Tags
Aiki, Aikido, Beginner's mind, Budo, Daito Ryu Aiki Jiu Jitsu, Eckhart Tolle, Ego, Fear, Feelings, Happiness, Healing, Martial Arts, Mind, Mindfulness, Psychology, Roppokai Daito Ryu Aiki Jitsu, Shoshin, Suffering
Do you need what I need?
J. Hetfield
Boundaries overthrown
Look inside, to each his own
Do you trust what I trust?
Me, myself and I
Penetrate the smoke screen, I see through the selfish lie
From the very beginning of my aikido journey I was told about keeping the beginner’s mind. Both my day to day teachers, which did aikido a few years at that time, and the professional teachers I met, who did aikido for a lifetime, spoke of the concept of shoshin. At a first glance, of course, this makes sense. To not become arrogant; To not consider myself an expert; To not stop learning. I considered it as a natural door to learn more. As a beginner this was never a challenge, and to this day those parts (I did not at that time see all the parts) has not been obstructing my road.
However, I think that there is a lot more to this concept than what initially meets our eye. Otherwise the professional teachers would not have spoken of shoshin as such a profound quality. All of them explained it in a way which I could not, at that time, relate to. I guess this subject passed out of my field of study, for a while.
At the time of the passing of T. K. Chiba sensei, a video interview with him was released. What I perceived from that video was that his most important recommendation to the future generations of aikidokas was to keep shoshin. Even though I never met this teacher personally (I only had contact with his students), I was inspired to put some emphasis into researching, for myself, what shoshin really means, for me. Presently I am also interested in how the concept of shoshin can help support us in the world outside the dojo.
According to wikipedia sho means initial, and shin means mind. So the translation I was given as a beginner: the beginner’s mind, is understandable. The mindset is open for new information, for learning.
But does this mean that the state of a person who never did any practise, at all, is of higher quality, than that of one who has been studying all their lifetime? This seems to be a paradox? Why practise at all, if we already have the quality we are seeking in the first place? Why strive for a lower quality than that which we already start with? We could of course escape that koan by saying that we are procuring other qualities, and in that process we should strive to preserve the initial one. I guess that would explain it, to a certain level.
What is easy for the beginner is to receive new information, because there is less content in their mind already, in this field of study. There is less past experience of this kind. Even if a beginner are dreaming of what comes in the future, it is not yet based on past experience, so the dream is easily “exorcised” by exposure to the present moment in the keiko. The beginner will more easily have the keiko as a support, or anchor, to stay present in the current situation, more so than the more experienced practitioner, which is more heavily restricted by the inner propaganda and censorship of the mind. I will explain what I mean by propaganda and censorship below.
The challenge will arise when there is an extensive amount of past experience and knowledge in our system during keiko (or in life). The shoshin is lost when our past memories triggers the mind into generating a projection of our past into a future time, where we will have an expectation of what is going to happen. What we expect might not happen. And the most problematic part is, of course, that our expectation is so strong, that even if it did not happen, we would interpret, and filter, the information we have from the situation, to fit our idea of “what should have happened”. For a scientist this is a calamity!
When the mind has a “reservoir” of information, it tends to label the information to reduce the amount of processes needed to perform a simple task. So if a teacher shows shiho nage, we will not see what the teacher is showing. At the moment our system recognise something we experienced in the past, we will immediately shut down and perform the same thing “we always do”.
Similarly, when we meet our partner to study we might fall into the same trap. It might even happen with the same partner we do keiko together with every single day. And more frequently it would occur during our first meeting with somebody new, at a seminar. The mind still tends to standardise the meeting to what we experienced in the past. Predicting the future, or rather, most likely, constructing a fantasy. As I mentioned before, if the current situation does not fit with our expectation of what the situation “should be”, the mind will hide the parts which contradicts our idea, and put more emphasis, on the parts which actually supports our view. It enhances whatever fits with the initial mind and suppresses whatever contradicts it. So in this way, the words “initial mind” means the exact opposite of what we are discussing here.
We should always be watchful of these things, as words has a way of oversimplifying things. As we saw above. Initial mind can mean many different things, even completely opposite things. We may argue the logic of both interpretations of the word. However, in this particular case the situation is trivial, because it is obvious for us that the word just turned the whole thing around for us. The more intricate situations on the tatami though, might be more perilous. Furthermore, in the complexity of life outside the dojo it is an immense challenge to not get trapped by the mind in this way.
I mentioned the mental labelling, and the mind’s tendency to protect it’s initial idea, protecting it’s “self”. A consequence of this “self protection” (or “self defence”) is the random preferences we tend to fall into, over time. We like this and we dislike this. From the start we just experienced it all for the first time, and some things we enjoyed more than other things. However, we still did not have time for investing our enjoyment in one thing naturally leading us to abhorring it’s opposite.
Sometimes two partners on the tatami have so different preferences (what we like and dislike), and ideas of what we think we should do, that we will experience a conflict. It could really be anything, but I will try to give just a few examples:
During katate dori one might put more emphasis on keeping a complete grab, while the other might put more emphasis on the integrity of the position (in some situations we have to choose a distribution between these two qualities, like 70% – 30%, so they may appear to us as opposites if the partner chooses the other way around);
One might be seeking to strengthen their posture by having a lot of pressure between uke and tori, while the other might be trying to remove more and more, making the contact between the partners more like we are one body working together (these might be perceived as opposites);
There might be a disagreement about which parts of the kata should be performed by uke and which parts should be performed by tori (even though we are agreeing on the form of the kata we have a disagreement about who to do what);
And last, but not least, there might be a disagreement of the actual physical form of the kata (there are a multitude of ways to perform each kata, and there is no lack of aikidokas who will defend the way they learned it as if it were a threat to their life if somebody do it differently).
So how do we use the concept of shoshin to help us keep our feet on our journey? In one way, there is no way to lose our way, because whatever choices, or mistakes, we make, and wherever we might go, it is where we have to go, to continue. If we “fail” we will experience some unpleasant situations, and we will have a “kick in the butt” (literarily or figuratively speaking) to evolve to a higher level.
However, some suffering is avoidable, if we already have the level for it. If we have the required level, we can see the activity of the mind during these little “conflicts” on the tatami. They are really small, you know, considering the major conflicts in the world outside. We are children playing in the kinder garden, gaining experience to deal with the “grown up life” outside the dojo.
Once we have the awareness, the simple observation and making a decision which leads to a productive keiko is extremely easy. The life in the dojo is really not that complicated. Outside the tatami however, the situations is very often very complex and intricate. On the level of manifestation there are no correct or incorrect answers. However, if we at least start from a state where we can see the situation, we might be better off than if we blindly follow whatever happens inside of us.
And to return to my initial question? What is shoshin, or a beginner’s mind? And does really a beginner have a beginner’s mind? So let’s take the second question first. No, they don’t, generally (there could of course be exception, but in that case they are usually not a beginner, as they received it from some other study). The beginner is able to manifest the outer form of shoshin even though they do not possess the quality, because the situation is new for them. In other aspects of life they do not have this “superpower”, so a beginner does not generally have a beginner’s mind, in my opinion.
As to what shoshin is, which we could describe by words, can easily be misleading, because, words have different meaning and association for different people. In my opinion shoshin is a level of awareness of the reactions of the mind. The mind is constantly clouding our vision of what is going on around us. If we are able to see the process of thoughts and emotions and their “haze equilibrium” of defensiveness, we can see the world around us in a different way. We have the freedom to make a choice. Or at least a higher degree of freedom than if we lack shoshin.
In Roppokai Daito Ryu we very often practice in larger groups, doing kakari keiko. One person is throwing the whole group in the role as tori and then shifting to the uke role, and so on. In this situation it becomes super apparent for everybody waiting in line (the ukes), who can see the eyes of tori, if they have shoshin or not. It is like it says in the Bible with the speck and the log in the eye, it is easier to see it happening to others, than to realise when it is happening to ourselves. When shoshin is lost, the eyes get “stiff”. This of course also becomes apparent in the waza we perform, as we will have difficulties with many partners.
Our “idea” of the movement does not fit with the experience from our partners, and in this situation the meeting is changing very rapidly, as every partner is different, and they are arriving in a flowing succession. This way of doing the keiko is one of many ways to check our level of shoshin. The past is not valid in the future. Actually the past is just a memory in the mind and the future is a fantasy from the mind. The only real thing is the now.
Enjoy your keiko! Aikido makes people happy!