Balance
Balance weighs in as a vitally important element in all things we do. As bipedal humans, we stand because of our inherent structure, our biochemical communication systems, and acquired skill. To maintain balance takes constant adjustment, most of which is not readily perceived in mind. In other words, it becomes instinct. Balance can also refer to our capacity to juggle our emotional, physical, and spiritual needs, the maintenance of which I find much trickier than standing upright.
Training in a body art like the martial arts, yoga, dancing or Pilates allows the participant to hone an awareness of one’s own body and improve one’s balance through development and strength of the center core of the body. Balance is often rediscovered in contrast to us really understanding how our bodies do what they do to hold us upright. Meaning, it is more often through recovering from injury that we concentrate on the learning of what our bodies do to maintain balance. Normal development of learning to balance is generally noted in our toddler years. Watching teenagers grow accustomed to their ever changing body size and chemical influx is fascinating, as well. While actively learning how to balance during periods of growth, it wasn’t a logical, cognitive experience like what occurs when you recover from, say, an ankle injury or when you train in a focused body movement art. Intricate and instinctual movements require years of dedicated effort and practice, i.e. the dancer whose movement looks otherworldly and effortless. Building your instincts through regular training supports interoception or the understanding of what it feels like inside your body when you move.
Recovering balance after a serious bout of inactivity is an entirely different beast, as the body needs to receive load information in it’s new format. In other words, post rehabilitation balance work from injury or surgical alteration requires guided cognitive build up as the body recovers. This is how you become acquainted with physical therapy and the recommendations for exercise protocols that specifically retrain you to your new balance (think knee or hip replacement). There is a valuable opportunity to engage your body’s healing capacity with good interoception while you are actively undergoing physical retraining. I have used this information to recover from many an injury to great recovery success. In Aikido, we constantly push our limits of balance. We train our bodies, our minds, and our spirits to bend to the most flexible point before conceding to a fall so our bodies do not break. This concession allows the opportunity for recovery by way of escaping injury. It also contributes to building instinct to note the actual tipping point of the body’s threshold for maintaining balance. Interestingly, we also use this information to calculate how to apply Aikido techniques to off-balance our attackers. It’s a rather engaging feedback loop, and it keeps me in relatively good physical condition.
Learning the skill of falling to recover balance also gives insight to the act of failing as an essential part of succeeding, essentially becoming a better version each time you stand back up. This turned into more of an advertisement for training in Aikido, but really the important thing to note is the skill set is divergent with other physical and functional training tools. It is not limited to training in Aikido to learn and apply these skills in your everyday life. I find that it is a cool format to hone the skill set, but the concepts and functional practice can be applied to your own individual training system, so to speak. Especially noting that so few of our population seek out martial arts training for fitness and functional structure. I spent a bit of time throughout my life trying different systems to match my physical, mental, and spiritual needs, and I consider myself fortunate to have been attracted to Aikido at such a young age. I also acknowledge the cumulative quality of cross referencing different modalities to provide a balanced system I found manageable as I move both figuratively and quite literally through my life. It is what I feel I offer the most to myself and the community I serve and in which I teach.
