Category Archives: Dojocho Talks

• – – – Kimbal Anderson Sensei

Sensei said: “It’s still Equinox”… 

Did you see the picture of the Full Moon over the shrine up there in Granite Falls? Beautiful! It’s just… you know…

                                                    * * *

So… last Saturday, there was this change in the sky and you know it was rainy and stuff that day, and it all started to cloud up…  but it hit this point where the sun looked golden color. It wasn’t red any more and it wasn’t white-ish like it usually is it was a gold color. And beams of light were shooting through the clouds, like, huge rays… It looked like some kind of religious calendar, almost, it was incredible. And then there were these curtain clouds that were coming… just dancing… It got me thinking of Kurosawa’s Dreams, right?  All these waving things…

And then it got really intense. I’ve never seen anything like that in my life, and I’ve seen lots of skies. My father taught me to predict weather and all kinds of things by the moon. As farm people we used the moon as our guide. So I’m used to examining the sky in detail, and I’ve seen phenomenal sun-dogs and Aurora Borealis and all those…  This was totally unique.  I took a picture, but it doesn’t look… you know… there’s no depth of field.. But the rays of light passing through extended across the sky. I’ve never seen anything do it like that and then these pulsing clouds behind it…

And what I thought was: ‘There’s probably 250 people at the market and 3 of us looked at it.’

No-one else looked up.

It’s like they were so disconnected from the phenomena around them… no-one looks at the sky any more,

And so I went around and there are some people that I know, and I said  “Come here…”  and I’d take them outside and they’d go “aaaah!”… and they’d just stare at it for a while… Then they’d always run back inside and try to get their children, and the children would go “I don’t care”… you know, looking at their cell-phones…

And I just thought what an extraordinary thing, that people no longer see, because, like I said, it was incredible… I’ve never seen anything like that. 

So I was considering that phenomenon of disconnection from Great Nature.  And to see it in that form, particularly when people are shopping for local, organic vegetables and local, organic food… You would think there would be some kind of…but no… I think Nature has been commoditized. It’s not part of us… …for those folks…

And I was just thinking…

Something I want to do in the dojo is take you out and show you some things about how to look at the sky.

And this event today, and in the last couple of days… we had the Autumnal Equinox…And you can tell. Everything feels so much different. And I was observing the trees out front, the leaves, and they were signaling ‘Autumn’ and ‘rain’: Autumn rain And I was thinking: probably no-one knows even how to talk to the trees any more.

They can’t understand the language of leaves.

So I want to show you that, so it doesn’t get lost.

And it’ll also let you understand maybe a little bit better.

Maybe like O’Sensei and those guys – they were very much creatures of Nature – they had to watch the sky, because of rain… or typhoons…or any of that stuff…

So we’re going to do that. 

There’s so much joy that’s not being enjoyed.

We’re going to do such a thing – as Sensei says – “without fail”. 

• – – – Kimbal Anderson Sensei

So, in our practice – and I think it’s the part that a particular group of people… one of the reasons they take this up… maybe they admire a particular part of the culture… – but the idea of the ten perfections – which you’ll never hear in a dojo, nowadays, it’s not something that happens, but we still do the old thing.  And it kind of comes down to this: there’s a bunch of awarenesses that you develop in training: being able to keep your focus, how to relax under challenge, how to be truly decent – where you actually look at your own heart and you can say,  “doing pretty good… it’s working… I’m figuring this out…” One of the things – and this probably comes from old yoga masters – concerning certain emotions and then their negative side, is that we’re learning through conscious engagement with what’s happening with us to work on these things, so they’re no longer sabotage…  so they quit sabotaging us…

Because that’s so common, isn’t it?

You guys ever sabotage yourself?

The deal comes down to this: my teacher, in this case Shoji Sensei… we were… I was trying to figure out… on one level I wanted to train the way he was asking me to train – which is respect – because he was giving me something really cool, and on the other level, the level of the ten perfections, because he’d already done it and had a good idea about human nature – he had his own life – there’s a couple of things that he simply said “Start here. If you get this part even engaged and you start working on it, you will have immediate relief.” “Relief?  Relief of what? Is there a threat I don’t know about?”  And he said “you’ll have immediate relief…” 

And so I’m going to address that a little bit with you as we play.

You know, I tell you like: when you can be really sincere and you thank the person that whacked you, because you realize, they just showed you that you weren’t out of the way. That’s what they really did. They didn’t think, “I’m going to make this person’s life miserable, and they’ll go to bed feeling bullied like they did in eighth grade…”  It’s not that. It’s just: “oh… under these conditions I get whacked when I don’t get out of the whack-zone.”

That’s a good thing. 

It’s a good thing. 

To be able to deal with yourself, that part of you, so then whatever you want to call that part of yourself… …one of the big nemeses of a student progressing is arrogance, to be honest with you. And it takes so many forms, and some of it is so subtle, and so justifiable, and I’ll give you an example: how many of you can find a friend who will back up, justify, and totally agree with your arrogance: “they shouldn’t talk to you that way…” and all that stuff?

You can find them pretty easy.

How many friends do you have who can say, “Peter, you’re being kind of like an ass. This isn’t a good way to operate. These people have feelings and in many cases they’re quite intelligent.  And you’re pretending that this thing you have going on is more important”?

So I’m going to ask you to do this exercise with yourself. 

This is ongoing. This is a verb. You have to work on this all the time… And it’s more like: you start recognizing how subtle arrogance is. And then you’ll see how you try to deal with your arrogance by being arrogant back at it. That’s the first step. You’ll do that for sure.

Now… Nothing I’m telling you is me ridiculing you. It’s just some-one who’s been there pointing out trail-markers… You know that part that says “don’t go left”. Really, don’t do it, man.  It’s not about if you can survive it, you’ll just die. There is no good ‘left’ on this thing.

In the case of this arrogance thing, to discover the difference between having a good, healthy sense of boundaries, self-esteem, and all that good stuff… you cannot have that little aspect of us, the arrogant part, come up with the rules. 

And that’s the trick.

Maybe, as we learn in here, you’ll discover how you made up rules, and stories, and things to reinforce those stories, and how you listened with special ears when you got feedback, and you ignored everything that didn’t fit what you wanted… But what-ever you want to talk about, with it, that’s one of the first places to begin. Because it’s in your way. The sensory part I’m trying to show you, with ki, the kind of magic… that is totally in the way of it.  That totally blocks your ability to have a very real set of feedback on energy stuff.

When you relieve yourself from this one part, the subtlety will be more available to you.

But also, sometimes the arrogance is false humility. It’s false. It appears to be like the person’s getting it, but it’s actually false.

And as I’ve told you: in here, function is what we look at. 

• – – – Kimbal Anderson Sensei

….and he said, ‘leaders do not fall from the sky. Leaders are an exact reflection of your culture. If you want to have a different kind of leader, change your culture…”

Something we do in our practice, in keiko, is we are refining our internal culture. The dojo itself is a beautiful culture. It’s not only a university of deep learning, it’s also a family. It’s also “I’ve got your back”… “Help me move that furniture”.  It is a macrocosm/microcosm kind of thing. The dojo is a microcosm of the universe. 

And I always try to make sure everyone is learning to be the lineage. So that no-one’s better, worse, or whatever. 

Because I know, if we’re going to change anything in the culture, it’s going to have to emerge that way.

Corporate culture is not based on humanism. It is an exploitative kind of programmed entertainment, to address and develop a culture that’s really exactly what’s happening now. You can see the face  of the media in the culture, now.

We have to change that. 

If we don’t change that it’s going to get messy. 

And being a person who believes that the planet is a conscious, living entity, and that I am quite literally a little bunch of its physical mass walking around, living. I think we need leaders who embrace that thinking. I mean we really do. They would be able to see everyone in the big picture.

Anyway, that’s my 2022 dojo talk.

• – – – Kimbal Anderson Sensei

It’s the Year of the Tiger.

Tora Tora…

And as you know, this type of year often has a militant aspect to it, in which many conflicts arise, and they’re usually settled by reactionary violence. Okay. That’s the book’s bad part…

What I was talking about was that it would be so good and so necessary for a bunch of people to rise into leadership, all over – it has to be planetary – who have a long view, who have a big-picture-long-view, and aren’t intoxicated with the oligarchic wealth, and sex slaves, and the whole craziness they’ve gotten into.

Now, I was very fortunate once, to be able to get a question to his Holiness the Dalai Lama, when he was visiting here. So I got to pick one question… some life-question.

And back then we were dealing Bush and the whole ‘let’s just blow everyone up who has nothing to do with it!’  You know… It was just this strange war machine got started.

And I wanted to ask him: ‘We’re being led by leaders who I disagree with, almost everything they believe and say….’  And a lot of us do. This isn’t that I am eccentric but this is a big, common view at that time. It’s like “what the hell?” Because we didn’t want a war, we didn’t want all that. And I said, ‘What do you do with that? What do you do with the contradiction and tension when you say: ‘these people are doing everything I am morally against, and yet they’re all you have.’

And he said, ‘leaders do not fall from the sky. Leaders are an exact reflection of your culture. If you want to have a different kind of leader, change your culture…”

….

• – – – by Kimbal Anderson Sensei

To categorize before you see means you only will see what you determined you want to see.

When I was young and ambitious I wrote a whole article about training in the arts. Trying to show people who felt like that that was ridiculous: we shouldn’t have art and music and all that and it’s just waste of time… to show them this: the best scientist is someone who’s trained in the arts. When they look in the telescope, the microscope, the mathematics… when they look at things, they have developed their perception. They see things others do not.

And I was suggesting, of course, there needs to be a comprehension of that  and also, I’m going to call it, a deep nurturing and appreciation of that. 

I know as myself, I had a mentor once just stop me and say:  “You know, men as artists in this time, have to make a statement, have to have this thing, have to say something… It’s all about some ‘voice’…”

And he said… 

“I want to challenge you to make something beautiful. Just beautiful. From your point of view. Just make it beautiful. If you think you’re a good artist, just frigging make something beautiful. Drop all this other crap!”  And so I did endeavor to do that.

And in the process, as I offer you artistic challenges with your life, I’m asking you make your soul an art, an art-form…

You know… a martial Art – if you take the words – is… to me it means… you bring together the martial – the forces – and you make it an artistic exploration.

A martial Way is to – once you’ve done that – determine you’re going to live that way. That the little moment of you is that: a beautiful work. My belief is that empathy, compassion, these other things… must be there. In fact, I’m going to go as far as – at least to my level of understanding – as to say that they are the basis of things. And that empathy allows a kind of compassion where you drop your socialized stories. And every person who comes to you first is a living being. First.

Not a sex or a gender, not an economic place, not a fear… All that…

That takes some bravery. It does.  Because you don’t know… Come on now… We all live in a… Right now we all have PTSD. The kindest people I know now have PTSD from this whole thing. And they’d like to glom onto some answer: “I’ll just be this way with…” “If they say that, I’m just going to do that…”

And they’re no longer the eloquent, beautiful capacity any more…

So as martial practitioners, your work is creating your capacity for all things. 

All kinds of capacities.

• – – – by Kimbal Anderson Sensei

Any person who can have a chariot run by cats has got something happening,  you know what I mean? Because, you know… if you know cats, the whole idea of them leading a chariot… woah!!! It’s a whole other level of understanding of things

And I love the metaphor of it.

So I’ve trained with ladies teaching who were truly herding cats, because, you know, the guys… particularly large, kind of forceful guys… felt they needed to simultaneously prove something while placating. 

Exactly…

Is that respect?

But then on the other hand being brutal, and not treating you the same as I would treat anyone else sucks. And is not the nature of our art at all. 

Now, part of the nature of our art is discovering things about yourself. Cherished things. Where you discover, ‘Huh! What the hell is wrong with me…’

I had a dear friend, someone I love beyond all measure today, tell me something about a realization they had concerning a homeless person. And I thought,  “Now you’ve got it. Now you have the potential to change your whole life.”

Where you see something and you think: ‘I have been trained to categorize, label, all these things, without even seeing.’

• – – – by Kimbal Anderson Sensei

What I wanted to talk about was, because of the season… if you go outside it’s glòm which is an Old English word, and I think it was sometimes in the idea of something that’s obscured but not dangerous: it’s just something you’re not seeing – like you just see the light of the moon, but you can’t see the moon itself.

It also is a metaphor…

We don’t use metaphor much in this society, but the idea of something being hidden in this sense is not negative secrecy.  It’s like when your spiritual eye is ready… That kind of stuff… That it’s probably not good to force on other people who are not there. It’s not kind. And you have to drop the thing ‘they’re not ready and I’m much better’. It’s more like: ‘oh… it’s not their time for it’, okay?But you still have to live. You still have to have a good life.

One of the beauties of training is that, in here, you began to get experiences of interacting with people quite intimately that isn’t sexual it isn’t political it isn’t any of that ‘-isms’ or ‘-iddles’.

It’s simple. 

And may be you never had these experiences before. So your whole vision of the world is kind of ‘over there’. And your ma-ai – the distance  at which you keep things – can lead you to being very separate from things. And it doesn’t help you have empathy.

I prefer the ancient words but they don’t mean anything to anyone now, but they were much more subtle. And they were kind of holographic, and metaphoric, you know what I mean?

And then you get literalists who take the most beautiful thing, and turn it into a bludgeon.

I don’t think that way in our training.

Early on I found I used to have fifty-fifty in our dojo. We’re pretty much there now: fifty percent wonderful women… wonderful men… And to interact with each other in a non-sexual, non-transactional, non-social way – the whole stories, allow the stuff… allow them to just be in each other’s presence without that. There was not all that stuff. 

And I so much enjoyed the women teachers I encountered.  Their approach varied drastically… it was like this range of wildness…

The women brought so many things to it that I had never seen, that were like absolutely awakening to me.

I noticed with the Iwama-trained ones – there are a few very well-known teachers – at first when I trained with them in 1980, it was very much them trying to  demonstrate that they weren’t going to be pushed around: they had very big guys in the Iwama lineage… and so they were very physical. But now they’re back to… what a variety… what a wonderful variety of things…

There are still some that are very physical, but it keeps the mental/heart part about musubi about just joining of energy… And it helps people understand that can exist without politics, without social stuff, without all those rôles that people think are real… 

But I got to see what I call the spiritual lineage, the stories, the beauty of it all…

Peter-san: So do you think the key moment was the moment of actually heading to Iwama – from Tokyo – which was O’Sensei giving up on the whole thing, because the government was going to take over his dojo, so that was the final straw… or was it doing the physical stuff in Iwama

Sensei: Yeah…

Peter-san: and then discovering stuff…

Sensei: Yeah…

Peter-san: …for the first time, because of the relief and relaxation of finally being out of it all?

Sensei: Yes! I think his youth was spent in nature:  if you  think about Hokkaido and all that. But also, even if his family were quite wealthy enough, they lived a pretty earthy life. I mean, in his metaphors he really never really departs from Great Nature… and even when he discusses the kami – with great reverence – they are natural forces, they are forces of nature, they are not human constructions.

And then – you know – you have the people who formalize everything…

But I think he had deep respect for anyone with sincerity trying to approach the ladder up to the Gods…  He didn’t really care about their formal affiliation. 

But I think for himself, when he went to Iwama, I think he just returned to Great Nature. 

I think he really needed to…

• – – – Kimbal Anderson Sensei

Something we’re going to work on this evening is this whole constellation of concepts surrounding ‘position in space’. You can say ‘ma-ai‘, and things like that, but it’s a way more beautiful, intricate thing. And something I’ve always found was the expression of the actual principles which are that physical things – in our dimension – have this nesting principle with all kinds of other stuff. 

And I think of it as a way to open your awareness to ki and kokyu by experiencing these things very clearly… very definite things… and then you could understand with a certain kind of mind and spirit that any movement you make would be them.

They say there’s that shizentai concept of natural body and it just does this stuff. I think when we think ‘natural body’, at least in the United States, it’s like: “I do whatever I want to do…” “I just do this whole, sort of, whatever makes me feel free, liberated, whatever it might be…” which is not it.

That’s not ‘natural body’. 

‘Natural body’ might be the simple way a farmer squats to check his rice – and it’s all these things – but his body is expressing a wholeness with the forms around him.

And I think this society in particular is so, what?… ‘voyeuristic’ might be a good word, but it’s really that detachment aspect:  that we are watching life on a TV screen. So our shizentai is a slouch or a bunch of tension. So maybe these metaphors don’t match very well as far as words go. However,  by training you begin to become aware of yourself again, and in a new context: because we definitely work with these natural energies and forms and flows and stuff, which aren’t what one might see on a computer – the theatre of something – they are actually built-in.  And I think they’re in there just normally, but sometimes we’ve blocked off ourself.  Our inculturation blocks us off from this stuff.

And it’s one of the things that O’Sensei, I think… (this is my interpretation, of course, I cannot speak for him…) he had some kind of emergent experience of the natural human, even though he was in a time where the Westernization was trying to define things really differently.  

And I think, for him, I wonder if that one moment when he went from ‘budo as militarism’ to ‘budo as farming’ wasn’t the most important thing?

I think that something happened, and then that was it for him. 

His aikido changed. 

You start seeing all those different versions: the Tokyo dojo, the Iwama dojo…

I always think about the Osaka dojo – I kind of wonder what that would have been like – – – and up in the hills West of Osaka…. the dojo that was their main dojo before they were suppressed…

So the expression of the energies… I think maybe that he saw that they were losing that connectivity so he went back to the root of it.

And I think about Tesshu and those other guys – I have some exposure to their lineage – also, were very much about trying to keep Japanese culture from deteriorating into ours.

The swordsman understood this stuff and he could see that the office guy wasn’t even there…

And couldn’t understand the words any more…

Which I think is the shocker, because we think, ‘oh, they’d’ve  figured it out’…  But no. Why would they?

Anyway…

that’s my thinking…

Discovering your natural body again. 

Which we’re going to play with, tonight. 

• – – – Kimbal Anderson Sensei

So…. our training is meant as a kind of  becoming versus a kind of achieving…

And it does require courage. Courage in the freaking mundane: “how am I going to live today?” “How am I going to live this circumstance?” “How am I going to be…” you know? 

And you also have to realize: is sometimes we cut ourselves off from support.

I think the biggest thing I really finally grasped on a grateful level was: there are situations and beings and layers who know way more than I know right now. And they’re offering it.

I do have to do my part, which is pony up and accept it… allow it to modify my basis of what I am.  Also, stop thinking I need to defeat some philosophical parent and simply be glad they have the knowledge. 

And learn how to embody it

I think this whole argue-about-everything thing has gone about as far as it can go, particularly with nuclear weapons…  I’m far more concerned about computers and AI and all that crap that can happen…

AI’s kind of dangerous.  In the wrong hands, its ‘worse than a nuke. You can just turn everything off, literally.

I think humans need to get their evolving in gear. 

At this point, it appears, that many people have not chose growth and autonomy.  They’ve chose freedom and fighting which isn’t growth and autonomy  but they mistake them for those things…  And if the bulk of the people just want to follow something, we need to make sure that it’s  beautiful and healthy, and doesn’t make slaves…  Because they can sacrifice their lives to something that’s really pretty harmful to the planet.

Our Earth-jewel’s the most precious thing we have. It is us. It is not our possession… We literally are that. 

And I think that O’Sensei, for all of his foibles,  I think he understood that. He got there the hard way. And I respect that a ton.

I hope to benefit from the wisdom of those who know.