JOURNEY - on Mastering Ukemi Daniel Linden (feel good novels txt) 📖

“For us,” Chris answered. “Curtis and I want to go. We just need to ask a few questions about the details of the trip, but we think that mostly we could do it, if you wouldn’t mind us coming along.”

I looked back and forth at them and each in turn nodded his head to my inquiry.

“I’ll need to think about it a little,” I said. “I’ll also need to talk it over with Christian. You know that this is really his party. But if he agrees, it really isn’t a lot more difficult to have four than two, only one extra porter with one extra tent. I’ll have to let Mr. Pasang know so he can arrange it. Tell you what, go over and relieve Christian on the grill and have him come over here and talk to us. Jeremy, why don’t you do that so Curtis and Chris can stay here?”

Jeremy looked shocked. “Sensei, I’m a vegan. I can’t even be in the same room with cooked meat.”

“Oh. Sorry.” I looked around and saw Mike, a former member of Disney’s Culinary Institute. “Mike, could you relieve Christian for a minute?” I asked.

“Sure,” he said.

“Now we’re going to have hamburgers that resemble some little, weird French meat loaf.” Curtis laughed.

“Just go along with it,” I smiled.

Everyone got sorted out and when Christian was sitting I had Curtis go over his proposal again. Christian was surprised, I could tell, but equally pleased. He was also hesitant to some degree, enough so that I thought we all needed to think about it for a day or two before we decided. I wanted to have a chance to hear his private thoughts before making a decision. Curtis and Chris accepted the delay in the decision making process with the same equanimity that they accept everything. They are very easy guys to get along with.

Randori (multiple attackers) requires uke to suspend belief for the purpose of training nage to control time and space. Here the art of ukemi is most stylized and done with minimum effort to not damage nage during the attack. The purpose of randori training is to give nage a chance to deal with multiple attackers and escape. So, essentially, randori by an experienced nage is in a sense, the ultimate in ukemi. Very slippery stuff here, but as I previously stated it all becomes clear in the end.

This is the essence of the mystery. When I wrote my first book about aikido I spoke almost exclusively about the art from the viewpoint of the nage. Mastership, after all, is about one who performs masterfully. If an attacker tried to violate a master of aikido he very likely would be overcome and subdued by the master’s effective use of his training. He would use the art of aikido to this end. He would be said to have done aikido. But the training of aikido is so much more than the efforts of the nage side of the equation that in order for him to achieve this state of mastership it would have been necessary for him to have trained as uke for many years in order to have achieved the level we describe as master.

On Mastering Aikido (Basswood Press, © 2004) describes the process of what the nage does explicitly by examining the principles of movement that are required for mastership. Ukemi is something that has been so completely absorbed into the fabric of an accomplished nage by the time he makes a bid for mastership that it is mostly ignored in this book. I spent a great deal of time after publication of this first book describing the process or evolution of training to my black belt students. We found ourselves coming back again and again to the moment when each of them felt that they had reached a level of ‘mastership’ in ukemi. This took place sometime around nidan (2nd degree of black belt) for most students although some who were privileged to be called frequently for demonstration purposes achieved this level somewhat quicker. Still, when the process of definition was asked for, we discovered many of the same problems that we discovered when it was time to define the ‘principles’ of aikido. Confusion, redundancy, misdirection and disingenuous descriptions are all the usual things you find when you try to define the mystical without genuine western style thought. Actually sitting down with pen and paper and hours to think and diagrams to analyze; these are the necessary requirements for an in-depth definition of the mystical. Most teachers of martial arts are simply not interested, capable or inclined to do this. So here we started the hunt for the pure essence of ukemi.

By using multiple attackers we try to create confusion and chaos for the nage. On nage’s part he tries to remain calm and indifferent to the number of his attackers choosing to deal with each one individually. There are, of course, techniques for doing this. Movements which tend to line up the attackers or cause confusion and chaos in the attacking group. Sometimes a hard technique, (or put another way, a technique done hard) can cause pause in the other attackers or sometimes simply disappearing will have solid results. It matters, but not for the purpose of this discussion. What is important is to remember that the analysis of what is actually happening during ukemi takes a long view and must be thoroughly thought out.

This is why Christian and I were caught up in the discussion of whether to join up with Curtis and Chris for our trek across Nepal. The dynamics of a group of four plus additional staff as opposed to only two would be different, but not that much, I argued.

“Look at it this way,” I said. “We are already in the mix for a sirdar, porter, maybe a cook, but maybe not, reservations,