Every year the dojo chooses a theme that helps us see our practice in a new way. We do this because training is not merely an exercise activity, or even a new skill that you are acquiring. It is more like a journey down a path that has no end. The purpose of this journey is to penetrate the nature of reality itself. And you can’t really do that without making a substantive offering of some kind. How and why you walk down this path therefore matters a great deal. If you hang out near the very first steps of the path forever, you will always be holding yourself back from the true nature of aikido practice. And if you sprint down it to get to the end… well, there is no end. Everything interesting happens along the way, and you will miss it, for no good reason.
As we continue down the path this year, I want to focus on the fire we are building and maintaining as we train. This fire is simultaneously the thing we are offering, and the thing that consumes what we are offering. We train to build heat and tighten the slack in our bodies, minds, and spirits. We also train to throw the parts of ourselves that are already too hot into the fire so that they might be forged or purified. We exhaust ourselves to exhaust our internal enemies, and to know what we can give up and still keep going. All this work feeds the fire that we share. A dojo that has fire pushes its students further down the path, and it nurtures a culture in which students can push one another productively.
When I started training, I thought fire was simply about throwing people harder and taking impressive ukemi. It’s totally fine to start here, and I will be bringing more heat to training as folks take better ukemi! But there’s a lot more to it than throwing each other hard. Fire is what you’re bringing to the mat as an offering. It’s your attention. It’s getting up immediately after getting thrown. It’s your fingers going all the way to the wood, especially when you hate conditioning. It is also what you are sacrificing as you train. We throw our preferences, comfort, and even our stories about what kind of person we are or what we know… all of it goes into the fire to be consumed.
This is the offering we make, so we can see past all the illusions our mind creates.
This dojo has a little bit of fire, and this year we will stoke it together. Every time you train, you’re not just training for yourself, you’re training to stoke the fire that we share. And when you come to the dojo, I want you to consider both how you’re stoking the fire, and what you’re throwing into it.
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