I was surprised looking back at Bruce Lee pictures that he didn’t look that mean or nasty even when he was about to knock someone out. Often when I want to show how great Aikido is I ask my uke (partner) to be really mean. This make for a great demonstration, especially when uke is much bigger and stronger but while this is great practice I am realizing that it may be “bad medicine.”
O’sensei remarked about how Aikido is medicine for a sick world… There are many stories about how important it was that his direct students go share Aikido with the rest of the world.
I often feel challenged to show how “magically powerful” Aikido is against “real” attacks. This is especially true for some reason when I am trying to show how it is possible to remain peaceful in conflict. I pick the biggest, meanest, most doubting guy in the room and tell him to go for it. ARRRRRRRGH ahhhhhhhh BOOOOM. Job well done, everyone is impressed including the guy on the floor and score one for Aikido.
I need this challenge, it rarely goes perfectly and I learn something about my technique. I try it again and see if it goes more smoothly with less muscles etc. And, people do need to know that Aikido isn’t just a nice philosophy.
What happens when the guy that is called up struggles with aggression, anxiety, or defeat? At some point Aikido is a great place to address those struggles but what if uke is not there yet?
If the person knows nothing about Aikido and may never see it again they are left with the feeling that Aikido makes the other guy feel like crap. The do what they are asked and end up feeling like they got shown up by some old lady. (no offense to the ladies, I strive to feel like Mother Teresa when I do Aikido).
The practice of Aikido is gradual for Nage (person practicing Aikido) and Uke (partner acting as “attacker”) We need to be safe and challenged at our level in either role. We develop our capacity to return to center even after being the bad guy. Eventually that practice may be as beneficial as practicing being the good guy but be aware of what we ask of ourselves and others. As we leave the mat we should feel like the good guy and that Aikido is “Good Medicine.”
After leaving the mat we should feel that Aikido is “good medicine.” That line stuck out to me the most. After a long stressful week, I could not agree more than having Aikido class at the end of the week is “good medicine.” The happy feeling everyone gets when approaching the mat, all the anger, stress, and anxiety leaving the room. If one walks onto the mat and still has all the anger, stress, and anxiety from the week on his or her shoulders, then that brings for “bad medicine” and could lead to people getting hurt and the movements not being fluent and done correctly. As I was told move and feel like water when doing Aikido, and since then when practicing the art I feel relaxed and stress free. No tense shoulders or tense fists, relaxed with flat hands. Having this class at the end of the week helps me drop all the stress and anxiety from classes, and I highly recommend people taking this class. Aikido is “good medicine” and the world needs it.
In our classes, the relationship between nage and uke always makes me think about what it would be under real circumstances. During our practices, I find taller and stronger uke often makes me much more nervous than facing girls about my size, especially when I want to push down their elbows while they are way taller than me. So I wonder if everything can be that easy and ideal like our instructor demonstrates on class, even the uke would act “mean” sometimes. But I agree with the idea of aikido as “good medicine” that lets learners feel good when they leave the mat, because I realized that the negative “mean” energy might affect us on practices and being a nice uke is very helpful for learning the techniques for us as starters. I think the example of Bruce Lee is interesting that even he doesn’t specifically practice aikido on the screen, he represents an ideal figure of practicing any kind of martial art, that is calm, peaceful and even gentle. Compare to most of the other martial arts, the peaceful quality of aikido is more obvious and I feel that learning it should help us seek for the inner peace more than victory over physical struggles. On the other hand, we do always face our ideal uke, who knows about aikido and understands how to be a uke. The challenging opponent of us may exist outside of the mat in our classroom. After all, using aikido in our real life may require much more efforts than we do now in classes.
This article stuck out to me out of those I looked at because of the challenge of showing how “powerful” the martial art is. Whenever we are presented with a self defense mechanism, or anything that is supposed to aid us, we want proof. If someone challenges an aikido practice to show them a technique by using it on them, I do not think they are able to complain about feeling defeated, or anxious, or embarrassed. It is their own fault because they asked to be demonstrated on, so at first I didn’t understand the concept of not doing this. Afterwards, when it is saying how Aikido should make us feel good, especially as the first experience, I understood more. A few years ago I was trying to teach a trading card game (magic the gathering) to friends who were unfamiliar with it, and my friend, who was very used to the game, took it upon himself to construct starter decks and emphasized that the most important thing for hooking people into the game was that they had a positive first experience. Winning or losing didn’t matter, but the new players should have fun, not leave feeling frustrated if they wanted to think well of the game and learn more. I later compared this to my brother, who tried to teach our parents how to play, but really only wanted to win and was so focused on the rules and got frustrated when basic rules were forgotten. In the method of teaching by leaving with the “good medicine” feeling, the skeptic can come back to see how magically powerful attacks are later, when they are more prepared, and have a better understanding of the martial art.