The Right Direction
November 2024
Michio Hikitsuchi Sensei, 10th dan said: “The Aikido way is as narrow as the edge of a sword blade. If you deviate from it, even by the thickness of a hair, you’re completely off.”
Some practitioners go to great lengths to accumulate knowledge: they try to learn the names of the wasas, the Japanese terms usually used, they read books on Aikido, they meticulously record each of their practices in a notebook. Their sense of mastery and progression increases with the assimilation of knowledge.
The sum of intellectual knowledge and technical mastery then becomes a thick, solid shell that prevents the movement of the inner journey. These practitioners move backwards. They follow the reassuring path of illusion.
In Aikido, walking the path means setting oneself in motion, losing oneself, detaching oneself, losing one’s mastery and control, confronting oneself, one’s shortcomings and weaknesses, as well as one’s unappreciated resources. It’s being kneaded down to our very soul, letting ourself be impregnated by the breath of Aiki. As Taisen Deshimaru explains it in Zen, it means dying to oneself in order to be fully reborn. It’s going through the looking glass, emerging from illusion. In this way, and only in this way, does the profound path operate. This is Takemusu Aikido.
What risk-taking! What recklessness or courage!