Zero Degree Aikido

ARTICULATION OF THE LEG
David Orange, Jr.

“Make your fighting stance your everyday stance and your everyday stance your fighting stance.”
Miyamoto Musashi
A Book of Five Rings

PART ONE Basic Elements

Mochizuki sensei was a seitai-in, bone setter, soft tissue healer, and practitioner of Chinese and Japanese healing arts. His son, Tetsuma, was doing most of that work when I was in Shizuoka, but I was aware that Sensei did sometimes treat people, including many of his students. But his more subtle and widest-reaching work was in his teaching of natural alignment of the legs and feet in judo, aikido, karate, and sword. Uses of the leg in martial arts are famous and diverse but the best and most subtle arts remain very close to natural movements of walking and doing ordinary work. Some martial arts and artists use the legs naturally and rationally, leading to effective self defense techniques and lifelong health, while others put the bones, joints, tendons, and muscles of the leg, pelvis, spine, and neck under unnatural stresses to produce unique and unusual self defense techniques that look impressive but eventually damage or destroy their own skeleton, joints, and nervous system. But even skilled martial artists training in rational technique may lack the insights necessary to unlock the natural uses of the leg, itself, avoid injury, and benefit by full articulation of the legs in human walking.
Through experience in Mochizuki sensei’s yoseikan and my studies in Feldenkrais Method and Chinese martial arts, I’ve come to regard the “leg” as everything from the toes and sole of the foot to the armpit on the same side of the body, so that the “leg” is like a crutch from ground to armpit, and supports walking in basically the same way except that the support of the leg is internal and the multiple joints afford more utility and subtle function than the crutch. Articulation of the leg involves natural movement of all joints of the toes, metatarsals, ankle, knee, hip, spine, and ribs, up to the armpit, and it affects the torso, chest, shoulder, neck, and the muscles of the skull. So movement of the leg involves breathing and complementary movement of the ribs, spine, and head. Locking or “freezing” parts of this chain is chronically injurious. This can happen when people repeat complex movement patterns imperfectly and with unnecessary muscular tension and establish small unconscious “locks” among the links of the chains of movement. The movement is visibly imperfect, but the specific imperfection is harder to see or understand, and very difficult to communicate to the learner.
Deep study of articulation of the leg can do much to help overcome and prevent injuries through the whole body. In martial arts, this awareness can help us develop safer and actually more efficient applications of techniques for self defense, sport, or misogi purposes. Any catch point in the chain of articulation from toes to top of the head is a point for pain to accrue, dis- ease to form, techniques to fail, and injuries to occur. Another important factor is that all unnecessary tensions shorten the body and consume energy. Feldenkrais referred to this as parasitic tension. It contributes nothing to the main effort and actually reduces its effectiveness. Releasing such wasted effort frees one to move in ways that conserve energy at every moment rather than wasting it. This can mean a serious edge in self defense.
Articulation of the leg begins with natural upright standing, stimulated by the effortless “standing reflex” infants exhibit when their feet touch something they sense as solid. This includes the natural “reaching” actions of the infant leg in seeking something to push against, and the complementary reaching of the spine and simultaneous unfolding of the spine away from the legs so that the whole body extends to full length when the nerves of the feet are appropriately stimulated. Standing is cultivated as dynamic instability. A naturally standing person, responding to the standing reflex, is constantly reorganizing from the ground up in response to changing pressures on the nerves of the feet due to gravity (body weight) and the shifting of that weight in general restlessness or small adjustment to changing conditions. The nervous system constantly makes minute unconscious adjustments of all parts of the body to remain relaxedly upright in the vertical column of gravity. As long as we remain plumb to gravity, standing is effortless. But when we lean or shift in any small way out of plumb with gravity, we must use structure and some muscle to remain upright. When such misalignment is unconsciously adopted, chronic subconscious tensions in the back, shoulders, and neck can result. So we want to find plumb with our feet, and when we do, the nervous system responds with effortlessly correct reflex standing and release of parasitic tensions, and we stand very comfortably upright with a feeling of lift inside the body. Feldenkrais called this natural standing organization the “neutral stance.” I call it rei no kamae (zero stance) because zero is the absolute beginning, and few martial artists realize that they began from a state already far from stillness, far from rest, far from nature, and they’ve worked intensively to retune themselves from an unknown place of beginning. So any error in the material they practice will be magnified by the degree of their offset from natural organization. I bring people’s awareness to natural organization on incredibly small levels. Truth can only be built on truth and we must find truth in our relationship to gravity before we can even establish meaningful identity. The neutral state occurs naturally when people “forget themselves” while witnessing something captivating, standing upright with their head properly balanced as they pay rapt attention to something outside themselves. From this easy, natural position, a person can move freely and instantly in any direction and deliver kinetic energy by dropping their weight in a specific direction. With fluent articulation of the leg, this dropping of weight can be precisely directed to destroy the attacker’s stance, balance, and technique.
We can explore the articulation of our legs in standing and walking to recognize and release parasitic tension and conserve physical and psychological energy. One area where this is quickly beneficial is when people have learned to “pick up their feet” with the upper leg muscles when walking. But we move better by letting our knee “drop” before we step and converting that drop to a forward swing.
When we stand naturally upright, our legs support us solidly. We can compare this organization to stacks of bricks. Aligned with gravity, the stack will be self-supporting. If we lean the column, it will remain stacked until a certain point of lean when it will suddenly fall apart. Thinking of the leg in this way, when we move our hip ahead of the foot below it, with compression from bodyweight above and ground below, the leg remains straight until a point where the column has to “break.” Unless we hold the leg stiffly, the knee will “drop out the bottom” and fall toward the ground, translating potential energy to kinetic energy, increasing with gravitational acceleration. But the upper leg hangs from the pivot of the hip and this pivot translates the knee’s falling motion into a forward and upward swing, with enough momentum to bring the lower leg along. The potential energy released when gravity breaks the leg is kinetically sufficient to swing the entire leg, needing no more effort than necessary to stabilize it through the movement and place it precisely at the end. The structure of the leg is intended to “reach” and “feel” for a landing place. It’s not tight, but extendable and compressible, able to respond immediately and sensitively to the transfer of weight as the heel touches the ground. This extremely complex set of actions takes place fluidly and mostly unconsciously, even at high speed and energy levels. And if the leg encounters some obstacle in the swing, we should be able to adjust the step or reverse it without difficulty. But with excessive parasitic tension in the body, once committed to stepping, the walker cannot withdraw or change where his foot lands. Compare the articulate action to someone who picks his foot up with upper leg effort, holds it off the ground to move it forward, then sets it down flat. That’s much more work and very few people do it, but truly articulate walking is probably equally rare.
In a natural step, the foot should “peel” smoothly off the ground, but most people are in too much of a rush to allow it to happen. In a proper step, the knee “breaks” when the heel comes off the ground, and the foot rolls onto the ball with the heel aligned directly above it. The moving knee is directly beside the supporting knee at that point. But we can break that down much further. Just before the heel leaves the ground, an impulse goes from the grounded heel, up the leg, through the hip, up the spine and into the neck to the top of the head, to lift the head and allow it to balance and align properly atop the neck. If we pay careful attention in stepping, we can feel this surge of impulse from the heel to the top of the head. That lift continues as the knee breaks and the foot peels away from the floor until the ball of the foot pushes us not forward, but upward. The momentum of the swinging leg carries it forward. When the heel rises, the foot acts as a cam to push the leg up, and the leg pushes the hip up. That push continues up the spine and through the neck to lift and balance the head. The initial push brings the hip to the height needed for the swing of the leg to clear the ground and shifts all weight to the opposite leg as the full support of the body through the step. The support leg is straight when the heel of the stepping leg is vertical above the ball of the stepping foot. The stepping leg can swing freely without dragging the ground because all the weight is supported by the other leg with the hips level at the height needed for ground clearance of the foot. You don’t have to “arrange” all this but simply allow it to work.
As the leg swings freely, it gets a moment of rest within the motion and experiences reversal of gravity from compression to pull, and much of what makes a good step is that the leg can lengthen while swinging and the joints expand and close as weight reverses in the stepping leg and reverses again as the foot lands. No “lifting” of the leg or “picking up” of the feet is necessary in a good step.The only muscular effort should be for aligning the skeleton, not picking up the foot. The swinging leg gains energy by surrendering resistance to gravity and the articulation of each joint in the process contributes to full synergetic unity of the swinging leg, rather like a wave action, so we can confidently say that the best organized walking is virtually effortless, like free gas for a car.
The effortless step depends on the nervous impulse from the push of the ball of the rear foot going all the way to the top of the head before that foot leaves the ground. This is actually a very pleasant sensation and it’s rather surprising if you haven’t noticed it for a while. The push goes up to the head as the weight shifts sides and the pushing leg swings freely through the step. Then the push of the other foot goes all the way to the head before that foot steps and swings freely. If you don’t feel this when you walk, it’s probably just that you’ve never slowed down to experience the actual natural movements of walking, which indicates parasitic tension throughout the body and probable “mystery” or chronic pains.
A little Feldenkrais exploration will probably reveal that you have far more parasitic tension in your body than you imagine. Do you have sciatica? Re-read the above, how the expansion of the joints in the swinging leg allows decompression of the hip joint in its socket and relaxes the surrounding musculature which is tight from misuse... and after a few such steps you may find that the sciatica has disappeared. I showed this to a martial arts friend one day as we walked a few blocks through the University. His sciatica was gone by the time we reached the Admin Building. Paying attention to how much energy you really use in the simple act of taking a step, and how that usage affects the chain of articulation from foot to head will undoubtedly reveal that you’re not as smooth or effortless in walking as you might think. Even highly trained athletes, dancers, and martial artists can find quick improvement and new tools to approach their own pains simply by slowing down for a moment and paying attention to their own small movements.

Ending this year with a new book nearing release: The Heart of Aikido, examining the inner workings of pure aikido by looking back fifty years to methods of the old yoseikan aikido. My illustrations, though far from perfect, may be enjoyable to some and even informative about aikido and the mysteries of internal power.

A clip for my acting reel showing some improvised movement from aikido, karate, kenjutsu, baguazhang, tai chi and other sources.

Fighting Corona I set up my camera to film a little action demo for my actor's reel, but when I looked at it on a larger screen, it seemed there was something strange about ...

Part Two of my interview for Xavier Duval, a martial arts teacher in Hong Kong. This part explains in some detail about the Zero Degree approach to training.

An insider view into the Yoseikan dojo with David Orange - Part 2 Former uchi deshi of Minoru Mochizuki, David Orange Jr. has not only trained under the direction of one of the most famous masters o...

Xavier Duval recently asked me about my theory that aikido technique comes from "baby" movement. What I actually say is that everything needed for judo and aikido is present in a child when he or she learns to stand and walk.

This little clip is a fascinating example of what the human nervous system knows before it can be taught. The little girl performs it perfectly and without undue emotion or disturbance. She does no more after the boy releases her.

This is typical of toddler movement, instinctive, reflexive action that no one has taught the child because the child is too young to be taught from the outside. Up until now, their nervous systems have taught them unthinkable volumes in the delicate arts of orienting a stack of bones in gravity and being able to control their point of view and choose what they want to look at and go to it. These kids are entering the outward teaching age but instinct remains strong with them.

The girl shows some of the major principles of aiki in her single move. It is innocent as the boy's hug and not a sin or a character flaw. It's like kittens fighting for reasons neither knows. The boy, too, displays proper falling without having been taught. This is, in fact, a basic technique in aikido and aikijujutsu and it looks pretty much like this when adult black belts do it. Babies already know it.

media.giphy.com

Zero Degree Aikido updated their phone number.

Look at this child’s instinctive response to a chilling threat.
This is the kind of thing I mean when I say that aikido comes from baby movement and that the techniques are close to human nature. The greatest hindrance to learning is that we are taught the techniques as exterior “things” that we have to internalize, rather than as things that can emerge from our natural responses.
Imagine the ghoul closer to her, reaching to grab her with both hands. She responds with nagashi tai sabaki, flowing to the rear with her left foot. If the attacker continues forward, her step through with the right foot and swing of the right arm could produce tembin nage, scale throw, if she grabbed the attacker’s left wrist as she turned.

media.giphy.com

Here's a post that may not be very surprising for serious martial artists. I wrote it for a general audience on my life coaching blog, Daydreamer's Holiday. But I thought it would be interesting for Zero Degree Aikido. Please share if you like. Best to all and Happy New Year.

http://esotericorange.com/daydreamers-holiday-relax-your-shoulders-100000-times/

Minoru Mochizuki, Gyokushin Ryu and Terumi Washizu
By David Orange

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eRB_wLrqnRs

In the past few years, Terumi Washizu sensei, one of the top students of Minoru Mochizuki sensei , aikido 10th dan, has begun teaching under the banner of gyokushin ryu aikido, hosting gasshuku in Shizuoka, in Mochizuki sensei's old dojo, teaching gasshuku in various foreign countries and promoting people in the art of gyokushin ryu aikido.
Recently, Patrick Auge sensei, uchi deshi of Minoru Mochizuki kancho, has criticized Terumi Washizu sensei for teaching gyokushin ryu. Auge sensei characterizes gyokushin ryu as a style Mochizuki sensei studied briefly in his youth, and challenges Washizu sensei's right to promote people in gyokushin ryu. In fact, Mochizuki sensei valued the gyokushin ryu highly and it affected his entire life following World War Two. He spent decades "reconstructing" the gyokushin ryu and both Washizu sensei and Auge sensei received permission to teach gyokushin ryu when Sensei gave them menkyo kaiden along with eighteen other longtime students. I was present the day these certificates were awarded and in the weeks before that award I had a chance to see the twenty certificates and examine them briefly. Each certificate listed the names of all the people receiving them, including Kyoichi Murai, Terumi Washizu, Akira Tezuka, Hiroaki Kenmotsu and others. Patrick Auge was the only non-Japanese to receive this certificate, but Hiroo Mochizuki sensei later said that Alain Floquet should also have received it at the same time and that his omission from the list was an unfortunate oversight. Auge sensei spent a great deal of time criticizing Alain Floquet sensei over the years I trained with him. But at the yoseikan hombu, I learned that Mochizuki sensei respected Floquet sensei very much.
The certificates Minoru Mochizuki sensei awarded to the twenty people included both Japanese and English language text, granting each person the authority to teach yoseikan aikido, yoseikan judo, yoseikan karate, yoseikan sword (I believe it was listed as "yoseikan katori shinto ryu") and yoseikan gyokushin ryu or yoseikan gyokushin ryu jujutsu. To dismiss the gyokushin as something Mochizuki sensei studied briefly in his youth badly misrepresents the role gyokushin ryu played in Mochizuki sensei's life and in the form that yoseikan aikido assumed over the decades after Mochizuki sensei taught in France. It's misleading to omit this information and for the sake of future generations and the edification of the current world of yoseikan and gyokushin students, I will explain in detail what Mochizuki sensei told me about this art, what I observed over fourteen years training with Auge sensei and five years at the yoseikan hombu with Mochizuki sensei. And I'll explain what I know of the inestimable Terumi Washizu sensei.
It is true that Mochizuki sensei studied gyokushin ryu only for about six months when he was seventeen years or eighteen years old, training at the judo dojo of Toku Sampo sensei. The main facts are well established in interviews Sensei granted Stanley Pranin, which were published in Aiki News magazine in the 1980s. But to restate the general outline of the story, Mochizuki sensei encountered Sanjuro Ohshima, the last master of gyokushin ryu, and was invited to train. He went to Ohshima sensei's home with some judo peers and began training. Most of his judo friends quickly dropped out and never returned because they were young and vigorous, interested in winning judo competitions, and the gyokushin training was all kata and very boring. Nonetheless, Mochizuki sensei continued training and was treated very kindly by Ohshima sensei, a Shinto priest, who gave the young judo man the cakes and sweets he had offered on the kamiza. He literally gave Minoru Mochizuki the food presented to the kami of gyokushin ryu. He told Sensei, “The name of our tradition is the Gyokushin Ryu. The name is written with characters meaning ‘spherical spirit.’ A ball will roll freely. No matter which side it is pushed from it will roll away. Just this sort of spirit is the true spirit that Gyokushin Ryu seeks to instill in its members. If you have done this, nothing in this world can upset you.”
" At that time I was still a child," Mochizuki sensei remembered, "and so I didn’t understand what he meant very well. I simply imagined a heart or spirit rolling here and there. It wasn’t until I had passed 50 years of age that I came to understand what 'Gyokushin spherical spirit' really meant. If you don’t spend 50 years at it, you won’t be able to get it. I had forgotten about it for many years."
Mochizuki sensei phrased such memories a little more vividly in person. The interview mentions that he had a nice dinner, but in person, he reminisced humorously about how he would eat ravenously and "run away" or "escape" after eating. So gyokushin ryu wasn't just a legal thing for him. His experiences with Ohshima sensei were deeply personal, connected in his psyche at the edge of adulthood.
It seems that Washizu sensei has put in his fifty years thinking about gyokushin ryu. Auge sensei seems not to have put much thought to it. One might wonder why he is so bitter about Washizu sensei's taking up the spirit of the ryu, which Mochizuki sensei certainly carried. Washizu sensei surely rates as one of the greatest masters ever to emerge from Mochizuki sensei's tutelage and he clearly understands "the true spirit that Gyokushin Ryu seeks to instill in its members."
Mochizuki sensei received one mokuroku in gyokushin ryu and described it as equivalent to first or second dan. At that time, Ohshima sensei told him, "Beyond this point, the system contains many sutemi waza." But Sensei told me he left the training at that time and never saw any of those sutemi waza. Some people now say that the sutemi waza of yoseikan aikido came from gyokushin ryu, but it's not true. Sensei never saw those techniques. The sutemi waza of Minoru Mochizuki sensei's aikido "are" gyokushin ryu as Sensei "recreated" them following a realization in France, where he taught after World War Two.
Mochizuki sensei went to France in 1951. He was first to introduce aikido outside Japan as well as instructing for the kodokan, shotokan and katori shinto ryu. He encountered European fighters of all kinds but was most impressed by the wrestlers and their suplex (sutemi) techniques. He said it was watching those wrestlers that he realized that sutemi waza were the epitome of Jigoro Kano sensei's judo maxim, seiryoku zenyo—maximum efficient use of effort. In sutemi waza, we leverage the power of gravity and can throw with very little exertion because gravity is constant and it efficiently does most of the work of the throw. Considering Jigoro Kano sensei's classic example, "he pushes me with 5 units of strength and I add 3 units of my strength to his strength…." we could say that sutemi allows us to add a hundred units of power with virtually zero units of strength. Recognizing the central meaning of sutemi waza, Mochizuki sensei began thinking of Sanjuro Ohshima and the gyokushin ryu. He learned that Ohshima sensei had long since passed away, leaving no one to continue the ryu.
Mochizuki sensei sat me down in his kitchen one day and opened one of the twenty or so volumes of a comprehensive encyclopedia of every classical bujutsu ryu of Japan. He looked up gyokushin ryu and pointed out to me generations of headmasters, the last being Ohshima sensei. No one had replaced him and the gyokushin ryu was considered extinct. Mochizuki sensei emphasized to me that he felt a great sense of shame at his own personal failure to recognize that he had been offered a great treasure, to inherit a Japanese jujutsu koryu, and had lightly declined.
Teaching in France in the early 1950s, he determined that he would research sutemi waza in light of the gyokushin kihon waza he had learned (knowledge of which had helped him understand Morihei Ueshiba's techniques) and "reconstitute" the gyokushin ryu and revive it. One of his last official acts before retiring as he neared age ninety, was to award his menkyo certificates including gyokushin ryu in the yoseikan material.
Since returning to Japan from France, Sensei had delved into the history of sutemi waza in judo and its jujutsu roots. He had trained extensively as uchi deshi to Kyuzo Mifune, a real master of sutemi waza, and he reviewed all that he knew about gyokushin ryu to try to understand what gyokushin sutemi waza would have been like. His yoseikan dojo became a reactor for development of sutemi waza within his aikido. He experimented with sutemi versions of all kinds of jujutsu techniques, including all the major aikido techniques, such as kote gaeshi and kaiten nage. He began testing his ideas with the senior members of his dojo, including Akahori sensei and Shoji Sugiyama sensei, who taught for decades in Italy. Eventually, this research included Terumi Washizu, Akira Tezuka, Hiroaki Kenmotsu and Patrick Auge. The "hombu program" Patrick Auge mentioned in his 2016 New Year letter published by Stanley Pranin could be said to have been Mochizuki sensei's form of gyokushin ryu. Everyone who trained at the black belt level at the Shizuoka hombu was part of Mochizuki sensei's research into sutemi waza for the main purpose of recreating the gyokushin ryu. Of course, none of those techniques are known to have existed in gyokushin ryu because Mochizuki sensei never saw those techniques and he had no way to know what they actually were. But he knew what the kihon waza were and he extrapolated from those with his broad knowledge of jujutsu and sutemi waza. While I was training with him, forty years after his training in France, he created his sutemi waza no kata, using Washizu, Tezuka, Kenmotsu, Akahori, the Shizuoka Sugiyama brothers and everyone who came to the dojo, including me, to test and refine that kata. I was amazed and honored to observe the process of creating a kata and to participate while Mochizuki sensei trained people in it. That kata is born of gyokushin ryu.
Mochizuki sensei awarded menkyo kaiden to twenty people around 1993 or 1994, and each one of those certificates specified that gyokushin ryu was part of what each man was inheriting. Auge sensei knows all this very well but he disregards it like annoying trivia on which Mochizuki sensei wasted a lot of time. He believes the "hombu program" was yoseikan budo, which he has controlled legally in the United States. But Hiroo Mochizuki sensei was teaching yoseikan budo when he sent Patrick Auge to get some special instruction from Minoru Mochizuki sensei, his father. Auge was supposed to return to training with Hiroo sensei, but Minoru Mochizuki sensei sent him to the United States and he decided to stay there and control the yoseikan budo name. To criticize Washizu Terumi sensei for anything at all is unfortunate.
Terumi Washizu sensei is a humble and generous person. He was a faithful student of Mochizuki sensei, working on the railroad as his occupation and training week after week and month after month with people who came from around the world to study Minoru Mochizuki sensei's art.
From the time Patrick Auge sensei came to North America, he trained many, many people. There was a vibrant yoseikan group in Alabama when he arrived and it grew under his leadership. It was associated with a vibrant group he built in Canada and our large gatherings were energetic and friendly. They were excellent training camps. Some people learned faster than others. Skilled judoka were able to absorb all Patrick's lessons quickly and they were very strong. I guess Patrick found them to be a threat and he got rid of them all. Others found his constant pressure obsessive and left without looking back. After a few years, Patrick stopped teaching so much and restricted the flow of information. He did polish the kihon waza but people advanced incredibly slowly through the kyu ranks. He wouldn't associate with the American judo world, presumably so that they wouldn't go to the yoseikan hombu and he could remain the world's authority on Mochizuki sensei. Judo was a major vehicle for the spread of aikido in Europe. Aikikai and Tomiki aikido grew very popular and active in the US in the same way. But yoseikan aikido remained a closely held secret under the legal control of Patrick Auge. It has grown very, very slowly. From what I can gather, the US Yoseikan Budo Association has produced fewer than fifty black belts in over thirty five years since we incorporated it. It may well be fewer than thirty listed but I'm not named on those lists so it's hard to say how many were actually promoted.
Washizu sensei has accepted North American martial artists whom Patrick "excommunicated" from yoseikan. Washizu sensei got to know many of these people on their visits to the yoseikan hombu and he took them as his students. Patrick speaks in reasonable phrases in his statements but those who know him will understand that he is furious that Washizu sensei has provided a bridge to the spherical heart of the yoseikan. That is why he has said all these dishonorable things about Washizu sensei, why he has minimized the importance of gyokushin ryu and the forty-five years Mochizuki sensei developed his sutemi waza techniques after the war. This is why he has cast aspersions on everything Washizu shihan has done since declining to follow the seifukai.
Patrick seems to believe he has the power to sever one's bridge to Mochizuki sensei as a Catholic priest can excommunicate one from the church. He cast out many people and now he has cast out Washizu sensei. Were Mochizuki sensei here today, Patrick might even cast Sensei out in Sensei's own name, but I'm sure Mochizuki sensei would find Washizu sensei much better company, and a much better person to accomplish Sensei's goal of spreading his aikido and the ancient tradition of the gyokushin ryu throughout the world. As Sensei always said, "Truth can only be built on Truth." The truth is, gyokushin ryu lived in Minoru Mochizuki sensei and Terumi Washizu sensei is just the wise leader to carry it to future generations. I applaud Washizu sensei's brilliant efforts and I know his kind and precise teaching will keep the gyokushin ryu and Minoru Mochizuki sensei's true spirit alive for generations to come.