As I write this in early September 2024, it is six-and-a-half-years since I restarted aikido practice (at least at a serious / consistent level), but equally 30-years since I first discovered aikido. This multi-part article is in part about my personal journey from one style of aikido to another. It is in part about my personal battle with back problems – and age, and life, in general. It is in part about finding a way to keep training during the COVID pandemic and live beyond. Most of all, it is an acknowledgement, a show of my appreciation for all that have supported me in my study of the way of aiki.
Find the subsequent articles at https://www.westcumbriaaikido.com/blog/categories/club-news
Part 4 – a new beginning
Following my back issues in the early to mid-2000s, days became weeks, weeks became months, months became years. Over time my body somehow adjusted or adapted. The crippling seizures of acute back pain became less frequent and more manageable. Around 2012, now eight years on, I made some tentative steps back into aikido practice with a ki-style Yuishinkai Aikido club in the UK northwest that was run by a fellow (and former) BHA student from Plymouth under the technical direction of Koretoshi Maruyama Sensei – a direct student of O-Sensei and former Chief Instructor under Koichi Tohei Sensei. I would ‘load-up’ with pain killers and anti-inflammatory medicines on the way there and, ignoring the recommended dosage, would take the same on the way back home. Over a few weeks of training the pain started to ease and I managed to do a weeklong summer course in Andover in the south of England. It was great to be back on the mat, but something was missing in me – within the year my training faltered and stopped.
Fast forward now another six years to early 2018. It was February 2018, and on a random impulse, I googled aikido in my local area. I was amazed to find an aikido club – a takemusu aikido ('Iwama Style') club – in the local town less than 20-minutes’ from my home. I got in touch with them straight away and arranged the night of my first visit. The instructors, Shona and Jason, were apologetic, noting that their association would not recognise my existing shodan award. I did not care. I happily found a white belt from my collection of coloured belts and a dogi from the bottom of my wardrobe that was now a few sizes too small. I joined on that first night and ordered a new, larger dogi, as soon as I got home.
The local club I had joined was part of the International Takemusu Aikido Federation (ITAF). It was great to be back on the mat, it was great to hear the rattle of wooden weapons in bags as people arrived. After 14-years of mostly not being on the mat I struggled physically – during the warm-up I said to Shona, one of the instructors, that “I used to be flexible”. She responded, “Adrian, you used to be flexible”…. It quickly became obvious to me that some of the interpretations, explanations behind the weapons work being considered here were different to my initial learnings. I started googling things in the hope of finding some supporting material. I trawled through reams of videos on YouTube – most of which I rejected. I then found and subsequently focused on a range of videos from a ‘Lewis-someone’, posted by a club in the Netherlands. The form was crystal clear. I set out to study the form of this unknown person.
My return to aikido was not easy. I was now not 20 or 30-something, but in my early 50s. Whether directly due to back issues, or overall lack of activity and movement over many years – my body was broken. I was carrying too much weight, my aerobic fitness was gone, my mobility / flexibility was terrible – my body coordination a disaster. I literally wanted to cry. Over the weeks and months things improved, but with only two hours a week training in the local club, progress was painfully, glacially, slow. I attended a four-day seminar with Koretoshi Maruyama Sensei (Yuishinkai Aikido) in spring 2018 and then a three-day seminar with Francois Chidiac (ITAF) in the summer that year, it was great to be at these events, but they were, physically and mentally challenging.
At the Francois seminar, I respectively bowed at the start of the class, coming straight back up to the vertical. People then bowed again and then clapped, not once, but twice. I had no idea what to do. Worst of all – after the claps people bowed again. As the instructor turned around, I glanced down the line to find, to my horror, that I was the only one sat upright.
Onegaishimasu turned out to be a term not just used at the start of the class, but throughout the class. Will you train with me? ‘Onegaishimasu’, Yes, I understand, ‘Onegaishimasu’. Yes, I accept, ‘Onegaishimasu’. At the end of the classes I would shout out domo arigato gozaimasu, only to be left with the feeling that everybody else was saying something slightly different. I became even more confused when we looked at techniques where the nage struck forward with the blade of their hand and then did a technique. I was very familiar with the concept and application of atemi within a technique, but how could aikido, as a defensive art, have attacking moves? I was confused. Bokken cuts were percussive, more chop than cut. I was really confused.
I desperately wanted to understand more, I needed more. In late September 2018, I googled ‘takemusu aikido’ to see if there were other clubs in the area, and this is when I found Lancaster Aikido Club.
I made contact with the Lancaster club and had an immediate (within minutes) reply from Aaron Wieclawski, an instructor there. Two weeks later (mid-October 2018) I made the ca. 1.5-hour drive south to Lancaster for a 4-hour course that Aaron was running. I promised my wife that it would be a one-off visit. It wasn’t. I went back the week after, and the week after that, and then again and again. Sundays in Lancaster very quickly became the norm, and work permitting, were supplemented with one, and at times, two (and occasionally three) trips during the week. With ongoing training in the local club as well, I started to notch up 4 to 6-hours (sometimes 8-hours) training a week, I started to feel as if I was making some, gradual, progress; my body, and my mind, were starting to adjust. Occasionally my back would give out, at times for no apparent reason. For about a day I would struggle to walk, to move, due to the pain, but it would gradually subside over 4 or 5 days. It was the exception rather than the rule and as the recovery time became more predictable, my fear of these events became less, their control over me became less, my mind started to take control back, where it led, the body followed.
Class after class, week upon week, for months, during bokken work, Aaron would shout out “straighten that front foot!”. My front foot didn’t know what to do. Sometimes it was angled in, sometimes out, but at least I was now aware of it. Class after class, Ellie, another instructor in Lancaster would say “slow down Adrian”, telling me to relax, to drop my shoulders. Things were strangely familiar, but different, what did grounded mean? What did the ‘corkscrew the hips’ statement relate to? How could you feel as if you were moving under the mat? New starters and blackbelts all trained together, doing the same thing. Kyu grades all wore white belts, and at the start of the class people lined up in any order. The training being given was clearly part of a boarder and more elaborate system, but I couldn’t see how expectations varied through the grades.
In basic techniques, from a static grab, I would move, only to find that my partner was left standing upright, literally unmoved. My footwork was wrong, time after time I was told that that is the nagre form, and that I needed to practice the kihon form. My training partners would note that I was doing something wrong. The instructors would come over and watch and ponder and declare their verdict. Wrong angle, I had moved too far, I hadn’t moved far enough, extension had been lost, too high, too low, stay martial, stay with your partner, that’s the old form, do it like this, or that’s a variant, now do the base form, the list of corrections was endless. But they were corrections, it was what I needed. Occasional questions I raised would leave Aaron or Ellie pondering, with the promise that they would ask Lewis and get back to me. I found it a mildly amusing coincidence that they would be messaging a person called Lewis (apparently in Spain) whilst I was watching videos of a person called Lewis in the Netherlands....
Lewis (the one from Spain) was doing a seminar in Lancaster in March 2019, six-months into my training with the Lancaster club, I signed up straight away. For the weekend of the seminar, Lewis and I were both staying in the same B&B and the proprietor, Dave, also a Lancaster aikidoka introduced us. OMG – the Lewis that Aaron and others had talked about, the one here to do the seminar, the one from Spain, and the Lewis from the videos I was watching where the same person!
The following morning, Lewis and I met for breakfast. I noted to Lewis that there was an expectation with my local club that I would regrade to shodan under ITAF, but that I would also like to grade under him. Lewis mentioned a planned autumn 2020 trip to Japan. I committed there and then. After breakfast, excitedly, I phoned my wife to tell her the news, fully expecting her to be happy that my dream of many years, of going to Japan, was coming true. The response I got was absolute, utter, complete silence….
The weeks clicked by. In July 2019 I did my first TAE summer camp, a weeklong residential course in Switzerland. It was here that a provisional date for my shodan examination with Lewis was set – March 2020 at the next Lancaster seminar. At a seminar in Norfolk with Francios Chidriac later that summer, I got awarded an ITAF shodan, 20-years after my first BHA shodan award. Nonetheless, I still wore a white belt when visiting Lancaster or attending TAE seminars.
The weeks continued to click by. I did the autumn 2019 Lewis seminar in Dorset and another in Zaragoza in Spain, then Copenhagen in January 2020. I even organised a Lars Landberg seminar in the UK at the start of February 2020. Around this time I decided that being part of TAE and ITAF at the same time wasn’t going to work. I didn’t want to lose my friends or the ability to train in the local ITAF club, but I had to focus on teachings in TAE. I resigned from ITAF – and hence any opportunity to train again in the local club. To my surprise, Jason and others in the local club decided to leave ITAF as well. Hence, as club we separated from our previous ITAF affiliation, and were accepted as a TAE dojo member, with Jason and I as co-dojo chos.
A week later, at a seminar in Germany in mid-February, Lewis asked that I stay behind after the Saturday class to do a pre-test, I must have looked a little worried because he said, “don’t worry, you will be fine”.
I wasn’t. I got everything wrong. My shomen cut was too low, my yokomen cut not right, my choice of attacks wrong, my execution of some techniques a disaster. For those that train regularly with Lewis, you come to recognise a scale of disapproving noises, its starts with a questioning ummm… a ‘not what I would do, but OK, it works’ type of sound. There is then a more growling ummm sound of disapproval followed by ‘oi ya ya’, an explanation of complete disapproval. I went through each to the lowest-of-low levels - “Adrian STOP”. The second day of the seminar was changed to focus on some of the techniques I had got most wrong. I got to share the disaster of my pre-test will all the seminar.
I was devastated, deflated, I had been training as hard as I could. I couldn’t possibly get to Lancaster any more frequently. I cancelled my interest in grading for shodan the following month (March 2020). Lewis was more positive, suggesting we could look at testing in April at the Motril Intensive, a five-day training course in the South of Spain. I wasn’t convinced, shodan now felt like years away, not a couple of months, nonetheless, I agreed.
COVID then arrived. Dojos closed. The 2020 March seminar in Lancaster was cancelled, then Motril in April. The world ground to a halt. My training regime was destroyed, my hopes of grading smashed.
To be continued.
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