The Sound Of Silence

When I first started practicing Aikido, my teachers often helped me by practicing with me.  They would do something and then asked me, "Can you feel it?"  

"Feel it?  Feel what?  Hmm, I am not sure."  They totally lost me.  "Where should I feel it?  How do I feel it?  What is 'it'?"  

It was frustrating to me.  I was trying my best, but I had absolutely no idea what my teachers wanted me to do.  It was frustrating to them because what they wanted to convey to me was not something one can describe with words.

What my teachers wanted me to experience is the essence of Aikido -- a feeling between the nage and uke,  a communication that is beyond words.  

Now that I am an instructor myself, I do the same with my students.  Like me, many students have no idea how to perceive the feeling at first.  I can totally sympathize with them.  I just did not expect that I would run into an opposite problem.

Like the other day with a student, while we were practicing together, before I, the nage, made my move, he was already moving around on his own.  I was perplexed, but amused.

Then I watched him practice with other students.  He was not moving in sync with his partners either.

"Why is he wiggling back and forth like this?  Where do all these movements come from?"  To my eyes, Student was acting like he was diligently responding to something.  What was he responding to?

During their engagement, the uke and nage should both be highly attentive to each other's movements.  They want to detect the smallest changes to each other's center so that they can repond promptly.  They are like human radios that are super attuned to each other's frequency.  

But what if the human radio is not properly tuned? 

That seems to be the case with Student.  

Student actually has acquired a lot of skills so that he can "hear" quite well.  His being able to hear a lot of things is not the problem.  His problem is with listening.

What he should try to listen to is the channel of his partner's center.  Yet, among the many sounds that he is able to hear, he is unable to discern between the center's broadcast and the interference noises.  Maybe because his radio is not so well tuned, the noises end up being louder to him than the center's sounds.  As a result, he mistakenly reacted to superfluous movements and missed the real deal.

As strange as the phenominon might seem, the fix was not so hard.

We had been working on sankyo that day.  So, I set up a solid sankyo hold with me being uke for Student.  We were very well aligned and connected from center to center.  Student got to experience what "perfect reception of the human radio" should be like.  

Then, I asked him to lightly roll his hand left and right while keeping his center solid in the same position.  Instead of connecting to his center, I connected myself to his hand and proceeded to moving around with his hand.  I flew all over the place like a kite with its line cut off.  

😮

"It is weird, isn't it?" 😄 I chuckled to my dumbstruck student.  "This is what happens if I respond to your hand rather than your center.  I responded to the wrong thing!"

We set up a sankyo hold again, and have him move it around.  This time, I ignored his little hand movements, but responded to his center swiftly.   Every single time, I kept a very clear hanmi and my hanmi is well aligned with his center.

"Alignment implies a sense of direction.  However, conceptually, the center is just a point.  A point has no directions.  How do we align it with anything?  That is why, to manifests its direction, the center relies on the cooperation of other body parts around it to form a 3D structure --  the thing that we call hanmi."

We set up a sankyo hold once again.  This time, with Student being uke.  I intentionally create noises along the way, but he now knows how to tune out the interference and listens only to the true sound of the center.  Moving from hanmi to hanmi, he follows me readily without fail.

Problem solved.  Case closed.