The popular Facebook group “Aikido” shares well-written content about the traditional martial art, and the technical notebook.
The center is not only a center of balance, or the focus point of breathing. It is a fail-safe compass within, the birthplace of the aikido techniques and of one’s own expression of aikido. You need to be true to your center. Then the rest of the progress in your do, the path of your self-realization, is ascertained. Without it, you are unable to go beyond the mere techniques of it all.
It is from the center that the aikido techniques emerge, as if born out of it. And the essence of the techniques is the relation between the center of tori, the defender, and uke, the attacker. Aikido is not primarily done with the partner’s arms or wrists, but with the partner’s center, and the energy emanating from it. To regard aikido in this way is to open for unlimited development of it.
That’s why nothing is more important in aikido, than working with one’s center and that of the partner.
