Recently, my daughter and I have started a small bedtime ritual. After her younger brothers are down (hopefully!) for the night, she snuggles into her bed, surrounded by a menagerie of pillow pets. I grab her desk chair and pull it to her bedside, and we settle in for 30 minutes or so of reading the Harry Potter series of books. It is, without a doubt, one of my favorite times of the day.
We just finished the third book: Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. Towards the end, there’s a scene where–wait a second. First things first.
Warning! If you are one of those people who (1) has not read the book or seen the movie, and (2) actually cares about spoilers, you may want to stop reading now.
Okay. As I was saying. Towards the end there’s a scene where Harry is need of a particularly strong spell to ward off an onslaught of creatures that feed upon happiness. The spell creates a Patronus, an entity filled with so much positive energy that it drives these creatures away. The spell is, apparently particularly difficult to perform. In fact, the main reason why Harry is able to perform the spell at the end of the book is because of time travel. You see, at one point he sees the spell being cast–although he does not by whom. Later, he learns that his friend has a charm that allows her to go back in time. They do so, and he realizes that it was he, who cast the spell he saw earlier.
If you’re confused, don’t worry–the point I’m getting at has little to do with spell-casting. It has to do with attitude.
When asked how Harry was able to perform the spell, he states (roughly): “I was able to cast it, because I already knew I did.” In other words, his trip through time gave him such confidence that he was unable to fail.
There are few moments when I do not compare what I am doing or learning to aikido, and when I read this passage, I realized that here was a perfect example of what we call positive mind. Harry had such confidence in what he needed to do that he was able to perform at a level greater than he expected. We try to emphasize this idea on the mat: the best technique often comes when the nage (thrower) is so confident in his or her movements that failure ceases to be an option. These moments can happen even for students who have only practiced for a few months or even a few days. To quote another aikido instructor: “Aikido is the only martial art I know of that works best when you act like you know what you’re doing, even if you don’t.”
The pursuit of positive mind is, in many ways, the real study of aikido. Correct technique is essential, of course, but it is only one part of the equation. Just as an expert craftsman needs good materials in addition to good tools, our mental state is essential to perform correct technique. Here, Harry has an advantage that we do not: the ability to time-travel (albeit temporarily). But Harry’s experience isn’t anything we don’t already do ourselves: when we visualize success, we tend to perform better. This is what positive mind is all about.
(For those of you thinking this blog post was going to focus on my stint as a Defense Against the Dark Arts teacher–that’s a story for another time…)