About Calmness

合氣道光氣会 Aikido Kokikai Japan News 

2020-8-1 

Shudō Maruyama, Founder and President 

About Calmness (落ち着き ochitsuki) 

It’s important to be calm. 

Everyone recognizes the phrase, “Calm down!” 

Including kids. 

But when you ask a child, “What is calmness?” they answer, “I don’t know.” And if you ask them how to calm down, they have no idea. Mothers also know the importance of calmness from experience. They often say so before their kids’ tests or competitions. But mothers who say, “Calm down, and be strong” can lose their own calmness and become flustered themselves. To learn what calmness is, what kind of state it is, first consider the opposite of calmness: losing your cool, blood rushing to your head, getting mad, anger rising up, and so on. These are states in which your center of gravity rises, the mind becomes unsteady, flitting here and there, and you can’t concentrate on anything. In such a state, you can’t apply your whole ability, be it for an exam or for  sports.  

Long ago, it was said you could calm yourself down by focusing your mind on a point about 10 cm below your navel, near the upper body’s center of gravity. In Kokikai, we display in the dojo the principle, “keep one point to develop calmness.” The “one point” below the navel is a point of reference. Kids are gradually made to understand that this feeling is what calmness is. In martial arts, this calmness is likened to the surface of a pond. When it is quiet and there is no wind, it clearly reflects birds and the moon. When little waves arise, however, the reflection is disturbed. When the waves grow big, it disappears entirely. 

Calmness must be made into a habit, as in the old song Yawara, by Misora 

Hibari, with the words, “Going, living, sitting, lying down, all softly single-minded.” 

Make calmness a habit. You will become strong. In the dojo, while we check their posture when standing and sitting, we practice various methods for kids to develop this formless, colorless, weightless, yet important sense of calmness. A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. 

(translated by Barbara Litt, with assistance from Dave Nachman and Steve Syrek)