The Journey to ALIA Europe
Posted by jamesk | Filed under Aikido, Stuff
In November 2008, just as my second daughter was born, the advertising industry was being threatened, if not with meltdown, at least with belt-tightening. I found myself with both opportunity and excuse to lessen my workload for the first time in over 10 years.
I had a fantastic few months at home, picking up odd pieces of work, playing with the baby and our 4-year old, and of course my girlfriend. Playing. Hmm. I started thinking (again) about the value of the work I’d been doing to the future generations. No value whatsoever, that I could see.
Furthermore, it became clear to me how fantastic kids are – in the early years, before we get to impose on them too much, and I looked at the kind of person I have learned to be – very much rule-bound – and I realised that I didn’t want the same fate to be waiting for my daughters.
A direction opened up for me when a friend asked me to teach her son – my first daughter’s age – Ki-Aikido. This is a practice that I’ve been studying (and teaching) for some time, and one that I believe to be very practical in daily life. Could this be the tool to help growing children keep a clear understanding of who they are in the face of constant and almost overwhelming external pressures?
I googled for information on teaching kids, and came into contact with an American teacher called Paul Linden, who happened to be running a course on an Aikido-derived conflict-resolution method in London the following weekend. This struck me as the first piece of serendipity I’d been aware of in years, pretty much because this was the first time I’d looked beyond my computer monitor in years, so I followed it up.
Serendipitous moment #2: I had a Twitter search running, showing me tweets that included the word “Cambridge”, my hometown. One of those that caught my eye was a tweet about a workshop giving teenagers confidence by a woman called Corinna Gordon-Barnes. Over the course of a short email conversation, she told me that she was registered for a freebie 2-day course based on Wendy Palmer’s work.
I’d first come into contact with Wendy’s book, The Intuitive Body: Discovering the Wisdom of Conscious Embodiment and Aikido
Corinna put me in touch with Ann Lyons & Chris Grant, the course organisers, and I was able to join in a great day of playing with a mix of arts folk. At the end of the day, Chris told me that part two would be run by Wendy herself. I signed up straight away.
The second day was brilliant – a week into a new contract in London – I enjoyed myself a huge amount, and began to see the potential for making the principles of Aikido available to non-practitioners. At the end of that day, Chris mentioned that Wendy would be teaching a 5-day module at ALIA Europe in January.
By the end of 2009, I had an urge to re-align the work I’m doing, and a number of paths I could explore in order to work out how to make that change. I also had a time and place for playing with those ideas and clarifying where I should aim and what next steps I should take: that was ALIA Europe.
Tags: alia
February 10th, 2010 at 10:52 pm
It really was a fantastic synchronicity that brought us into contact just in time for you to attend the Conscious Embodiment course together – so glad that we've met.