The Aged Samurai

philipriffe
Apr 21
8 min read

As I was getting ready for aikido class, a line popped into my head: “Preparing for battle, the aged samurai binds his wounds.”

I don’t want to be one of those old geezers boring everyone with the details of his maladies, so I’ll just say that the perfect body storm had assaulted me, and I was having problems simultaneously with one hand, one foot, one knee, and one neck.

When I went to see my doctor about my knee, he performed a routine examination, feeling around my jawbone, making me stick out my tongue and say “ahhh,” holding my eyelids wide and blinding me with an instrument casting a brilliant light. He stood bent over in front of me, the diaphragm of his stethoscope lingering on the left side of my chest for so long that I began to suspect that he had fallen asleep.

“We’ll need to do an EKG,” he said. I’m hearing an irregular heartbeat.” He left the room, and the nurse came in and began putting pasties attached to wires all over my torso. Then she turned to the transistor radio-size machine and flipped the switch.

“I know how to fix this,” I thought, and relaxed into the deep breathing I do every morning. Be still, my beating heart.

The doctor came back, holding a chart showing my heart’s rhythms. It revealed an interesting syncopation: the electric pulse of 2 strong beats followed by a tiny, ragged pulse, then a giant spike, attempting to make up for the previous wimpy one. Later, I wished that I had asked him if the irregular pattern was regular—did it go on like this over and over again, or had he just cut out an arrhythmic portion in the middle of a series of more normal beats?

“I’ve been listening to a lot of George Clinton lately. Could that have caused this?” I asked.

He looked at me briefly as if trying to decide whether I was joking, or he should arrange a test for early-stage dementia. He ignored my silly remark and said, “You’re not showing signs of being easily fatigued or having chest pains. I wouldn’t worry about it too much.”

“Of course you wouldn’t worry about it,” I thought. “It’s not your heart.”

I was a bit surprised at how immediately the sight of the chart tracing my heart’s erratic beats brought on something like a panic response.

For the past few years, I’ve felt myself slowly approaching an acceptance of death.

But wait a minute! I didn’t mean now! I can accept death—only later. I still don’t have this aikido stuff down like I want. I still need a few more years—possibly decades--to approach anything like mastery.

Brought up with some rather drastic notions of the afterlife as being an eternity of extreme suffering or unfathomable bliss—the destination determined by some rather arbitrary choices one might make—death was something I obsessed about way more than any young tyke should.

I still think of death often, and ponder the nature of consciousness, which current neuroscience theory calls “the hard problem.” How does the physical world give rise to experience? Why doesn’t the universe go on in the dark, a complicated machine unaware of itself?

The prevailing scientific belief is that once the brain achieves a certain level of complexity, awareness arises. This seems likely. My memory of early childhood is of isolated events arising out of nothingness. Physical changes in our brain change our consciousness. Brain damage can restrict awareness.

And yet, and yet… At a few random times in my life, I have had experiences that have convinced me that things are not at all what they seem—the primary one being a “vision” I had when I was 18 where I saw with great clarity a future event that came to be exactly how I had foreseen it. For me, this throws into question everything we think we know about the nature of time and space. The only conclusion I have come to is that we don’t know squat about reality.

Having thrown away most of the metaphysical beliefs I was brought up with, I have arrived at the faith (since I have no proof) that consciousness is primary. But what does that even mean? Do our cells—or even the atoms—have some small bit of awareness? Is my heart disappointed with its ragged performance?

But beyond all this highfalutin speculation about the nature of consciousness is my coming to terms with what will almost certainly be a slow diminishing of abilities as I age. Aikido is one of my principle passions. It’s a martial art that requires physical dexterity. The reality is that I am already less physically adept than I was in my 20s, and my physical abilities are bound to deteriorate as I age. So how do I proceed?

I travelled to Tucson a couple of weekends ago so I could go to Aikido at the Center Dojo to attend a seminar led by Mary Heiny Sensei. Mary Heiny first encountered O-Sensei (Morihei Ueshiba, the founder of aikido) in Tokyo in 1965. She stayed in Japan for six years, training under him and his direct students, primarily Michio Hikitsuchi Sensei. In 1973, she began to teach at the University of California in Santa Cruz and has been teaching aikido ever since.

She is now 80. As I anticipated meeting and training with her, I wondered what answer her teaching and her abilities would give to this question that has been so persistently arising for me: How do I deal with the decline in physical capabilities as I pursue this art that I love so?

I didn’t have to wait long for an answer to the question I hadn’t even voiced aloud.

Heiny Sensei arrived after most of us had gotten dressed and were on the mat stretching and warming up. She walked slowly and a little stiffly into the dressing room. Emerging dressed in gi and hakama, she went to sit in a chair near the front of the room while the rest of us lined up in seiza (the Japanese kneeling way of sitting) to wait for class to begin.

Judith Robinson Sensei, the chief instructor of the dojo, performed some kind of ceremony. Standing before the shomen, she turned in four directions, sprinkling a substance onto the floor. I was unfamiliar with this ritual but was surprisingly deeply moved by it. I felt that something important was about to be transmitted to me.

Heiny Sensei stood up, walked out before the class and bowed to the shomen and then to the students. Standing before us, she began by saying that her liver was barely functioning and that she would soon need a liver transplant. She went on to describe how she once practiced, doing high falls and flying through the air to roll across the mat.

“As you age, you lose athletic ability. Maybe you can no longer take break falls. You might lose the ability to take ukemi or lose the ability to even sit seiza. But if you do not train, you are left with nothing.”

I felt that she was speaking directly to me.

She went on, “What do we learn from this training? To have an open heart, to be concerned with the welfare of others, and to be filled with gratitude.”

I gazed at this woman. She seemed to have no ego yet possessed a commanding presence, filled with compassion. She was the embodiment of the person I would like to become as I age. I want to train in order to be left with what she has.

Heiny Sensei’s aikido is very subtle. Over the weekend she encouraged us to move slowly, feeling as nage (the person throwing) how our movements were affecting uke (the person attacking and being thrown), and as uke how we were being affected. As we practiced in pairs, she walked around the mat, observing and offering corrections. Whenever she came near, I asked her to throw me so I could feel what she was doing. What I felt was that as soon as I touched her, she had me. By a subtle unbalancing I was at an immediate disadvantage, and she tossed me effortlessly.

Technically, she emphasized three things:

Connecting to uke's center on contact.

The weighting of the back foot at the beginning of most techniques, drawing energy up from the earth, bringing uke’s center into nage.

While turning one’s center, feeling a focus on the hip moving backwards rather than focusing on the hip moving forward.

Over the course of the seminar, I found myself falling prey to the speculation that often arises around aikido. “Does this stuff really work in a martial situation?”

I know that this is the wrong question. What aikido has given me is an increased awareness that has allowed me to notice trouble before I walked into it and to go the other way.

I have faced potentially violent situations where my confidence and relaxation have diffused an attack before it happened.

And on one occasion when I was shoved from behind, I moved spontaneously to spin around and take my attacker partially down in ikkyo, surprising us both. When he pleaded to be let up, I said, “OK, just don’t shove me.”

But will aikido give you Steven Seagal-type skills to single handedly defeat a squad of armed attackers? That’s just Hollywood.

Still, I found myself wondering if Heiny Sensei, quite adept at aikido yet fairly feeble, was attacked by a huge brute, what would happen?

Once again, my question was answered without my having to voice it.

Earlier in the day, I had practiced with a student from Phoenix. He was a fireplug of a guy, all muscle, with a low center of gravity. Having practiced several martial arts, he gave no quarter. As he had grabbed my wrist with an iron grip, I had felt his center drop into the mantle of the Earth. As I led him into a kosa tori ikkyo irimi, I could tell that he wasn’t going to just fall for me. In fact, he tried to counter my moves at every opportunity. He clearly valued the martial effectiveness of the art.

Fifteen minutes before the end of class, Heiny Sensei said, “Now I’ll take questions. Ask me anything you like.”

The student from Phoenix raised his hand. “Sensei,” he said, “I practiced with you once before, and you taught sitting in a chair.”

“Oh, yes,” she said, “I was doing a tour of seminars across the country. I was co-teaching a class with Ikeda Sensei and I tore my calf muscle. I couldn’t stand up. But I had all these seminars scheduled, so I decided to teach sitting in a chair.”

“Well,” the student said. “I wanted to see if what you were teaching really worked, so I came at you full force. I tried to hit you as hard as I could, and you sent me flying. It was amazing.”

I raised my hand. Heiny Sensei looked at me and nodded, and I asked, “What do you consider to be the most important thing in our training?”

She smiled. “To give up the desire to throw someone. I remember when it happened for me. I was sitting in a class in Japan, and suddenly I stopped wanting to throw uke and replaced that desire with an intense curiosity about how this aikido works.

”Aikido is very hard. It requires constant self-scrutiny. The desire to throw will arise again and again. We have to observe ourselves with complete honesty. Are we using strength? Are we going against our opponent with force? Or are we blending with the energy of the universe?

“Through meditation, we learn that we are all connected and that all beings suffer. We can open our hearts and care for others.

“So, what is the most important thing in our training? Complete relaxation and relentless self-introspection.”

I left the seminar feeling that the universe had provided me with a direct answer to my question. I really do not fear death. I fear losing the ability to do the things I love as I grow older. Despite the trouble it would cause my fellow dojo mates, I hope to die on the mat.

I know that my body’s capabilities will diminish, whether or not I do aikido. And now I have Heiny Sensei’s answer: “But if you do not train, you are left with nothing.”