why i practice aikido- a. shridhar

November 15, 2017

I practice aikido because it is my path. This is not what I would have said five and a half years ago when I started.

When I started aikido, I had no idea what it was. I had just moved to New York City from living in India and London, and was starting life over on my own. After about 22 years of dancing, I had decided to stop. I had studied one year of Indian martial arts while in Bangalore and knew that I wanted to train in a martial practice. I did not know why. It was like I was in a pitch black room and was following a simpler, more basic sense than sight. My friend said, “you should check out aikido, I think you would like it.” Watching class, I knew within a few seconds that I would like Savoca Sensei to be my teacher. In a way, as much as I found aikido, I think it also found me.

Recently, I have been thinking about my previous dance training and aikido. I have been asking myself why I decided to stop dancing and why I have made a commitment within myself to aikido. The initial answer that came up was too easy. “Dance was heavily related to my married life and I wanted to leave that behind.” That wasn’t it. While I loved dancing, I felt boxed in by ideas of how I had to be as a female dancer on stage and off. As I grew older, the high of performance also wore off. I grew more interested in finding a sense of depth and rootedness within myself and I also wanted to work with other people. I practice aikido because it is not solitary. While each person must work on themselves, the work is also with another. If both people really give themselves, practice can be a way for both to create and discover.

In aikido, there is a sense of wildness. This does not mean crazy and wild movements. For me, this wildness is a feeling of not just being this list of attributes or qualities that I have for myself. It’s a feeling of existing and working with another person with fresh possibilities every time. This starts at a physical level, when you decide to not let your body tell the same story again and again. “I have bad knees so I can only go down this much, or I can only stretch this much.”

Sometimes, especially when resistance has been worn away, this wildness can be felt, and you find yourself moving differently than the list of “this is who I am and how I move”. This wildness moves beyond the physical level as well. It is not pushing down and hiding what comes up. Yes, we must work continuously to channel this wildness and learn how to use it. But aikido does not ask me to hide. It asks me to be myself, in small ways, and in big ways.

When I started aikido, I was training for myself. I felt like I had given away my voice to others, and I was training to find it. However, this has changed. Yes, I still train for myself - I want to go deep and I must bring a fierce commitment and energy to practice, but it is not only for myself anymore. Being part of a strong community at the dojo shows me how connected we are. What I do on and off the mat affects others. And what good is it for me to develop myself alone? In the first place, that is already impossible. My training would not be possible without the lifelong dedication of many teachers, including Savoca Sensei, to this art. In this way, as soon as I started training I was connected. And as I continue training, it must be to continue this connection with others. So I also practice aikido for the community that I am a part of, and in a greater sense, the world.

Perhaps the simplest answer to why I practice, is that I love aikido. It is beautiful and fierce, and the most difficult thing I have ever done. It is rich and deep. It is not easy. But I love it.

While the following are not my words, they express how I feel. They are an excerpt from Mary Oliver’s “Starfish”:

“[...] What good does it do

to lie all day in the sun

loving what is easy?

It never grew easy,

but at last I grew peaceful:

all summer

my fear diminished

as they bloomed through the water

like flowers, like flecks

of an uncertain dream,

while I lay on the rocks, reaching

into the darkness, learning

little by little to love

our only world.”

perseverance (or how to give up)- j. jones

May 7, 2017

Sometimes, your bread does not rise.

After you mill the rye berries into fine flour in a hand-powered mill until your arms are tired; after you feed the sourdough starter fresh rye flour and water, and let it ferment overnight; after you get up in the morning and mix the tangy-smelling starter with white flour, water, caraway seed, and sea salt in a 40-quart bowl, enough dough for 24 or 36 loaves; after kneading this mass by hand until you're tired and sweating; after waiting for the dough to rise, forming it into loaves, and waiting for them to rise again; after baking the loaves, sometimes, nothing happens.

They did not rise. They're dense, gummy, inedible. Sometimes, you try this whole process several times, changing different variables, and still it fails. Dozens of loaves go to compost, or to feed pigs. You check and re-check the recipe. You call the baker who gave you the recipe for advice. You pray. And still, nothing.

And then you give up.

You learn, that sometimes to progress you must stop, give up your assumptions, 'empty your cup', throw the recipe out of the window. You create an empty space, and see a new way emerge from nothing. You find a new recipe that uses the same ingredients but with a different process. You try it, and the dough rises, and the bread is good, and then you understand what you did wrong in the first place. You understand that time is an ingredient, that progress is not always a straight line, and that perseverance is not stubbornness. To persevere is to gladly accept obstacles in the way as a gift.

(J. Jones is a former student of Brooklyn Aikikai, a baker, and now lives in Vermont.)

elevator by n. calonge

November 10, 2016

In 1859, the Cooper Union Foundation Building was opened with the mission to promote social mobility through subsidized education in arts and engineering. The building itself was an example of foresight and massive inventiveness, having been the first 'skyscraper' of its time (it was five stories), and was designed with an elevator shaft before the elevator was even invented.

In preparing for the future, it is potentially disturbing to have a gaping hole where something uplifting ought to be. Yet that is exactly what architect Fredrick A. Petersen did by imagining, then producing, a hollow column in a major building. In deciding that the world was capable of faster, higher, and more advanced means of elevation, he prepared for it. How do we do this in practice and practical life? Because at the same time that we tap into our limitless potential, it can sometimes feel like just that -- potential. And lurking behind that is a deep sense of despair. What if this is just an empty tube in a fancy building?

Yoga teacher B.K.S. Iyengar wrote this of architecture and bodily alignment:"To reach the infinite we have to use finite means as does the architect, even if he is building a cathedral or temple. And, like the architect, yoga science says you have to align your inner and outer bodies, so that they run parallel and in communication with each other... Alignment creates an intercommunicating structure that, like a cathedral, is an offering to God."

If alignment is our gift to God, then the way we build our lives is our gift to each other. We are responsible for unleashing potential and making the bridge from creative vision into reality.

So. We prepare. We show up. We uplift. We architect space -- internally and all around us -- with all the brave ferocity, kindness, and imagination we possess.