Until then I had believed in the uniformity of the instruction. Whether it came from the Master or an ordinary teacher, I thought there had to be some immutable doctrine, a practice determined for once and for all. The fact that the master-founder disapproved of what I had learned from his direct disciples, created a very serious moral dilemma. It called everything into question.’²Tsuda Itsuo, The Science of the Particular, Chap. XVII, 2015, Yume Editions, p. 139–40 (1^st ed. in French: 1976, Le Courrier du Livre, p. 125–6

Children’s balance

We tend to worry about children’s balance when they start walking, which is often between ten and fifteen months. While I hear parents proudly announce that their child walked very early, sometimes at nine or ten months, I notice that the position of Noguchi Haruchika sensei, founder of Seitai, is very different from what we usually hear.

In the way of Seitai as transmitted by my master Tsuda Itsuo in France in the 1970s and until his death in 1984, parents are advised to wait until their child’s legs are sufficiently ready and strong, and not to be in a hurry to see their beloved toddler walk. While Noguchi sensei, like many paediatricians today, obviously advised against baby walkers, which are supposed to help children walk faster, he also advised against helping children stand up or holding them, for example under the armpits or at arm’s length, when they take their first steps. At most, you can give them a finger to hold with one hand for the first few days, but it is nature that must do the work of balancing. If children stand up on their own and start walking on their own, they will be stronger and more stable, and their natural involuntary balance system will be strengthened. They will move towards independence with greater ease and determination, and will know how to rely on their own strengths. What is more, children are proud to show that they have managed to find their balance on their own without any help.

For Noguchi sensei, the ideal time to start walking is after thirteen months, or during the thirteenth month. He said this based on his observations of thousands of babies he had followed for several generations at Seitai Kyōkai. Noguchi sensei gave many other recommendations to attentive parents who followed his teachings, particularly on how to care for babies and children, which can be found in the works of Tsuda sensei.

It all starts around the age of three months

Good posture, beautiful posture, cannot be achieved through exercise alone, otherwise you risk doing so at the expense of your health. Of course, you can improve poor posture acquired over the years through exercises performed under the guidance of a good teacher, a specialist, or even a therapist. But I think it is more important to start off “on the right foot” than to try to correct, straighten, or repair the damage.

Until the age of three months, babies remain lying down, or they are held in the arms of a parent, their spine well supported by their caring hands. There is one extremely important detail that all parents of newborns can check if they wish, provided they are sensitive and attentive: the position of the baby’s third lumbar vertebra. This position depends exclusively on the involuntary system and, more specifically, on the extrapyramidal motor system, which plays the most important role in standing upright. Until about two and a half to three months of age, this lumbar vertebra is set back, meaning that it follows the curve of the back and does not actually support the spine.

One day, when you pick up the child and hold them with your hand behind their back to support their lower back as usual, you notice that their spine has changed. The third lumbar vertebra has moved into position, and the lumbar curve has, so to speak, reversed. From that moment on, the child is able to stand upright on their own in their parents’ arms, whereas before they were unable to do so, and any attempt to make them hold their back without support could cause serious problems, which sometimes only arise much later. When we understand the role of the third lumbar vertebra in posture in general and in the firmness of the hara in particular, we can understand all the precautions that informed parents take to ensure that this transition goes smoothly.

Without the correct position of the third lumbar vertebra, the third point of the abdomen, which is directly related to it, will not be positive, i. e., it will not be bouncy, and the hara will be weak. We risk being tossed about by other people’s ideas, being influenced by all kinds of theories, and struggling to make decisions. It will be difficult to act quickly and, above all, spontaneously. While the second lumbar vertebra allows us to bend sideways, the first lumbar vertebra is used to bend forward, in harmony with the fifth, which is the lumbo-sacral hinge, the front-to-back axis par excellence. But it is the third lumbar vertebra that proves to be the most important in movement. This is because it is positioned, so to speak, at the centre of the body’s rostro-caudal axis, i. e., its vertical axis, and at the same time, it is primarily responsible for the body’s rotation due to its physiological function. If it stiffens and loses flexibility, it becomes blocked and can no longer perform its role as a pivot.

There can be no correct taisabaki without this pivot, and obviously this is even more true when performing ura movements such as tenkan. If the body leans, if the rotation does not occur around the third lumbar vertebra, the same thing happens as when a spinning top is unbalanced: it loses speed, is unable to straighten up or continue with other movements, and begins to roll around on its own in all directions, with no other goal than to survive, to regain its lost balance, but without ever regaining its true natural stability.

Of course, the entire spine is involved in taisabaki, but this central point, the third lumbar vertebra, is crucial for practising Aikido in a flexible manner without risk to ourselves or our partners. The mobility of the hips depends on that of the third lumbar vertebra. When this mobility is lost, we find ourselves forced to practice more and more with the strength of our arms, and therefore simply “by force.” This makes it almost impossible to really use our partner’s imbalances, their gestures, their attacks, the movements of their sphere, and we then find ourselves practising DOING and no longer NON-DOING.

Unpredictable movements

Apart from what could be called choreography, which we use to learn Aikido techniques and which takes many years, there comes a time when our bodies begin to react differently. From that moment on, when necessary, our movements are unpredictable because they are never planned by our will. They are the right response, the exact response of our body when it is freed from the irrational fears generated by the movement of the person facing us. There is therefore only an adequacy of movement before or after the other person’s movement.

Before they move or act, we receive a large number of signals from the body of the person facing us. Not all of these signals are perceived by the conscious brain, which controls our voluntary system. On the contrary, most of them are perceived by our involuntary system, which is a very good thing. Despite the high opinion we have of ourselves, despite our certainties, a little doubt is enough to make our voluntary falter because of the consequences we foresee. Or we start to think about various solutions, but it is often too late and we lose our ability to react.

It is no better to rely on our reflexes. Our reflex nervous system may lead us into dangerous situations, even if we have received high-quality training, and sometimes precisely because we have received high-quality training. A high-ranking Japanese judoka was stabbed in the chest with his attacker’s knife during a fight. He had applied the ippon-seoi-nage technique, which in itself would have been excellent on a tatami mat, but proved dramatic in this case. He stabbed himself in the chest with the knife because of the quality of the technique he had executed perfectly, and unfortunately did not survive.³[cf. e. g. The Path of Less (op. cit.), chap. XIV, p. 140: ‘I remember a story that a teacher told us in high school, almost fifty years ago. A judoka, 3rd dan, is in a nightclub. A fight breaks out between him and a thug. With a good judo reflex, the judoka gives him a hane goshi, pulling both the thug’s arms towards him. At the same moment, the thug takes out a knife and points it at the judoka. With the very same gesture that would have allowed the judoka to throw his opponent into the air, he receives the knife in the stomach. If he had not had that reflex, his life would have been spared in exchange for a few punches and slaps.’]

Drunken Kung Fu

It was in the mid-1970s that I had the opportunity to see a Kung Fu demonstration by Georges Charles sensei, which impressed me greatly. At the time, we were both young teachers at the Montagne Sainte-Geneviève dojo in Paris, and we exchanged views on the respective virtues of our arts.

We talked about movement, taisabaki, balance, and then, to help me understand what he was trying to explain to me verbally, he showed me various “kata” in his art, which I knew very little about (at that time, there was no YouTube, or even the internet, and experts were very rare). It was a huge surprise and a great joy for me to see him perform first the monkey style, then the drunken man style. To see this play with imbalance, to see him push the limits of stability with ease and sincerity. This discovery reinforced the research I was already doing: finding simplicity, breathing, and a balance devoid of stiffness in movement, as Tsuda sensei showed us.

A personal experience

In 2002, I had just returned from a seminar in Jerusalem. The seminar had been difficult because it was the beginning of the Intifada, and I had insisted on making it open to everyone, despite the palpable tensions that this had caused during the seminar itself. So, back home, I was with my daughters (both still teenagers), we were walking around and had entered a Parisian monument that I did not know very well. Suddenly, I had a slight altercation with an individual about the inappropriateness of his behaviour. After taking a few steps, he rushed at me and threw a magnificent uppercut. I cannot say what happened, I just felt like a gust of wind, in fact, the movement of air caused by the movement of his fist. I had moved, and he had lost his balance because of my movement. I had not used any technique, nor had I even thought of using one. He fell and then quickly left in a rage.

That day, I physically understood what Non-Doing was, about which my master Tsuda sensei had talked to us about so many times. I was very calm, without any animosity, without any need. The necessary movement had happened on its own, without any voluntary control, yet with extreme precision. Would I be able to do the same thing again? I have absolutely no idea. Sometimes, even a small disturbance is enough for something to go wrong. In any case, it is not a question of becoming invincible, but rather of leading a simple and full life. This is the path that was taught to me, the path as understood by Tsuda sensei, which obviously has its own constraints, as he himself explains: