Posts Tagged ‘Aikido’

Children laugh between 300~400 times a day, whereas in adults the number drops to less than 20. What happened to them?!

According to Dr. Madan Kataria, Founder of the Laughter Yoga Movement, adults need a reason to laugh, whereas children laugh for laughter’s sake, as the sun shines and water flows. One characteristic of children’s laughter is that it always come with active play. Perhaps adults laugh little because by comparison they are relatively sedentary.

In Aikido training we frequently laugh as we throw and and are thrown on the mat. The humor is not like slapstick comedy, as when somebody slips on a banana peel. Nor is from an intellectual play on words, nor a twist in an improbable situation, nor is it disrespectful. The laughter in Aikido is similar to the laughter of child’s play. It simply can’t be helped.

Find something that you can engage with in such a way that it makes you laugh! In Japanese this kind of activity is known as a shumi （趣味）often translated as a hobby or pastime, but the etymology of the characters (走 (run) + 取 (take) = to go towards. 味 = to taste) show it to mean a joyful pursuit. To run after, to taste, and to enjoy!

Laughter is at the core of Leisure, the 8^th Frame of Life in the Mandala Chart. No matter how much money you spend on leisure, without laughter it is all a grim business. Store bought pleasure doesn’t dig as deep, or last as long as the enjoyment that wells up from inside. Leisure should be rejuvenating, invigorating, delighting, yet when forced it can be draining, damaging, debauching.

Leisure is not just for weekends and holiday vacations. It is something that you can enjoy all year round, even as you work, if you approach it with the right spirit, that of enjoying what you do. Perhaps the 8^th category could be renamed Laughter, the royal road to enjoyment.

Write Your Wish List

Takezawa Shingō, a fellow Director of the Mandala Chart Association, bestselling author and consultant of Ganbare Shachō, suggests a great list for Leisure in his booklet Mandala Wishlist (published in Japanese). With permission, here is a portion translated from the Leisure list to get you started.

• To have a secret pleasure
• See a favorite movie or play
• Hold or participate in a special event
• Engage in an adventure
• Experience something that makes you excited
• Challenge to get in the Guinness Book of Records
• Enjoy a special food or drink
• Visit a famous restaurant or cafe
• Have a secret place, room, or library
• Buy a special stone or accessory
• A favorite brand of clothing, shoes, bag, or watch
• Start a collection of favorite items
• Visit foreign countries or tourist spots
• Participate in festivals or historic spots
• Stay at hot springs and famous inns
• Visit art museums and exhibitions
• Enjoy nature and natural scenery

You see that these range from passive to active, from free to expensive, but all suggest a sense of excitement, of something beyond the daily grind. Moreover, the Wish List is just to get you started. You may create your own, or adapt this one to see how accessible it might be.

These can also make great starting points for conversations with a friend or partner. Perhaps you have recently had such an experience that you would like to share. Or maybe it could become the focus of something that you could plan together. Give it a try, whether it ends up as an enjoyable conversation or as a real venture, you will definitely enjoy exploring the world of Leisure. Remember that it was intended to be one of the eight fields of life, and not to be ignored or overdone.

The Whole in the Part, the Part in the Whole

Another way to view the frame of Leisure is not as a separate compartment, but as an element of each and every frame. Can you find an element of Leisure in Health, Business, Finance, Home, Society, Personal, Study, and Leisure itself? The Mandala Chart makes no separation. Nor should we.

One way to do this is to allow an element of Play, and element of Fun in everything that you do. Don’t take yourself too seriously. A twinkle in your eye, a mouth that easily breaks into a smile, and a ready laugh in any situation can do wonders to keep spirits bright.

People will still drench you with their complaints, trying to cast a negative pall on life itself. Let it run off your back, and show them a better way. Ask yourself at the end of each encounter, was their an energy gain or an energy drain?

If your positive presence is not appreciated, find yourself some better company.

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Tagged as: active garage, Aikido, children, Dr Madan Kataria, Flexible Focus, Ganbare Shacho, laughter, Laughter yoga movement, mandala charts, manga, william reed, wish list

The 6^th Century BC Chinese General and military strategist Sun Tzu, best known today as the author and genius behind the classic text on strategy, The Art of War, penned a gem of a statement that has gained the status of proverbial wisdom.

“Hence to fight and conquer in all your battles is not supreme excellence; supreme excellence consists in breaking the enemy’s resistance without fighting.”

This book held profound influence over Asian military thinking and the Way of the Samurai. It was translated into French as early as 1772. Ultimately the book had an influence on leaders and generals from Napoleon, to General Douglas MacArthur, to Mao Zedong. It is studied at West Point Military Academy, and has been applied metaphorically in business and management strategy.

What is this powerful and apparently universal appeal behind Winning without Fighting, and more to the point, why is it that so few people throughout history have been able to master its lessons?

The Fisherman’s Quarrel

There are many variations on this wisdom in traditional Chinese culture, often told through profoundly simple and often humorous stories. One is that of The Fisherman’s Quarrel, in which two fisherman quarrel over their catch, during which time a bird makes off with the fish.

There is an inherent sense of the folly of fighting, and the wider perspective which seeks a way to win without fighting. There are many ways in fact of winning the battle but losing the war. We might say as well that the operation was a success, but the patient died. There are many ways of expressing the folly of the short-sighted solution.

We see it played out in our economy, where greed is good produces a massive win/lose scenario, eventually pitting Wall Street against Main Street. We see it in the nasty deception of going to war for the sake of peace. We see it in gross energy consumption that is altering the very climate of the planet we live on.

Sometimes we learn the hard way that fighting is not a way that works. Many conflicts erupt because someone had to talk back, stare back, fight back, rather than letting it go before it escalates. Even while studying the martial art of Aikido, which is fundamentally based on the art of winning without fighting, I have found myself drawn into conflicts that didn’t need to happen. Read Scene Three of my Manga Story, and see how easily this can happen. To have no enemies means to make no enemies.

Baker vs Taker

Guy Kawasaki tells of how he has found that by collaborating with what might have been his competition, both win and the pie gets bigger. He sums it up by saying that there is a fundamental difference in the mentality of the baker vs the taker. The baker makes pies and provides plenty to go around, whereas the taker gets his and leaves nothing for anyone else. The baker is creative and has an abundance mentality, whereas the take is destructive and has a scarcity mentality.

The Mandala Chart can help you develop an abundance mentality because it frees you from the one track mentality, and gives you 8 ways in which to view any particular situation. The power of the creative mind derives from flexible focus. If more people applied this in business, we would have the ability to generate solutions and preventions to problems, instead of constantly fighting to put out fires.

The Principle of Non-Dissension

There are many ways to think about winning without fighting. You can win by escaping, getting out of the fray in the first place. If you have a good understanding of all points of view, you can find a Win/Win solution, in which all sides benefit. You can win by passive resistance, the way of Mahatma Gandhi, in which you win by not fueling the conflict. Sun Tzu’s way is to win at the outset, through superior insight and perspective.

Instead of butting headlong into people and problems, develop a sense of pliancy and flexibility in your approach to life. Once you realize the folly of trying to enter the highway through the exit ramp in the face of oncoming traffic, you feel much better about following the good sense in the traffic signs that say, Yield or Merge.

An excellent way to cultivate this sense is to learn it with your body, by studying Asian martial arts which are based upon the principle of non-dissension, such as Aikido or Tai Chi Chuan. Learn to diffuse conflict by redirecting it, rather than fuel it by forcing the situation. You will avoid many of the problems that plague people, problems partly of their own making, and enjoy life more as you find the path of least resistance.

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Tagged as: active garage, Aikido, baker, Confront, Fight, Flexible Focus, guy kawasaki, japan, mandala charts, manga, Samurai, Sun Tzu, Tai Chi Chuan, taker, The Art of War, william reed

Moving out of your Comfort Zone

Many people like the idea of flexibility more than the practice of it. This is understandable, for if the experience takes you out of your comfort zone, you may prefer the familiar to the flexible.

When your body is stiff, then physical stretching can feel more like pain than gain. A similar thing happens mentally when your values or beliefs are forcibly stretched beyond their limits. We make frequent reference in this series to flexible focus, and how this is a process of mental and physical engagement. But it is not meant to be painful or uncomfortable. I have written in my Creative Career Path Column about how the Mandala Chart can facilitate this process by Moving from Matrix to Mandala Chart.

The key to expanding your comfort zone is to have more degrees of freedom. A brittle stick has no degrees of freedom, so anything which bends it will break it. It is the fear of breaking which causes many people to retreat into their comfort zone when stretched, but rigidity is ultimately a zone of discomfort. When you have more degrees of freedom in your mind and movements, then you experience flexible focus in action!

Mind-Mandala-Body

The key to expanding your comfort zone is to understand the process of engagement, and learn how to consciously navigate your way through it. To help visualize this, I created a Matrix which you can download called, Mind-Mandala-Body.

The horizontal axis shows the degree of engagement, from Shallow to Deep. However, the nuances change considerably when you add a second dimension with the vertical axis from Mind to Body. The two cross in the middle at the Mandala.

As an example, think of how you engage with Music. When you listen to music, you are in a more or less passive mode, engaged at a relatively superficial level with your mind or senses, and the result is that you Enjoy the music. As you learn more about the music, the style, history, instruments, and musicians, you engage at a deeper level, but still mostly in the mental and sensory realm, which is where you Learn about the music. When your engagement involves the body, either through movement of your kinesthetic sense, at first your engagement is shallow while you Practice the music. As your engagement deepens, you engage both mind and body while you Perform the music.

To understand the role of the Mandala in this Matrix, you might substitute the words Method, Tool, or Technique. The Mandala is all of these. It is also a way to connect the four zones, as well as the two axes, with Mind and Body able to engage freely in various ways.

While the Mandala Chart may seem to be more of a mental concept, as your engagement deepens it shifts to an experience, a sort of Body Mandala through which you engage with your instrument and your environment.

The Body Mandala

The Body Mandala is not just a metaphor. It is actually a physical way of experiencing and engaging your body in movement, and the discipline for learning how to do this is called Nanba: the Art of Physical Finesse.

This might make more sense if you have actively engaged in a sport, played a musical instrument, or practiced a martial art. Then you know from experience that when you play well you get into Flow, and when you play badly, you get stress or injury. What makes the difference is your mastery of physical finesse, the ability to engage intensively without forcing, twisting, or disconnecting.

I have found that my own experience with this has heightened my appreciation for the imagery of Cubism. When I am engaged in practice or performance of Nanba movement, Aikido, or even Tap and Calligraphy, the mental-physical experience somehow makes me feel like a Cubist man. I have no idea if the artists of the Cubist movement felt this way, but their work is the best visual expression I have ever seen of the kinesthetic experience of the Body Mandala.

You can also see this by observing animals such as birds, insects, or fish in movement. They are masters of physical finesse, and can teach you a lot about flexibility without forcing.

Because all of this comes to life in experience and engagement, it makes sense to find something to which you can apply it to in practice. It can be something as simple as taking a walk, but instead of just your usual stroll around the block, head out in a new direction and walk for a couple of hours. You will be surprised to see how much it brings you to your senses.

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Tagged as: Aikido, body, Creative career path, Flexible Focus, japan, japanese culture, mandala charts, manga, Martial Arts, mental, nanba diary, william reed

Outside of the Box, or Inside the Square?

What you see in the illustration are two entirely different ways of approaching a square.

The problem of how to connect the nine dots with only four lines, without taking pen from the paper, can only be solved as shown here by going out of the square. The dots only appear to create a box, and if you see it that way, you cannot solve the problem.

The nine dots problem is commonly used to illustrate the process of lateral thinking, or thinking outside the box, and is a common approach to creativity. It involves changing your perspective and freeing yourself from self-imposed or apparent limitations. The problem is, once you know the solution to the problem, there is not much more that you can do with it. The nine dots problem has become a cliché of creativity.

By contrast, the Japanese art of paper folding, know as Origami, is the art of folding the square into an astonishing variety of distinct shapes, animals, geometric figures, and objects of all sorts. All done by folding and refolding a single square sheet of paper, without any scissor cuts. It is far more challenging than the nine dot problem, because it involves manual dexterity as well as visualization. On the other hand, although someone creates the original origami shapes, for the most part people practice the art by following instructions. What is remarkable is the degree of flexible focus that was needed to come up with idea of folding paper in this way in the first place.

The Art of Folding

The art of folding is deeply ingrained in Japanese culture, and is an essential aspect of the Japanese sense of creativity and aesthetics. Japanese have refined the art of folding not only paper and clothing, but furniture, bicycles, eyeglasses, even joints of the human body in the martial arts. You can see numerous examples of folding the square in Japanese culture in a video slide show I produced with Prezi software.

I recently made a blog post on my presentation in October for the international conference of the Japan Creativity Society, at which I presented a paper which you can download, Folding the Square: The Geometry of Japanese Creativity. To accompany this, you can also download a Mandala Chart called GEOMETRY OF JAPANESE CREATIVITY for taking notes on key words and ideas in the thesis.

Why is folding the square significant for creativity? The reason is that, not only does it result in a host of useful and practical solutions to problems and products, but it also illustrates how many possibilities open up when we work within a certain set of limitations. The discipline of working within a set of rules and restrictions can sometimes set you free to discover new levels of flexibility and finesse.

This is not always the case, or every person working in a cubicle would be flexible and creative. More often than not, restrictions can bind and tether your imagination, particularly when imposed from the outside. It is when you seek to work out solutions inside the square of your own initiative through self-discipline, that creativity comes into play.

The unity of discipline and spontaneity

The artist who casts all rules aside in search of freedom of expression may find that he is still trapped in the limited range of his own experience and habit. One of the things that is consistent and intriguing about the traditional Japanese arts is that they are exceedingly difficult in the beginning. The brush in calligraphy is soft and disobedient, defying your efforts to control it. In the beginning it is difficult to even produce a sound on the Shakuhachi, or bamboo flute. Aikido is challenging to the beginner, who finds finesse frustrating, and force useless.

Each of the traditional arts follows a process know as Shu-Ha-Ri (守破離), roughly translated as follow, breakaway, depart. It is this process which connects discipline and spontaneity. Students are expected to begin by repeating copying standard master patterns until they become second nature. These are difficult to master, and much of the discipline is in recovering a beginners mind which allows you to engage with the materials and artistic challenges in a fresh and curious manner.

However, simply making skillful copies is not considered to be anywhere near the level of mastery. This is why in the martial arts, the first level of black belt (shodan) is considered to be merely the first step. Real development in the art starts after you learn the basic vocabulary and steps.

First you learn to follow skillfully, then you learn to breakaway, that is deal with variations and adaptations of the basic forms. Eventually you depart from all forms and learn how to be spontaneous in your expression. Though this process is formalized in the Japanese approach, in fact it is how all artists and musicians progress. Picasso did not start out creating free and original shapes, but rather in making remarkably realistic drawings. Many art students want to skip this stage of disciplined learning, and become an overnight Picasso. It cannot be done.

The Mandala Chart can facilitate the process of connecting discipline and spontaneity through flexible focus. It takes you away from polarity thinking, and helps you see one in terms of the other. Study the Japanese approach to creativity in folding the square, and it will open new horizons for you in the creative process!

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Tagged as: active garage, Aikido, Black Belt, creativity, discipline, Flexible Focus, Folding the square, japanese creativity, japanese culture, mandala charts, manga, nine dots problem, origami, self-discipline, Shodan, Spontaniety, william reed