Shuhari: Stages of Learning

In the Dojo Volume 2 Issue 11

By Avi Kaplan, shodan

We are taught in aikido to be present, to be aware of space and our surroundings without allowing them to distract us. But, being imperfect, sometimes our minds wander. Occasionally, over almost 10 years of practicing aikido in a dojo open to a bustling Brooklyn street, my mind has wandered out the window. I have found myself wondering what a passerby thinks of what they see in the dojo. What do aiki taiso exercises look like to the uninitiated? What about practicing ukemi or kokyu dosa?

It seems incomprehensible, because to us it is second-nature. Aikido’s many traditions and conventions seem normal to us now, whereas before we began training they might have seemed ludicrous or laughable or both. What causes us to cross that gulf?

Learning. Shuhari. Aikido, more than learning to sing or play an instrument or a sport, teaches us how to learn. It teaches us to take small steps until we can take larger ones, to move slowly because “speed will come.” Aikido teaches us to fail and not to quit, not through adages, truisms, or nursery rhymes, but through experience. It is the sign of a good dojo, I think, that one can make stupid mistakes unabashedly, and be encouraged instead of discouraged. One could do either with the business end of a shinai, but it is clear to any student when it is the former as opposed to the latter. For having a sensei and fellow students who wholeheartedly grasp that, I am thankful.

Through aikido, I have started to see shuhari everywhere. In practicing anything, from music to science and everything in between, I find that process, by which memory matures into skill and then transforms into intuition. As we practice good alignment, or timing, or improvisation, we pass through that process. Studying for free technique demonstrations has been especially instructive in this principle; you could simply memorize by rote a sequence of techniques and work through them one by one, but make a mistake or lose your place, and you stumble. There is no shortcut around learning.

So, in the dojo this is what I see. Students of different levels and different strengths and insecurities showing one another how to learn, even if what is being learned at that very moment is not apparently “useful in the street.” Doing aikido teaches one that its value is intrinsic, not extrinsic. But what does the passerby see through the window? A better question might be “does it matter what they see?” What does an average person see when a basketball player out thinks another player, or when a guitarist makes split-second choices about scale and harmony? Nothing. There is nothing to see, because the real process, the real basketball or the real music, is inside their head. Their expression of it is a matter of practice and coordination, much like it is in aikido. But asking what an observer sees diminishes the depth of what the practitioner sees: their own strengths and weaknesses, ripe for evolution.