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

lake or a mountain range that tells you that you are at home, but you’re already gone. The momentum has begun. The rush of travel picks you up and gets the old adrenalin pumping and you feel a little giddy, your heart pounds a little harder and looking back is something you don’t even consider for a moment.

I think that this has to do with commitment. The decision to engage in travel or any endeavor that moves you from one place to another (both literally and figuratively) is not one that is undertaken lightly by most people. We decide to do something or engage in something or undertake something and then plan, envision, anticipate, organize, worry, imagine, fear, long for and finally commit to it. But once the commitment is engaged we tend not to look back. Or at least those who are warriors try not to look back.

Ukemi is attack and escape. The idea of attacking half-heartedly is dangerous at best and lethal at worst. In aikido we must temper the knowledge of what nage is going to do with us (and we usually know what this is) with the need to commit the attack with beginner’s mind. That is, we know we are going to be pinned, thrown or rolled; yet each time we attack we need to do it as if we are going to be victorious in our attack. We need to maintain the notion of suspended disbelief. To do otherwise we would be uncommitted. To be a proper uke, we need total commitment; otherwise nage cannot feel and experience the flow of ki and movement necessary to train to mastership. We need it for ourselves and therefore it must be reciprocal on the part of all who study aikido. Think about getting on an airplane.

October rose up through the sweltering summer heat like mountains rising above Highway 70 heading west across Colorado. At first you don’t want to believe it, that it could be true, but then driving up across a small mesa you see that first clear sight of a huge fourteener rising high into the western sky and you finally give in and admit that those images aren’t a bank of clouds but the Rocky Mountains. In Florida you finally admit that the hint of coolness on the wind – that first hint of fall – is the harbinger of the end of summer’s heat. October arrives like that in Florida. At first it is just another sweltering hot summer day, but by the time you turn the calendar leaf the nineties are gone and the first good strong cold front has drifted through and you begin to believe that the long hot days are finally over and that reason has come into the world once again.

So finally on the eve of our departure let me at last be completely honest. Let me say the thing that I have to say and that has bothered me like a hangnail for the last 60-odd pages. Okay, here goes.

Christian could not take true ukemi if his life depended on it. There, it’s that simple. How a young, athletic guy with all his coordination and skill could be so bad at this thing, I don’t know, but there you are, and this is why I really want to go on this long-ass road trip with him; to see if I can turn him around.

I want to see if I can get through to him, make the scales fall from his eyes, open his heart, show him the way and guide him down the tunnel to the light. Oh, he falls fine. He takes beautiful soundless rolls and his timing is nearly perfect. What he lacks is the ferocity and willingness to kill or die. He just cannot attack as if he really wants to harm you. His attacks are practically feeble and no one can actually feel them in the quiet place in the center. And that is essential to mastering ukemi. It is essential to mastering aikido

And it is something almost every 6th dan has to some degree or other. Because they were all, at one point, ukes for their own senseis. They have it and understand it. They might deny it, but it is there. And God knows Christian needs some guidance in this. I’m hoping that the two best ukes in the dojo, Curtis and Chris, can help him understand what it is that he is missing.

I had a student in Denver years ago; let’s call him Jake. Jake couldn’t take ukemi either, the physical act. He was simply the worst, but he had an unusual physique and that contributed to his inability to fall down and get up properly. He was six feet and seven inches tall, weighed two hundred fifty pounds and had wrists like a ten-year-old girl. He was huge yet so delicate it was simply hard to believe. Behind his back some of the students referred to him as Baby Huey because of his size and delicacy. I tended to discourage that kind of thing in order to embrace the notion of unit integrity. Still, seeing this giant with his huge belly and towering height try to grab your wrist with his smooth and narrow fingers was odd to say the least.

Jake stayed with it; I’ll say that for him. I know it was hard for him though and actually would not have been surprised to see him quit. Somehow he had made a decision to change his life and had decided that he was going to do that by studying aikido. He believed a martial art could erase three decades of his mother’s constant attention and devotion to her little man and his “sensitive” ways. Face it, he was a mama’s boy and had finally rejected her attentions and had decided to become a man, by God. The problem was that he simply did not know how to break the chains that held him to earth. He didn’t