falling. yelling

“You can’t blame gravity for falling in love!” – Albert Einstein

Hiro pointed out to me in todays practice, how i tend to “vocalise”, sing,
yell, “kiai” when falling out of balance. I was intrigued by this
observation.

I reflected that I experience relief / joy in those moments.
Micheal raised the parallel of “petit mort” the little death.

I remembered that much of my early attraction to aikido was falling. Much of
my dissapointment in judo was the tendency to resist falling. As a child i was extremely interested in the stuntmen and women who fall for a living.

In the zen training I did, there seemed to be a strong theme of falling. I
remember a story told by my teacher Myokioni (who died recently). She told
of the person hanging on a cliff-face holding onto a root. Above, hungry
tigers prowl – below, an abyss. The person sees a wild strawberry growing out of the rock face
and , reaching out to taste, lets go of the root…

How sweet!

Click here for further falling fun!

Peri

is freeform aikido a psychedelic practice?

Square and control?

The idea of aikido have sometimes been illustrated with the use of the
shapes triangle, circle and square. My son Kit was talking to me about
these.
I then thought of how I had heard the square described as representing
control. I realised that for me now, control has very little place in how I
understand aikido.

For me control implies one will imposed upon another. For
me what is interesting and excites me is the unpredictable creation that
emerges from between the practioners in their meeting. For me this is the
antithesis of control.

Aiki promises me an alternative to the stern
predictability implied by the notion of control.

Peri

balance as finite or infinite resource

On reflection on Paul Goodman’s quote I became aware of various attitudes to
balance that we embody in our practice.
I thought that we can practice as though having our balance is a limited and
scarce resource we might fear loosing and thus cling rigidly too.
I thought that we can also practice as though balance is an infinite
resource.

This then encourages me not to cling to my states of balance. I am
then able to more freely identify with what I become ( as Goodman says) and
flow, fall and feel free with my partner. I am less defensive of my
balance with a fear of loosing it.

As one my partners commented, when I
practice with that attitude she noticed a sense of lightness in our
practice.

Peri

victory, loss and creative disinterest a quote from paul goodman

“The opposite of the need for victory is ‘creative disinterest.’… [a] peculiar attitude of the spontaneous self. the creatively impartial woman win or lose; she is not attached to what might be lost, for she knows
she is changing and already identifies with what she will become. With this
attitude goes an emotion that is the opposite of the sense of security,
namely faith: absorbed in the actual activity she does not protect the
background but draws energy from it, she has faith that she will prove
adequate.” -Perls, Hefferline and Goodman (1951/94, p.132).

discovery through experiment

Freeform aikido is a continual and intense learning process of discovery through experiment. Practitioners are encouraged to base their learning and practice on their actual experience through experiment rather than through the introjection of their teachers view points or philosophy