Random thoughts, haven’t done that in a while. One, I’d kind of noted this before, but not so consistently as lately – I had listened to a Buddhist meditation cd I’d gotten as a Christmas gift, and one little line in it said something about relaxing muscles you didn’t even realize were tense. So that got me thinking. And over a couple days, I realized my tongue is often tensed up against my palate, my lower abdominals pull my torso downwards, and even as I’m walking or driving, my toes and feet tend to curl and tense a little.

It’s a funny kind of tenseness that has obviously become unconscious habit, for each time I relax my belly and stand up straighter or relax my feet and feel my ankles loosen, I’m guessing about two seconds later they’re tense again. So, I suppose this is going to take a good amount more conscious effort on my part, especially in consistency, and all the same makes me wonder what the hell else I’m tensing without realizing it.

The other thing that clicked for me recently was a possible similarity between aikido and yoga. In each, an ideal aspect is looking for that physical-mental space where no effort is being expended to complete the task at hand. For aikido, in purely ideal sense that would make it the ultimate martial art, in terms of Bruce Lee’s respected adage that maximum efficiency is one of the highest goals in fighting. But for both, the trick is that (at least to learn the skill) it takes effort in a sense to put your body-mind in a position where it doesn’t need to expend effort, and then once that’s accomplished to keep from trying to expend energy anyway out of habit.

So I could perhaps see aikido as a way of learning to interact with other people on a subtle level, just as in yoga you learn to interact with yourself in a similar way, like when you hold onto negative emotions in the same way you’d hold a negative pose – learning to be relaxed and open even with pain (and, to loop around, perhaps being the uke in aikido acts in a similar role, in learning to take pain dispensed by another).