Budo – Blog

By Irene Cena

I came to Aikido after more than fifteen years of dance training. I knew how to
move. Or so I thought.
From the very beginning, Aikido confronted me with the limitations of my
own learning habits. I would watch a technique demonstrated, follow the
movements carefully, feel confident I had grasped something — and then
stand up and find I was starting from scratch. The image in my mind and the
movement in my body seemed to belong to different worlds.
This essay is about the long process of closing that gap. It is also about what I
discovered along the way: a different understanding of how learning happens,
and how the body itself can become the seat of knowledge.

The Moment of Surrender

I remember very clearly a moment during the first Aikido seminar I attended
with Inaba Sensei. The same pattern I had experienced in every class was
unfolding: I watched, I thought I understood, and then my turn came. But
something different happened. When I finally met my training partner, the
technique simply flowed out of my body — almost, I would say, in spite of my
conscious effort to understand it.
That experience planted a seed. I began to suspect that a certain kind of
understanding could not be reached through analysis alone. That there had to
be a degree of surrender and trust if I was going to learn effectively.
For someone with my background — trained in dance forms where careful
study of shape and placement was central — this was a genuine disruption. In
dance, I could “wear” a technique like a costume: reproduce the body
arrangement in space, capture elements of the dynamic, and refine from the
outside in. But Aikido resisted this approach entirely.

The Presence of Another Person

Part of what made Aikido so different was something that sounds obvious but
took time to truly absorb: I was not the only person involved. A technique is
not a solo form. The other person — their body, their weight, their intention —
is co-author of the movement. No amount of internal preparation could
account for that variable in advance.
More striking still: the mere presence of an opponent changed my experience
of reality before any physical contact occurred. Even before the first
movement, my sense of space, time, and my own body would shift. I could be
thrown off balance by that alone. My capacity to think clearly — by which I
mean to organise my body intelligently in response to changing circumstances
— was already affected.
This revealed something important about the relationship between thinking
and moving. They can happen independently. I can think about dinner while
sitting still. I can move a chair across a room and find myself on the other side
with no memory of how I got there. In Aikido, this disconnect becomes a
problem you cannot ignore.

Learning from the Outside In — and Its Limits

For a long time, my approach to learning a technique was to retain it as a
mental image. I would watch the demonstration, hold the form in my mind
like a picture, and then try to match my body to that image when I stood up.
Sometimes I tried different “keys” — a detail of footwork, a line through the
arm — hoping one of them would unlock the rest.
The problem was that the physical experience of actually practising the
technique would crowd and alter the mental image. Information absorbed
before moving seemed to occupy the same space as information gathered
during movement, and the two would conflict. I would find myself still
“projecting the movie” in my mind while in the middle of an encounter — and
then a fist would appear a few inches from my face, breaking through the
screen.
When I finally let go of the initial image entirely and simply began to register
my own experience of the meeting — from beginning to end, without trying to
fix it in advance — something changed. Moments in the sequence became
clear, like snapshots. And by joining those snapshots, the technique began to
flow more smoothly.

Thinking from the Body

This was the beginning of what I can only describe as a shift from learning
outside my body to learning from within it. Once I had gathered enough lived
experience — sensations registered in movement, not ideas about movement
— I found I could relate a demonstration directly to my body rather than my
mind. I could break down and store new information in a way that was
available to me in motion.
Instead of thinking about the technique as something separate from me, I
began to think it from my body, from the perspective of my body. The process
shifted from memorising form to understanding an event — and sometimes
that understanding bypassed images altogether.
There was a physical parallel to this shift: my centre of attention moved from
my head down to the tanden. When my focus was caught in my head — which
I believe corresponds to a literal physiological state, blood moving upward,
tension gathering there — my reactions became slow and cluttered. When my
attention settled in the tanden, I could see more clearly, respond more
quickly, and move with greater accuracy.

The Tanden That Sees

Vision still matters — it contributes to timing and accuracy. But in the most
effective meetings I have experienced, the sharpness of response does not
come from the eyes. It is as if the tanden can perceive something the eyes
cannot: a shift in the space between myself and the opponent, a tension that is
almost tangible, before any physical movement registers.
In those moments, my body has already moved before I am consciously aware
of responding. This quality of immediate, unmediated response is something I
have also felt on the uke side — in the experience of being touched, or thrown,
or of receiving a technique that simply arrives before any thought of it forms.
I noticed this vividly during practice with my training partner Tony, working
on kesagiri. In the moment of the strike, I felt my centre literally rise a few
inches — the weight in my belly lifting and then settling again. As I recollect it,
it seemed my feet may have briefly left the ground. The sensation was
unmistakable: the tanden was not merely a concept but a felt reality, and its
movement was leading mine.

Including the Other Person

A further shift began as I became more settled in my own centre: I could
extend my awareness to include the other person. Before, glimpses of this
would arrive unpredictably — moments of genuine connection in the midst of
practice that seemed to appear and disappear of their own accord. Gradually,
it became possible to tune into it more actively.
For example: when grasped at the wrist, I found I could immediately register
the weight, balance, and body arrangement of the opponent — without losing
my own centre. This awareness of the other did not come at the expense of
self-awareness. It seemed to arise from it.

Practice Permeating Life

Alongside my time at Tetsushinkan, I have been deepening other practices:
movement improvisation and performance, Body-Mind Centering®, sitting
meditation and Buddhist philosophy. For the first few years, these disciplines
fed each other. Progress in one area would show up as insight in another; the
dojo and the rest of my life were in conversation, but remained somewhat
separate.
More recently, something has changed. The practice has begun to move in the
other direction: out from the dojo and into the texture of daily life. I first
noticed this clearly during a seminar with Aoki Sensei — intense both in hours
and in content. By the end of it, the quality of attention I had found on the mat
was staying with me off it. It was no longer something I entered and exited; it
was becoming a way of perceiving.
I began applying this consciously: at work as a bookshop assistant, paying
closer attention to interactions with customers. More significantly, in
conversations within the Buddhist community — situations I had previously
found overwhelming. There were times I was able to hold my ground, express
my view, and receive a strong response without flinching, while registering a
very powerful feeling inside. The steadiness I was learning in the face of
physical pressure had transferred to the face of emotional pressure.
This connection is, for me, one of the most important fruits of practice. Not a
technique applied outside the dojo, but a quality of presence that has
gradually become less contingent on where I am.

Towards Integration

Where I am heading, I think, is towards an increasing integration of all the
practices I am engaged in — not by blending them into something
homogeneous, but by embodying each of them more fully, so that
understanding unfolds from within rather than being applied from without.
Reflection is useful only when it remains in honest dialogue with lived
experience. The questions I continue to carry are not abstract ones. What is
the nature of joining? What makes the opponent fall? How do I act without
attachment to a particular outcome? How do I smooth out the gap between
doing and registering?
I believe that thinking directed into the body — rather than about the body —
eventually creates new sensation. And new sensation creates new
understanding. The process is slow, non-linear, and never quite finished. But
it is, I find, unmistakably real.