West Seattle Aikikai hosted Hiroshi Ikeda Sensei this weekend. I was only able to attend one of his classes. It was well worth it even though I went away scratching my head a bit. His practice is way above anything I’m capable of. It’s like I’m in junior high and he’s a professor at a prestigious university. It’s definitely the kind of stuff you store up and hope that one day, you’ll get an epiphany and go “Eureka!” At least that’s the hope …

Several themes permeated the class I attended. The first was unity. The body must move as one unit. Those who have practiced awhile know the concept. It is one of the most difficult thing to do. I can tell my body to move as one as much as I like but inevitably, my arm, leg, wrist, elbow - whatever - will move first, separate from every other body part. This disjointedness causes disconnection with uke which has a tendency to make me want to use my muscles to compensate. It’s an all too familiar feeling. This lack of unity leads to Ikeda Sensei’s second theme - asobi.

I don’t speak Japanese so I can’t give you a literal translation of asobi. A quick google search came up with play as one definition. At first, I was puzzled by this but then I realize it fits into what Ikeda Sensei was saying (assuming of course that’s the definition he’s using - someone correct me if I’m wrong). He used the word to describe the spacing between you and uke. More specifically, the lack of space. For example, the space between your hand and uke’s hand when doing a katate technique. There should be none. You should take out the slack or play. That way, there is an unbroken connection between the two of you. This allows you to move uke as though both of you are one person.

He also talked about affecting uke by changing yourself internally. He said it’s ok to bend the knees in the beginning. But as you get more advanced, the up and down shift should be more subtle. At some point, it should be invisible. He demonstrated this over and over again with his trademark “do you see?” Of course, I didn’t. He said the subtlety to the movement makes people think aikdo is magic. To an untrained set of eyes, Ikeda Sensei hardly seem to move. Yet uke is so affected that he no longer has his balance. No muscle needed.

Later, I spoke with my tai chi and push hands teacher Ken Wright. He had gone to watch Ikeda Sensei this weekend as well. Unlike most of us, he said he knows exactly what Ikeda Sensei was doing. In tai chi, how you shift your weight from one leg to the other is very important. But it’s not the legs that’s shifting. Rather, it’s your dan tien or the hara that moves. It rotates in a circle. At the highest level, this movement is invisible. Not only that, the circling movement is smooth, not jerking as one would expect if you simply move your legs and hips.

What’s frustrating for me is that I understand all this intellectually. But damn if I can get my body to do it, much less do it consistently. Guess that’s what practice is for.

Finally, Ikeda Sensei spoke about 1+1=2. When we start aikido, we learn 1+1=2. But as you progress, that equation should change. For example, in the beginning, you may learn to do kotegaeshi in three distinct steps. At some point, that should become one movement. Even later, there should be even more subtlety to that one movement. He stressed how important it is that you don’t train thirty years and still be doing 1+1=2. If that’s what happening, you haven’t been really training. All you’ve done, at best, is imitation.

I like to attend Ikeda Sensei’s seminars. As I joked to one of my sempais, it makes you realize how little you really know about aikido and how much farther you have to go. You need teachers like that - teachers who place these carrots way ahead of you. You see them, you want them, but they are so far away. The only way to get there is to take another step, one at a time.