I brought in the New Year last night with a special 11.30-12.30 misogi (purification) training with Airenjuku aikido club. Like many pieces of excessive Japanese martial arts madness, Etsunen Geiko as it’s known, is both diabolical torture and a wonderful learning experience.
Last night’s Etsunen Geiko led by Tom and Maria Helsby Sensei consisted of 20min arm swinging (a simple chi building exercise that removes any tension you may have in your shoulders through exhaustion and pain), 20 min “tori-fune” a Shinto exercise that comes from oriental rowing, used in aikido, which involves moving the centre backwards and forwards by bending the knees, and twenty minutes of Zen Buddhist chanting. Twenty minutes may not sound like a long time to do an exercise, but try it non-stop. I do the first two exercises each morning but about 100 times fewer repetitions. The trick as ever is to let go and relax – the body teaches you the best way to do it soon enough. This learning through exhaustion method is a feature of many oriental martial arts and I’ve been through the process as a live-in aikido student. Sooner or later you just can’t be bothered to do it wrong anymore.
On the other hand I worry that this Etsunen Geiko “learning the hard way” method is unintelligent and could easily lead to attitudes of hating, ignoring or forcing the body. There is a fine line between pain and discomfort, which can be useful, and self-abuse which is just stupid. While this approach can be effective it is ultimately self-destructive long-term and the listening and leading the body is the approach I prefer. It’ll be interesting to see in Holistics how much my students will learn from a gentler approach, and how much they will not be able to get without the benefits of “hard” training. I suspect that they will learn some things much quicker through kindness, but that I would also need to ask anyone who wanted to learn to teach Holistics to engage in a more physically demanding practice at least for some time, or they just wouldn’t get some things.
Of interest to me last night was the thoughts that go through ones head and emotions in the body during the Etsunen Geiko misogi. I was more aware of these than normal this year, perhaps due to the regular meditation I’ve been doing of late. The mental chatter goes through several stages, after a good mindful start I normally start to drift and think about all kinds of nonsense. Then as it gets harder I start to blame myself or the teachers, then there’s a kind of bargaining one does with oneself – “I’ll just get through the next 100” and you enter a survival rather than growth outlook. This is often followed by despair. Normally I let go and just say “Screw it” a few minutes before what turns out to be the end and finish quite nicely. The process is analogous to Kubler Ross’s grieving stages oddly enough.
By the chanting I was trancing out slightly, from a combination of the rhythmic insistent tones, oxygen deprivation from constantly breathing out and endorphins from the previous exercise an sitting in seiza (Japanese formal knee sitting). I recommend this kind of misogi training for anyone who wants to experience an altered state in a fairly safe way.
I also noticed the power of group process last night. A person is capable of doing things in a group which they physically would not be able to do on their own, it’s as if you’re dragged along by the current. At several points last night I was able to tie into and ride this feeling when the going was getting tough, and at other times “reach out” to others who were struggling and drag them back into the group rhythm. I suspect most people who have played team sports will be familiar with the leap that occurs when a team is working as a unit compared with the clunkiness of when things aren’t gelling.
For an extreme example of Japanese misogi super-athletes see the Marathon Monks,
All in all a great way to bring in the New Year, and my thanks to Senseis Tom and Maria Helsby for hosting and teaching. As the fireworks at midnight went off I was glad to be in a group working on themselves and not just getting pissed.
Photos show pre and post training. Note the sake – another Japanese Etsunen Geiko tradition.