felt as if something inside of me is pushing me to stray off course.  As I paused to ponder, I suddenly became aware of these strange, intense emotions boiling inside my chest.

"I am just looking at a bunch of bananas.  What intense feelings can I possibly have for bananas???"  

Theoretically speaking, the task of sketching is pretty straight forward: You see a curve, you draw a curve; you see a straight line, you draw a straight line.  For me, the problem arises when the edge of a curved surface looks like a straight line from my perspective.  My brain understands the idea, but my heart would not leave it alone.  Because of my prior experience in a 3D world, my heart feels the urge to express everything I know about bananas.  It keeps wanting to mess with the lines, trying to make the image feel more round and plump.

I, the not-very-skilled artist, was attempting to combine two sets of totally different perceptions that do not reconcile with each other.  That was how the image turned into a mess.  

Several days later, I taught an Aikido class where we practiced the sideway entrance for yokomen uchi attack. Technically, it should be pretty simple -- slide to the side with the feet, and do the upward ikkyo movement with the hands.  From my observation over the years, however, this is one of the trickiest basic entrances for many students.   

Despite my best effort in showing and reminding students that they only need to move laterally, they continued to move forward and clashed with their partners.  The ikkyo hands should only go up, but students kept moving them up and then down to suppress the uke.  Deadlocks and more deadlocks.

Then, it dawned on me that they must be having a Banana Moment!  

Aikido is a complicated activity that requires a lot of skills.  When watching a demonstration, to start, you have to observe and remember the physical movements and their sequence for both the uke and nage.  In addition, you need to perceive the flow of both parties.  You also want to try to capture the feelings that the uke and nage are experiencing.  Then, you are supposed to isolate the various information you have just obtained and objectively reproduce what you just saw for the role that you play . . .

In this case, the nage created a flow which rises up like a wall of tsunami waves towards the uke.  The uke got thrusted upwards and then dropped backwards away from the wave.  Students saw the movements and felt the flow, but failed to discern which part was due to who.  Just like me, who tried to express the roundness of a banana in the wrong way, they mixing up the form and flow of different parties together and ended up doing the nage's moves, but flowing like the uke.  

Looking back, no wonder when Takeguchi Sensei talked to us about practice, he often talked in terms of "what I showed", "what you saw" and "what you thought you saw".  He showed us one thing, but once the imagery reaches us, it (d)evolves into a countless number of different things.

Fortunately, the solution to this problem is rather straight forward.  Everybody can do it with just a little mindfulness and patience.  It is not very different from sketching bananas:

Calm your emotions.  Simply reproduce what you see directly from eye to hand.  Skip the brain.  Acknowledged your feelings, and tell them to stay put.  Return to perceiving what your eyes had to offer.  

Before you know it, you will have a nice realistic reproduction in front of your eyes.