by Régis Soavi
‘“Whether they are one or many does not matter, I put them all in my belly,” said O sensei’. With these words1 Tsuda Itsuo sensei once answered2 one of my many questions about the practice, especially how to defend oneself against several partners.
Magic or simplicity
As a young aikidoka, I tried to drink from all available sources, and my references were Nocquet sensei, Tamura sensei and Noro sensei. But of course I also found them in the one I felt closest to: Tsuda sensei. In the early seventies, we were very fond of anecdotes about the martial arts, the great historical masters, and especially O-sensei Ueshiba Morihei. We would also go to buy the “super 8” films that were available in that temple that was the martial arts shop on the Montagne Sainte-Geneviève (in Paris), fascinated as we were by the prowess of this great master. Although profoundly materialistic, I was not far from believing in something magical, in extraordinary powers granted to some beings more than to others. Tsuda Itsuo brought me back down to earth, because what he was showing us was very simple, but even so, it was still completely incomprehensible. I was already familiar with the techniques he showed us, but he did them with such simplicity and ease that it disturbed me, and only strengthened my desire to continue practising in order to discover the “secrets” that enabled him to do what he did.
His leitmotiv: breathing
When he spoke of breathing he meant the word KI, that was the translation he chose to express this “non-concept” that is so common, and so immediately understandable in Japan, but so difficult to grasp in the West. He explained that, when uniting your breathing with your partner or partners, you can achieve primordial unity. The breath becomes the physical support, the concrete act, that makes it possible to unite with others. It acts physically as a kind of gentle constraint on the partners’ bodies. We all know what I am talking about, it is absolutely no mystery. There are people who are able to make others feel uncomfortable, others who know how to impose themselves, impose their breathing, sometimes leaving the person they are talking to unable to utter a word. In martial arts – and this is particularly evident in the art of swordsmanship –, it is a matter of desynchronising breathing in order to surprise and destabilise the opponent. In many cases, the crucial moment is when the beginning of the opponent’s inhalation coincides with the end of the other’s inhalation, in other words the beginning of the exhalation. It is during this interval between inhalation and exhalation that you strike. This moment, known as “the breathing intermission”, is the ideal time to use your physical strength in a fight and defeat your opponent. In Aikido, however, the same moment is used to enter into the partner’s breath, into this path which is the path of harmony, where the aim is to unify the breaths and reach a common breath.
Practise with one partner as if there were several
In the beginning it is easier to practise with only one partner, but it is important not to become fixated on him or her, to remain available for other interventions. This availability is achieved through inner calm, which begins with knowing the techniques well and not panicking. Even so, it will take a few years to become calm in such circumstances, which is why you should not wait to start working in this direction. I would say that, for me, practising with several partners, more than a performance to be executed, represents a pedagogical orientation. Aikido is a whole, you cannot cut it into slices. It is a global approach to teaching, not a school type of teaching validated by grades and exams. Whenever there is an odd number of people in the group, we can take advantage of this to work in threes, but this will not be enough to acquire the right reflexes and the right attitude to adopt. Whenever the group allows it, i. e. when there are not too many differences in level, you can get everyone to practise in groups of three or even four partners.When both partners seize Tori together, and with both hands, it is Tori’s technique and ability to concentrate the power in the hara through breathing that will be decisive; the suppleness of the arms and shoulders will allow the energy, the ki, to circulate to the fingertips, and to spurt out beyond them, causing the partners to fall to the tatami. However, when working with alternating attacks, the greatest difficulty lies not in the execution of the techniques, but rather in Uke’s role.
Too often Uke does not know how to behave and waits for their turn to attack. My teaching also consists of showing how to position oneself, how to find the angle of attack; in this case I play Uke’s role, exactly as in the old koryū. I show how to turn around Tori, how to feel the flaws in their breathing, in their posture, and how Tori can use one partner against the other, I do this slowly so that Tori does not really feel attacked, but rather disturbed in their habits, in their mobility or in their inability to move in harmony. The forms of the attack must be very clear; the aim is not to demonstrate the other person’s weakness but to allow them to feel what is happening around them without having to look or fidget, but rather to develop their sensory capacity. They must not become attached to the constraints imposed by each seizure but, on the contrary, realise that these constraints can be an opportunity to go beyond the situation, even a godsend.
The value of moving
Movement takes on a very special value when there are several people around us. If you watch the traffic on a motorway at rush hour from the top of a bridge overlooking it, you will be amazed at how vehicles brush pass each other, overtake each other, slow down, speed up and even change lanes in a kind of ballet that is not controlled by any higher authority but, in truth, by each individual driver. You might expect to see a lot of accidents, or at least sheet metal crumpling in the space of a few minutes, yet that is not the case – everything goes smoothly. Of course there are accidents, but very few compared to what we can imagine or see from our observatory.
If you practise with several partners with the same level of concentration, attention and respect for each other as you would when driving a vehicle of any kind, because it is our body – and not an extension of our body’s consciousness, as can be the case with a car – it becomes much easier. I will say it again: it is necessary to have a good technique, not to be afraid of what is happening, but to be calm and confident, while being alert and aware of what is happening around us. The difference with the example I have just given is that the partners are trying to touch us, hit us or stop us, unlike the cars, which are avoiding each other. Just like the car, for example – which through anthropotechnics becomes like an extension of our body, whose dimensions we are aware of to the centimetre, even to the millimetre – it is now a question of seizing the opportunity to feel our sphere, no longer as a dream, an idea, a fantasy, an imagination or an esoteric delirium invented out of the blue by some magician or charlatan, but rather as a concrete reality accessible to everyone, since we are already capable of doing this in the car if we pay enough attention.
Then it is a matter of playing with this sensation, this expansion: as soon as the spheres brush against each other, they expand, retract, move constantly, responding to needs without having to resort to the voluntary system. It is the work of the involuntary, the spontaneous, as if the movements were done by themselves, precisely and with ease. It is then that one enters the practice of Non-Doing, the famous non-action, the Chinese Wu-Wei, it is then that what seemed mythical becomes reality. The aim of training with several partners is to lead us towards Non-Doing. This practice can take place in the middle of a crowd, in a department store on sale day, or on a more everyday basis in the metro for city dwellers. The game is to feel how to move, how to get around, how to manage to pass through the empty spaces between people.
O-sensei was a master also in the art of moving through crowds. His uchi deshi used to complain that they could not keep up with him in the middle of the crowd, when they had to take the metro to accompany him to a demonstration or when they had to take the train with him. Although they were young and vigorous, they had enormous difficulty moving through the crowds at the station, whereas he, who was very old and rather frail at the end of his life, was able to weave his way through the crowd with surprising speed.
Recreating a space around you
The art of blending into the crowd, of going unnoticed, can be a natural disposition, or a deformation – sometimes due to trauma – that leads to suffering: to be the person who is unseen, the one who is unnoticed, who becomes invisible. But it can also be an art, and it seems that O-sensei Ueshiba Morihei has excelled here as well. Sometimes it is necessary to melt away, to blend into a crowd for example, to fade into the background to go unnoticed. In this case, our sphere becomes transparent, but at the same time it remains very present, coherent, stable and powerful. It creates an empty space around the person that is difficult to cross, making it difficult to attack or even approach.
I had the opportunity to experience this during demonstrations with my master Tsuda sensei, but I think this was even more striking after the sessions, when we would have coffee or tea together in the dojo just outside the changing rooms where we could manage to clear a small area. There was a big low table and we would all sit around it, more or less huddled together, except for sensei. There was always a space on either side that seemed impassable, and it was not just respect that prevented us from sitting there. There was a very concrete, very real emptiness, solid as a rock. Tsuda sensei never seemed to pay any attention to it; he drank his coffee, chatted, told stories and then, after some half an hour or more, got up and left. But the emptiness remained: even if we sometimes stayed a little longer, no one occupied the empty seat, something remained there. This is what I call the art of creating an impassable space around oneself, an art that can hardly be practised, rather it is a skill that emerges naturally, that emerges when one becomes independent, autonomous, when one has passed the first stage of apprenticeship, or when the need arises.
The one and the multiple
The problem is not the number of attacks, but our ability to remain calm in all circumstances. Who can claim this, and is it not a myth? If the attacks are conventional or planned in advance, like a kind of ballet, one steps outside the pedagogical role of Aikido. It will be nothing more than the repetition of gestures that can admittedly be refined or made more aesthetic, but without depth. It will be a performance that, however professional, however admirable, will no longer be about Aikido, which, in my opinion, will have lost its value of profoundly changing the human being.
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Article by Régis Soavi published in January 2021 in Self et Dragon Spécial Aikido n° 4.
- ‘Ueshiba. “I do not look others in the eyes; I do not look at their technique, their manner. I put them all in my belly. Since they are in my belly, I do not need to fight with them.’ (The Dialogue of Silence, Chap. XI, 2018, p. 94)
- ‘this is what Master Ueshiba said: “when there are a lot of people it doesn’t matter, I put them all in my belly”.’ (Heart of Pure Sky, ‘La Matinée des autres’, 2025, p. ???) ]