Today, I would like to share a moment that too few of us Aikidoka get the opportunity to experience. I am talking about practising with your teacher in the conditions where he is a "normal" student. I guess I am writing this today to try to intellectualise and understand an experience that was at same time very beneficial but also extremely frustrating for me, hopefully, giving you some useful points along the way.

Bruno Mathis, 4th dan Aikikai has been practising and teaching for over 30 years. His numerous travels have allowed him to practice all around the world and to discover the richness of our art with the human bonds that it allows us to create, beyond social and cultural differences. From Beijing, his current residence, he talks to us today about his Aiki journey around the world.

Olivier Gaurin is a scholar of Aikido, author of several books on Aikido[1],[6],[9] as well as fictions set in medieval Japan[7],[8],[2],[3] and historical accounts[5],[4]. Concerned about a drift of our art towards the sport, he reminds us about the cultural aspects that are an intrinsic part of Aikido. Having lived in Japan for over 20 years, he has immersed himself into the ancestral culture of his country of adoption and shares his thoughts on how 21st century Aikidoka should apprehend their practice.

If I had started learning Aikido in my own country and had kept on practising like that for 40 years, none of what I am about to say would have come about. It is only because I could observe O Sensei from 1964 to 1968 that I realised these things. Of course, due to his old age, O Sensei did not teach on a regular basis. He spent most of his time in his little office at the AikikaiHombu Dojo and would come every now and then for ten to fifteen minutes to show a few movements for before returning in his room. Overall, I probably saw him practice between 250 and 300 times and it is precisely during these moments that I was getting this sensation that we were not doing what he was doing. We were trying our best to reproduce what we saw him doing but with very little success. Besides, it is one thing that we could not reproduce what he showed but he, himself, constantly refused to explain us what we were not getting. If you did not get it, he would simply do the technique again and say "look carefully!" but never would he give any explanation. As surprising as it sounds, this was actually very typical of O Sensei's way of teaching and to a larger extend, it was common to all the great Japanese masters of Budo. These men always took their secrets with them to the grave and O Sensei was no different.

In Occident, we are the children of Cartesians. We cultivate intelligence but our body is sick, it is the victim of blockages and tensions. Hence, we understand a lot of things with our brains, we elaborate intricate and elegant theories, but as soon as it is time to turn words into concrete actions, we find it extremely hard...

Our mental representation of a man attacking or defending is a visual process based on the conception that we have of the human body when it is resting but this static vision is fundamentally flawed. Even though the human body is indeed a composed of a torso fitted with four limbs and a head in the way that has been immortalised in so many statues around the world, this representation does not translate the reality of the dynamic aptitudes of our body. This is however by this motion that we must represent our adversary.