Going Solo or Tandoku Challenge Day 1

I was challenged by a fellow blogger Sensei Patrick Parker at Mokuren Dojo to comment on the Walking Form of Tomiki Sensei.  I highly recommend his blog to anyone out there.  He's a great martial artist and a great all round guy and much, much more prolific a writer than I am.

There is a huge amount of material in Tegatana no Kata, and I am not really familiar with this kata/exercise.  There's several things that come to mind, but this is an essay I was working on for a while now that this Shodokan Aikido form had me thinking of.  I did not have much training in solo Aikido practices until after I was a Shodan.  There are benefits and pitfalls, and other systems that do extensive solo practice.  I commented on the systems I was most familiar with, and my own experiences as a student.

I have seen a few videos out there for combining Taiji and Aikido ideas.  Some like Kumar Frantzis have gone further and claimed they are convinced O Sensei studied Chinese arts.

For people who have asked if Baguazhang and Taiji are the same as Aikido (and there are a lot of you out there):  Ueshiba Sensei did spend time in China, had Chinese contacts, and did spend time in a Chinese prison.  His religious advisor did go to China to announce he was the next Dalai Lama and O Sensei did have some residual ties to religious supporters in China as well. 

However, Ueshiba Sensei was an avid nationalist and a trainer for the Japanese military and had Tomiki Sensei prominently represent him as a military trainer in occupied Mongolia.  Tomiki Sensei and his many students served in the events of WWII on the side of Japan against China and others.  Ueshiba would be regarded as a possible traitor for having a Chinese teacher; his Chinese teacher would definitely be a traitor.

There is much evidence that Ueshiba's history has been heavily sanitized for a wide variety of audiences, and the legacy of his on his own art is actually unclear.  Students do come from every country now, making the art more murky - many Aikido people I know now have a background in Baguazhang and Taiji, as well as a wide variety of other martial arts.  Human anatomy has not changed much in a very long time, so you will see something like Aikido wrist locks from every corner of the globe. 

Aikido did also originally aim to take on multiple attackers, which Baguazhang does as well, giving goals in common, which leads again to a resemblance between arts.  There is little historical evidence, but I agree there is a superficial resemblance.  The link might not exist, or might be from the art Daito-Ryu (which is one of the precursors to Korean Hapkido as well as Japanese Aikido) or there are many things like Ueshiba Sensei's military ties and Shinto worship that were heavily sanitized before he was introduced to the larger world, so why not a Chinese teacher too?

I personally believe no proof is ever forthcoming.

The teaching methods are very different in many, many ways.  Or so I thought.  Ethically, Taiji and Baguazhang have no restrictions on what types of techniques can be employed and make no claims to the development of peace and harmony for all.  The practical difference is that Taiji and Baguazhang are predominantly solo practices, while the Aikido I was learning was almost exclusively paired practice.

In Aikido, I never really did exercises like Tai no Henka in isolation.  We worked in partner exercises almost right from the beginning.  We did do exercises like the Rowing exercise and the Four Directions, but not during seminars.

Sensei was also clearly was getting more powerful without rolling around on the mat with all of us, and I began to suspect he had a solo practice as well.  Occasionally, he’d give us a glimpse.  Gradually I came to learn that other systems of Aikido had a very developed system of solo practice. 

Shin Shin Toitsu Do has a very developed system of movements that feed back into waza.  When a new student is learning a technique they haven’t seen before, their sempai says, “start with tekubi joho kosa undo!”  (Or, more often demonstrates the crossed hand position the beginner has seen many times at this point).  Muscle memory and body position has been established and engrained.  A new engram forms.  The beginner has a superior starting point.  One example is a Tohei lineage student will do tenkan in isolation before having a partner introduced.

In the USAF, Tohei was a major influence in the beginning, and then he divorced himself from his students.  Consequently, older students learned by this method, but they were ordered not to teach to their own students this way.  Within a few years of Tohei Sensei’s death, some of the Ki no Taiso have been reintroduced in the 6^th kyu test requirements.

In the Iwama Aikido system, weapons work takes the place of solo exercises.  There are very well developed systems of Aikiken and Aikijo in particular.  One exercise I have seen demonstrated by Saito Sensei in video (as well as O Sensei) is repeatedly cutting with a sword.  In one of Saito’s books, he recommends hitting a bundle of sticks or a motorcycle tire repeatedly with a bokken.  A Kendo teacher told me 1000x/d was the usual recipe for beginners.  If you’ve never tried this before, try it for a month or better yet 100 days.  I tried this once when I was sidelined by an injury, and a chronically sprained wrist magically healed and became very injury resistant and strong.

Saito Sensei’s teachings unfortunately live in something of a limbo outside of his son’s association.  Nearly every dojo acknowledges the 13 or 31 Jo kata, some have some basic knowledge of the kumijo or kumitachi.  O Sensei is mistakenly often identified as the author.

Saito Sensei’s empty hand system was never meant to be divorced from his weapons.  The use of Kiai, Kihon versus Ki no Nagare, the many variations for a single technique name; the sheer complexity of his system is intimidating and often not even acknowledged.  I even once attended a seminar in a different association where we spent an hour covering the 31 jo kata, then a couple of black belts spent the entire supper break to trash “this weirdo off in California who was doing “Op” noises and Kiai with his techniques.”  These blackbelts were completely ignorant that these two things belong together.  I stopped training with this group, but many dojo seem to only do Saito weapons as exotic cross training.  The idea that weapon and empty hand is the same is not transmitted – it can’t be, as the weapon work truly bears no resemblance to the empty hand work of a non-Saito lineage student.  Without a huge amount of work, the weapons don’t inform the empty hands of a non-Iwama student.

Why cross train in Chinese internal arts?  Certainly when it comes to Taiji and Aikido, I get the appeal. 

In Aikido, I was pulled, pinned and stretched on 20 year old moldy, dusty tatami mats with my face pushed down on decades of sweat stains.  I needed to change cloths.  I needed to be at a specific place at a specific time.  If I wasn’t healthy, I was likely to get injured.

It took years before I started to enjoy the pain, years before I could actually think about alignment and relaxation.  I didn’t feel like I was meditating if I wasn’t feeling the pain of seiza, which meant I didn’t feel I could meditate if I tweaked my knee on a ski slope.

Contrast this with my first main Taiji teacher, who let us come and go during class as we pleased.  We had a gentle, relaxing, politics free and often sweat free workout (yet another rare teacher I never properly appreciated at the time.)  It gave me an opportunity to focus on relaxation and structure in a way I was too busy trying to stay in one piece to do in many early Aikido classes.  I could meditate in motion, or in standing.  We did standing meditation in every Taiji class.  When I tried to push my teacher over, he was either a puff of smoke or a mountain.  I couldn’t touch his power, but he never caused me pain.

I could practice Taiji on my own, like during the nightshift on my lunch break.  I could be anywhere, at any time (big deal as a new nurse working shiftwork.)  I could use my Taiji and later my Baguazhang to heal from injures that were inflicted elsewhere, from a dislocated shoulder, to skin scraped off my knees and feet, to a partial hamstring tear, to a torn bicep and broken elbow.

My Taiji started to inform my Aikido.  The “magic point” in an Aikido technique could often be brought down to a movement in a Taiji push hands game.  The magic point was the one split second in time that I could be reversed or I could take control, the one moment in time that made a difference between a successful technique and a complete failure.  I started to learn to focus on this one split second and see how I could more reliably find this “magic.”  I learned to do Aikido slowly and deliberately, as of course, Sensei had shown us to do all along.

The irritations in Taiji classes were those intermediate people who were ignorant of kinesiology or combat and who were too proud to admit it.  In Aikido, I was throwing and being thrown.  Fake Ergonomics meant I felt pain or weakness in Aikido, something Taiji people did not get to feel as often.  Now, whenever anyone tried to demonstrate a Taiji form or tried to give me a correction, my Aikido bruises gave me a framework for evaluating what I saw.  My Aikido started to come full circle and inform my Taiji.

Solo form work needs to be informed by partner practice, or very good correction.  How wide should my arms be?  A person who trains solo will not necessarily know; someone who had been striking or throwing people with any power will.  Solo work informs partner practice, and partner practice informs the solo work. 

The danger in solo work is setting useless, stupid engrams out of ignorance.  Some students gravitate to solo work because they don’t like to be touched; this will never produce a martial artist.  Some students don’t like their hallucinations to be challenged, and so a solo practice means they never have to wake up. 

Many students are already “informed,” that is to say that they already “know” what the exercise is supposed to be like.  So, a karate person training in Taiji solo form work probably is still clearly kicking and striking.  A Judo or Aikido person doing a karate form will look like they are doing a throw when the form calls for a change in direction as opposed to just turning and hitting someone else.  Solo work will not challenge who you already are and your engrams and belief systems can be further entrenched.  Partner practice will always challenge you.  Mistakes can crop up in solo practice without feedback, and become very difficult to correct.

I accepted that my Aikido practice was going to be in perpetual tandem with my Taiji practices, as I got such very different things from each practice.  I simply could not choose.  If the Aikido I knew had a rich solo practice or set of self training exercises like Karate or Taiji, would I have ever started a second martial art?  Maybe not.

I wondered at the differences in the various Aikido systems.  As time went by and I met people who did Sayu-Undo hundreds of times, I found my own training in Morote Dori Kokyu Ho against some very strong people gave me a better foundation for power – lessons that fed back into being a nurse helping a patient walk, or transferring someone from bed to chair.  I see the advantages of the Ki No Taiso, and I do use them to teach beginners but I quickly transition to paired work.

At one point, I was realizing playing with two arts was a bad idea, and I was at a loss.  Yang Taiji was my solo practice, and Aikido was my partner practice.  The two did not come together well at the technical level.  I finally asked Sensei about this, and as usual he thought about his answer first for a long time.  The day came that he was sick and I stayed in hospital overnight with him.  I had known Sensei for ten years and I had been Shodan for about a year.  I knew he had no family.

Sensei was grateful, and clearly touched.  In the morning, he pulled the curtain around his bed and said he wanted to teach me something very important, something that would make a big difference in my Aikido.

We did standing meditation and a solo exercise.