In the soundtrack of a famous movie from the 007 saga, Sam Smith sings:
If I risk it all, could you break my fall?
We have written -and will continue to discuss about that- many times about falling. We can talk about falls from a didactic, technical, experiential, functional, aesthetic point of view… We have also talked about it in relation to projects of social relevance, in which the percentage of injuries has been drastically reduced thanks to courses in which people learned how to deal with falling.
Yet the importance of falling, especially in Aikido, is manifested in what happens “inside” the person who falls.
Let’s not hide ourselves behind a finger: dealing with falls (ukemi – 受身) is a watershed between those who continue the Aikido experience and those who stop practicing. Appropriate teaching can reduce this condition to a minimum but not eliminate it.
It is a fact that anyone who has experienced the sensation of a projection (or high fall or tobi ukemi – 飛び受身) has experienced a suspension of time.
The moment of the fall seems very long, while in reality it is a fraction of a second.
From a physical and neurological point of view it is all explainable: our system is used to an upright posture, in which the sensation of gravity and balance are constant references. A dynamic exercise that inverts the above with the below surprises our system. Which, in the absence of references, experiences a dilation of time.
To have this experience, you have to accept the risk.
Those who have been practicing for a while and fall with a certain regularity know that the risk is reduced to an impact on a tatami that is more soft than a concrete floor, anyway.
Therefore, the risk, in reality, does not exist. But our brain does not know it and must learn to do something very rare: trust. Trust ourselves and our partner.
If I risk it all, could you break my fall?
We take risks every day: in traffic, in professional relationships, when we face ourselves with the bank statement, in personal relationships, when we expose our body and our health to the inexorable flow of time…
If we think about it, much of our time is lived as if we were in free fall in the midst of events bigger than us. People pass by and go away around us, bonds, even the most solid, tend to dissolve over time. Most of what we consider certainties, in the end, are not.
It becomes important to dare to break this fall. This is why, in its great small way, a discipline like Aikido teaches us to call reality by its name and to increase our responsibility. Which is the ability to know how to take risks and know how to anchor and root ourselves in the courage to lose our balance.
In other words: stop being afraid of falling and know how to find those anchors on which we can build ourselves. This is the essence of martial arts practice: being able to answer the question:
If I risk it all, could you break my fall?