[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=haGSLZCrQFI]

Sakamoto Sensei said at a recent seminar that aikido techniques are produced by keeping an non-oppositional shape in response to whatever attack is coming your way.

I conducted a class for 4th and 5th graders and taught basic aikido and self-regulation and realized the importance talking about the body’s shape. All the students were doing the right thing with their hands but the rest of their bodies were all over the place. When I talked about the shape their body should take and didn’t talk about the hands they looked right almost immediately. Once their bodies were right the techniques were far easier to explain.

Sakomoto Sensei talked about becoming a sphere that rotates in multiple orbits like electrons in an atom. The combination creates your defense while redirecting the momentum of the attack in a way that steers uke’s body and feet in opposite directions. This also creates an inverted funnel where momentum, force, and aggression have more and more space as it moves beyond uke and nage which creates a vacuum which becomes the throw.

I taught art to the same age group years ago and then moved to high school. I realized that most of the things younger art students were missing the teens were missing too. I think the same may be true for Aikido. Sakamoto Sensei’s insight points out that we focus on a lot of things in training and forget to look at the “easy parts” like what are we supposed to look like when we are doing aikido? What does a good connection feel like? Are you creating a big hoop for uke to jump through or are you trying to shove them through the head of a needle?