intense bursts

I have noticed a gradual shift in our “culture” of practice. These days we often group round a practicing pair and enjoy their practice - jumping in and taking over from one of the participants when there seems to be an opening.

I discussing this shift we were aware that our current practice is highly intense and demanding. Our practice goes through wave motions of intense participation and more relaxed recovery time. This is different to the more steady practice rhythm that we used to enjoy.

learning from the ground up

At the end of practice today I noticed that from the waist down I had the feeling of earthiness - like a gro-bag!

We had spent quite some times working from and on the ground in squats, knee walking and back work.

I was aware that I had learnt a lot. Yet my learning felt as though it was in my hips down or feet up. This felt different from the learning I experienced as “head-based” which I tend to experience when working more arm-based and standing.

growing into contact, glowing and marriage!

Today we looked at “growing into the contact”. I was considering how we can at times contract, shrink or brace ourselves against quick or or threatening impacts. I was interested to see that if we expand into, and with the other, ki-musubi is made and developed without any secondary actions necessary. Nicola Endicott suggested we slow down to experience this. Hiro said he wished to look at simultaneous mutual engagement. We combined these two ideas in our practice. Out of the slow practice I became aware of two things.

• a “glowing” quality in our approach is needed to bring the contact alive -The Shining!
• it must be full-bodied not fragmentarily from the limb

When we engaged with each other in this way I had the image of bride and groom meeting at the alter. Hopefully (for the sake of the ensuing marriage) there is the glowing sense of growing together, a vivid electricity. I was reminded of O’Senseis idea of practice as the “cultivation of attraction”.

dreamtime

einscafe.eins.org/einscafeThis morning I woke from a dream. Awake, I shuttled myself from my sense of the dream to more “practical matters”. In doing so I noticed a chage in my “being”. When I stayed with the sense of the dream i was both sensorily aware and immersed in imagination.

This is the consciousness I have when practicing freeform aikido. It is a curious integration, living vitally in my senses and vividly embodying my imagination.

For me this resonates with Winnicots ideas about potential and transitional space

demonstrations of “mastery” or collaborative enquiry?

I have never enjoyed displays of “virtuosity”, in any field. As a flaunting of the “known” or the well-rehearsed, I find it uninspiring. I am much more excited by the stumbling into the unknown, the unfamiliar, the unpredictable. (Robin Williamson of the Incredible String Band had a nice phrase “inspired amateurishness”.

I enjoy our current ethos of collaborative enquiry. Freeform Aikido is in a sense “style-less”, by definition, form-less, not defined by the form it may temporarily manifest itself in. For me this contributes enormously to stripping the practice of being a demonstration of “mastery”.

There is strong egalitarian quality in our coming together to practice. There is no longer a vivid hierarchy organised around the sorting of those who know and can, against those who don’t know and can’t. I think this may reflect our approach to knowledge. Not as a defined commodity that can be handed down In this situation “knowledge is power” and creates a vertically in our relationships. Our current practice has an approach to knowledge as something contextual and evolutionary and played lightly with between us as we go. We are exploring with each other, rather than proving ourselves against each other.

“lose your mind and come to your senses” - warming up

I realise that Fritz Perl’s catch phrase “lose your mind and come to your senses” neatly sums up my approach to “warming up”.

For me to prepare for freeform practice I need to shift mode from “thinking about” and doing, to feeling. That is, grounding my self in my “felt sense” allowing my awareness to play in sensation. In practice I do this by using my inhalation to feel whatever there is to be felt and exhaling into that. Dissolving. Any movements I make are then to heighten sensation in as many areas of me as possible. This of course rapidly bring me to my awareness of my environment, ground and air temperature and others I am working with.

When facilitating a warm up in a group I am now wary that I will become too much the focus of the groups attention. That they will watch, and do and still leave themselves in the realm of “thinking about and doing”.

nurturing and protecting

” Hold your partner as you would cradle a baby”. Morihei Ueshiba

Our approach is the antithesis of self-defence in that we seek to protect our partners face, thoat, ribs, breasts and genitals etc (the openings) from weight baring or impact! We also allow are partner joints freedom to move as they require, to avoid twisting or dislocation. We don’t drop our partners but let them down gently. We attune moment to moment to our partners potential and limitations and vulnerability.

free improvisation - lovely link!

Here is a link about free improvisation in music which I think almost says it all as far as freeform aikido practice is concerned!

An approach to free improvisation

some working principles of freeform aikido

• create space
• listen to energy
• join
• play
• express

beginning with ki-musubi

 

Freeform practice begins with ki-musubi. (I don’t like to use jargon, as I think it carries us dangerously away from our actual experience, but, at the moment, I have n’t found a better term to describe the felt sense of shared-energetic-direction). Ki-musubi is in some ways a locking-in with the energetic extension and/or expressed intention of your partner in movement.

In freeform aikido both parties are active in finding ki-musubi between them. I think it is important to recognise ki-musubi is not the property of anyone, or something I can do, but is something I can be open to as the child of our engagement - born out of our meeting.

Ki-musubi is the starting point and dive board from which all further action evolves. It is the guide and muse of how the situation elaborates. Ki-musubi is the given creative well-spring of the practice.

In many ways the challenge of freeform practice is to how flexibly responsive to the ki-musubi we can allow ourselves to be.

the “between” and presence

One way i evaluate my practice and can tell whether it is going well, is when i sense the practice evolving out of the “between”. Neither I or my partner are willing a particular outcome. What is between me and my partner, our relating, is the well-spring of what is occuring. The between becomes richer the more prescent, open and available each participant is.

I have the image of participants “growing” towards the contact with each other - a sense of flowering towards the sunshine of the others presence.

heres a link to a nice discussion re:grace and the between

laughing?

Freeform aikido is a rich source of laughter.

I am delighted by how much I and others laugh while practicing. In fact, on reflection it could be one of my main reasons for practicing. Laughing in practice has many of the qualities of ki-ai - releasing tension and expressing bound energy. It also has a strong capacity to bond - aiki. I am not surprised that laughing has been ascribed so may health benefits, or that O-sensei exhorted people to practice in a “vibrant and joyful manner”.

Laughter in practice comes not so much from being a witness to the absurd, but from being a fully immersed part of it!