We were lucky enough to have a social visit from Sensei Pete Bailie, who teaches in Bristol Redland, this weekend. He made a very long journey up to see us, so we took advantage and arranged a Sunday training session in the village hall.
For the first hour, Pete and I revised our paired sword katas slowly and methodically. I was very aware of the thin-ness of attentive space around us. We were fully committed to the study, but something was missing.
At HQ, we train in a room of 16-20 people all studying the same thing at the same time, more or less, so there is a field of attention being generated that everyone is part of.
This weekend, Pete and I were attempting to create that same amount of attention in a village hall that just didn’t have the same containing presence throughout. I wonder whether – like the patina created by repeated handling of an object – a space can take on a particular feeling-patina through regular and repeated practice.
As it happens, I have been wittering on recently about moving during the ki for health and ki development exercises at the start of class. I’ve been repeating (to myself, or were they actually listening?) that we are a small orchestra warming up. My count is the beat, my movement is the movement of the conductor’s baton. And they have the responsibility, not just of doing the exercise, but doing it in time with the count and everyone else. That way we are bringing to life a shared field of awareness and attention for the rest of the session. That way, the village hall becomes the dojo.
We were joined for the second half of the session by brown belts and dan grades, and focused on randori – multiple person attack. Thus the importance of the shared attention continued to be central.
Rather than focus entirely upon the nage’s practice, we spent a while setting up the ukes’ role. Ukes provide pressure upon the nage’s space, and seek to contain the nage. This means that, as well as extending their mind directly to the nage, the uke also needs to extend awareness to their neighbours and move as one with them as much as possible.
The nage’s aim was to create opportunities to escape the surrounding containment. The nage wanted to receive an incoming uke, rotate and eject them into the path of another uke, so that four ukes surrounding would become two ukes trying to surround, and two ukes trying not to bump into each other.
Of course, throughout the session, shared attention split into hyperfocused one-on-one attention. Nages tensed up or froze. The container regularly collapsed as ukes forgot their shared role.
But there were also moments where the container flowed around the centre, and the nage in the centre moved freely within and through the gaps. Moments when five bodies seemed to co-exist in a single movement. Fleeting moments.
It seems to me that randori is far more than standing in the middle and throwing multiple partners in quick succession. It is an exercise in skilful multi-person containment, whilst the nage in the middle attempts to create holes and escape. It is an exercise in both attention and intention, in cutting dynamic lines through constricting circles. It works by attending to and shaping the space as much as moving the people within the space, perhaps.
All I really know from our weekend session is this: the more often you make the trip to Headquarters, the more you will immerse yourself in a field of high quality study and attention. You will steep in that quality, it will seep in through your pores hopefully all the way into your bones, and you may be able to bring some of it home to your local dojo.
James Knight
Lochaber Aikido Club