Aikido update

I have hit a kind of awkward spot with my Ukemi. But I am finally at a point with most other things here in whitebelt land that I no longer feel like know nothing, you know? I see a beginning now. I am staaaaarrrting to grasp the edges of it.

Be a stone in the river.

When you have a Chronic condition, any disability or illness or trouble that lasts longer than other people have patience for, they often talk up how great it is for you to always be fighting, always "keep fighting this". Guess what?

They mean well but that is *exhausting* and irrational to expect.

 I'm not saying give up, I am saying you do not have to fight all the time. No one can be in an aggressive mode every day, "inspirational" only when thrashing about against the current. Sit in the current. Be a stone in the river. Let the river go past. 

“Heaven is where you are standing, and that is the place to train.” Aikido founder O Sensei Morihei Ueshiba.

I’m not saying you have to be pleased to be where you are. Being sick or disabled in some way often just sucks. It isn’t sunshine and rainbows.

But it is where you are right now, and it might help to know
that you do not have to wait to be happy
until you get better.
You can be happy or at least At Peace in some ways here and now.

Once more: You do not have to wait to be happy
until some future or impossible time when you get better.

You don’t always have to be “fighting”. You deserve to have peace now. Let yourself have it.

Aikido and Recovery

 How do you manage to balance (or not) martial arts and other parts of your life?

Aikido is a big part of my mental/personal health. I learn lessons there to apply to my personal emotional challenges. It’s been instrumental in the healing and recovery I am trying to do. It shows me in a kinetic and physical way where my fears still are, and what I can do about them.
Getting personal here, TW mentions of abuse and trauma:

It’s not an official “diagnosis”, but I have a decade or two’s worth of Complex-PTSD, which in my case is the slow trauma I got from long term bullying or emotional abuse, with threats or incidents of physical abuse. I have complex trust issues and problems ever feeling safe. Besides the obvious physical empowerment of a martial art for some self defense, Aikido is teaching me to practice trust, to enforce boundaries, and to speak up when people hurt me or I am uncomfortable.

That last is very difficult as I have had a lifetime of being "trained", told repeatedly and firmly, to be silent when I am hurting or unhappy. In our Aikido Dojo, if you ask someone to stop hurting you... they stop, instead of laughing, ignoring you, dismissing your pain, or increasing it for their entertainment. That is very new and precious to me and I am learning from it.

I am learning which motions still make me uncomfortable, and then in my outside therapy I can address the reasons for those. I get severely dizzy doing a certain turn and I realized it’s because I hate moving backward when I can’t see what’s behind me... because of fear and hypervigilance. I was able to then talk to my counselor about that.

I am also learning how to move with and around things instead of fighting against them. That’s the literal principle behind Aikido but it’s also been helping me in my emotional and personal struggles. “It is far easier to roll a rock, using its own momentum, than to try to carry the same rock. Stop trying to carry the rock!” I put myself through a lot of mental anguish I do not have to actually deal with any more  if I would just stop trying to carry it. So now it’s in inner mantra- “Stop trying to carry the rock!”

Thing about Aikido

People often will watch an Aikido demo and say, “Well it’s not realistic, you cooperated with him when he threw you!”

Hahaha, Of course I did! 

My other option was to have my arm dislocated, possibly spiral-fractured (don’t google that), and then to land neck first on the ground with all of my body weight on top of my then-shattered vertebrae. Much safer to go along with it and roll.

Aikido “looks fake” because the people being tossed

protect themselves

from the consequences of having all their momentum hurled into the ground, along with squishy breakable anatomy.

We could resist More, yes, but it would have bad results. we often do try to resist a bit to help our partners practice against an unwilling opponent, but the result is pretty much the same- Wowican’tbendthatwayTHUD…Tap!Tap!

I promise you, if you learn to roll and fall correctly to protect your body, and then get a Sensei to show you some Aikido, you will see how effective it can be. Once your balance and momentum do not belong to you, you are hurtling through the air whether you like it or not. And then you’re on the ground wondering what the heck just happened. And all that happens in less than a second. It’s really, really FUN.

Aikido and Grief

Jul 8. 2015
I had to let my darling dog go “Home” this last week. It was hard for me, but she was losing her ability to do all the things she wanted to do, and her body was quitting on her. She was already aching most of the time, so we let her go before she started to really suffer. I think I’m handling it as best as can be expected. I had a while to get used to the idea and really adjust to it as a huge change in my life. Funny thing was, Aikido helped me through it.

I had told Sensei I might not be at our session on Thursday because that morning we were putting my dear dog ‘to sleep’. He understood and was very kind and sympathetic.

So when I showed up on Thursday afternoon, he raised his eyebrows and said, “I thought you weren’t going come to practice today!”

And I said, “At first I wasn’t going to be here, because I knew how much I’d be dealing with… Then I realized that that’s exactly why I needed to be here.”

He nodded. “That’s right.” Just before he turned away I saw his grin. I think he was trying not to show too much of how proud he was that this week I had grasped a part of Aikido Zen.

Weird Martial arts dreams

"Tell me about your martial arts dreams. Like the ones when you are asleep."

Hoo boy I had a heck of one last night. Lemme get to my laptop and edit it in here.

So I seemed to be high school age again, me and a few friends were attending this conference meeting thing with a bunch of other high schoolers at a big building with lawn around it, right across from my high school. Somehow I was a practicing Aikidoka then. I think in the dream, Sensei’s dojo was based in my high school, not at my college as is reality.

Everyone at this meeting got really angry with our group, I think it was because after the meeting and potluck snacking, we took back the leftover cookies we had brought and we ate the rest that the meeting people had not eaten. For dream reasons, this made them all furious at us. They really wanted to punch our faces in.

We tried to run for our huge white van and leave, but we were missing one of our group, a very shy girl. Outside on the lawn around the building, teens were gathering to work themselves up and get really ready to find us and beat us up. They were standing around in loose groups of twos and threes all over two sides of the building.
So I said to my friends with me in the van, “Drop me off over by all those people. I think I can do something about this. While I have them busy you go into the other side of the building, find *shy girl* and get her out. Then come back around pick me up. I might be running.”

So they drove past the crowded side and I kinda hopped out of the van as it slowed down, and all the angry teens saw me, and I didn’t say anything I just started walking though them. I knew they were all set to attack someone, so it might as well be me. I could keep them occupied.
The first one ran at me and BOOM, Aikido throw. And the next. And the next. It was very gentle. I just grabbed a wrist here, and arm there, and sat them down on the grass. They looked up at me kinda stunned.
I just kept on at a waking pace through the crowd, throw after throw, one after another. It was really hard to keep it up, and I am not very experienced so sometimes it was difficult. I kept saying, “Have you had enough? I have. I’ll stop when you do. I don’t want to fight.” There were at least 40 people.
After a while things slowed down and they were kind of avoiding me, in shock.
My friends swung around and picked me up in the van and we got outta there.

Then I was at school, and suddenly hearing rumors about a big fight, and that I had “beat up a bunch of people”. My heart sank and I knew I was gonna get expelled for violent behavior. Everyone was treating me oddly now that the whole school had heard I “started a big fight and beat up people”.

 I spent the whole day being very quiet, and proving to people who asked that what I had used was gentle and defensive and that I had actually been careful not to harm anyone. Then I felt I had to confess to Sensei all the details of what had happened, and that I had used Aikido in such a manner.

 I was so mortified he would disapprove and tell me I had misused it. I was also very afraid he’d have already heard one of his students had “instigated a big fight and beaten a bunch of people up”, and would be upset and ashamed of me.

At practice, in front of everyone, I made a formal bowed apology for all the disturbance I had been central in, and explained the entire thing as honestly as I could. I don’t know if Sensei was upset, because then the dream shifted and I’ll never know what he though.
And all that was last night.