What's up cuties? This is The Ritzu’s vibes Podcast, and if you're looking for that moment of inspiration that comes when you least expect it, then you're in the right place. In this space, we talk about what happens to us every day through a special lens, the martial path of the samurai, which that genius Ueshiba Morihei transformed into the art of Aikido. Don't know what I'm talking about? Then stick with me. Today, let's talk about habits, those things we have to do every day and just can't stand. And as the fog thickens, we think, as Ligabue would say, that we could have lived by the sea. Our daily obligations cannot be avoided. In the best-case scenario, we turn them into habits and numb ourselves. We do them automatically without thinking, and at the end of the day, we wonder, "What have I done today?" However, everything changes when we turn them into rituals. This is the magic of martial arts. Let's go!
When I started practicing martial arts, I remember I didn't have huge expectations, but I wanted to learn as much as possible, as quickly as possible. This has always been a flaw of mine, a sort of bulimia related to studying. I wanted to know many things and had this anxiety to know them better and before others, as if there were some toaster to win in the end. My approach to studying completely changed when I started studying martial arts because I realized almost immediately that to perform complex movements, there was an infinite repetition of seemingly very simple movements.
This is also what is mesmerizing about great professionals. They repeat seemingly simple, unexciting, unspectacular exercises an infinite number of times and seem to find pleasure in this repetition. I absolutely didn't understand it until I experienced it myself on my own skin. The repetition of basic exercises doesn't lead us to quickly grasp these basic exercises; on the contrary, the more we repeat them, the more we study them, the more we realize there is to learn. We keep going deeper, like an endless well. Now, in my training, I find myself repeating thousand of shomen, the vertical cut with the sword, and I repeat these thousand shomen all the same one after another rhythmically. Inside, I think, they're not the same at all because I can't make them perfect one after another. I study, study, repeat and check the position of my hands, check the height of the sword, check if my shoulders are low, and I continue to repeat endlessly. Those who watch me from the outside often say, "What are you doing? Two thousand times the same thing, but why?" Inside, I say, "But it's not the same thing!" From here, there is another thirty years of studying infinitely. This is one of the most beautiful feeling that the study of martial arts has given to me, understanding how much of ourselves we can delve into, seeking the sublimation of the gesture, the perfection of the individual movement. But what does this have to do with the discussion of habits? Well, because continually repeating an exercise transforms it when it becomes part of our life into a habit. We know that we will go to training, and we will have to repeat a certain number of exercises at every session. And what is the risk of habit? The risk of habit is repeating that exercise without attention, without thinking, I repeated it, I have to do it, let's do it.
And that's where habit steals our time; that's where we say, "What am I doing always the same thing, is this a life?" Yes, because if we leave the tatami and apply it in real life, how many habits do we have in our day? How many gestures do we have to repeat continuously that, because we repeat them every day, have indeed become habits? We know we have to do them, we do them, and we do them numb, without thinking, without giving them any value. I refer to those who do a job that doesn't gratify them, to those who may not have a conceptual job but a job that involves many repetitions. Specifically, I refer to the small things of everyday life. You have to go grocery shopping, oh yes, you have to iron, you have to make that phone call, to relatives you don't want to hear from.
But how many examples do we have? For example, for me, the prime example—oops, I said example twice, whatever—is the moms' chat, the moms' chat is evil, I hate the moms' chat, I said it, I hate it, I can't stand it. It's not that I hate moms, by all means, I hate this thing, like but when we were little, how did we manage without anyone taking care of our tasks? Now it seems to be a fundamental obligation that qualifies you as a parent. And that's where I reflected on what martial arts had taught me, yes, because when we continually repeat our exercises, in martial arts, it's called kata, a precise sequence of movements, a precise codification of those movements, we are no longer just performing a habit, a repeated exercise; we have turned it into a ritual. It's not about doing something with a completely lost and un-focused mind, no, that is our ritual. That exercise must be perfect; that exercise must represent the best of ourselves. We represent ourselves as human beings in that single, tiny movement. The essence of martial arts is this, repeating the basics to the point where we can concentrate our entire essence, our whole life, into that one small movement. We must put everything into it. And when we do this, that repetition is no longer a repetition; it's a ritual, it becomes something sacred. Attributing a dimension of sacredness to what we do makes that thing important, turns it into an expression of ourselves. This is what we do on the tatami, repeating the gesture until it becomes perfect—the kata. The more we repeat it, the more we know there's work to be done. And that's why practice, in one way or another, lasts a lifetime. But martial arts can be carried outside as well. If we transform our small habits into rituals, they are no longer just habits; they are sacred moments of our day.
For example, going back to the legendary moms' chat, I realized that for me, eye contact was necessary. So, I thought, okay, let's see which moms I get along with and maybe those who are a bit more updated. Let's try to meet them. I don't know, let's have coffee once a week for instance. At the beginning, my absolutely mundane goal was, let's get a quick recap, have this coffee, figure out what I have to do with the kids quickly this week, and then we'll talk about it next time. The fact is, week after week, that meeting became something completely different. Because I said to myself, okay, there's this moment; I chose to work this way on this habit. Perfect. How can I sublimate it? And I started paying attention to that moment, and the two moms who were supposed to give me a quick recap became two friends. They became two people with the same problems, people I can share everything with. Week after week, we realized we had many things in common, not just our children. That coffee, that moment when we meet, is a breath of fresh air before all the commitments, the whirlwind I have during the day. It has become a sacred moment; it truly informs me about all things related to children. They spare me from all the tasks I have to follow the chat too much. But above all, it's a ritual, a moment of sharing that we have, and I experience it with my whole being, giving it the utmost importance.
The same goes for work; we have to repeat certain gestures many times. It's true that the work ethic today practically doesn't exist because the first thing you're told is you're replaceable, and if they don't tell you that, rest assured that if it gives dimensions after two days, they have replaced you—at least in the work I do, it's like that. But, in reality, it's not. Yes, they can replace me, but I can do that job in that way only. Those individual actions I repeat every day are executed in that way only because I do them; there's something special in those actions that is me. The point is how much attention I give to this me, to these actions. If I turn that moment into a ritual, they won't be perhaps entertaining actions, but they will be actions that I don't do with a numb mind; I do them trying to give the best of myself. Do I have to go grocery shopping? Well, instead of just walking through the supermarket, let's look around, let's look at people. We'll discover that maybe a lot of people do their shopping at the same time as us, and every time they come back there at that same hour. People we might see continuously, people that we might know. How many times do we happen to pass by someone and not see them even though we know them because we're doing the same thing we don't pay any attention to? Instead, we could discover that, "Oh, my neighbor does the shopping in this place at this time; we always meet, and we never see each other."
There's a very interesting thing that is discovered: when we pay attention to what we do, time expands. It expands in a particular way because it's often said, "When you're having fun, time flies," which is true, but do you know when else it flies? It also flies when we do things that annoy us to death; the day ends, and we say, "Oh my god, what did I do? What happened today? The day has already gone, and I didn't understand anything. I always do the same things." No, when we do something we really like, it's true that we have the feeling that it's quality time that we're enjoying, so it doesn't weigh on us. Time flies, but it doesn't pass so quickly. It's a substantial time. When I do things that I like, things to which I pay a lot of attention, I don't know how, but I have a lot of time to do other things as well. It's as if I filled that space; I didn't let it escape. On one side, it passes more quickly, but on the other side, it passes more slowly. Try it because it's a truly incredible feeling. I remain timeless when I don't think about what I'm doing, but when I think about it, at the end of the day, I feel like I've accomplished an incredible amount of things.
Now I'll tell you an anecdote about my practice, my personal practice experience. The moment I realized the power of this ritual was when I did the Senbongeiko for the first time. It's the practice of a thousand techniques. In Aikido, it's usually done at the beginning of the year because it's a ritual practice. It involves repeating a technique a thousand times—500 times as torii (the one performing the technique) and 500 times as uke (the one receiving the technique). Then you switch. The technique is shihonage, and you have to repeat it without stopping. Your partner throws you, and you fall, get up, fall, get up fall, get up, with an uninterrupted rhythmic cadence. The exercise's goal is absolutely not to stop, not to rest, not to adjust your keikogi, not to look around—nothing. You have to repeat it; the rhythmic cadence is crucial. I was very curious about doing this practice, thinking, "Will I be able to do a thousand consecutive techniques? Oh my, I'll get tired to death, who knows what will happen." It's just that everyone else was doing it, so I thought, "Well, I have to do it too." I went to do shihonage with this partner much more experienced than me, and we started.
But after the first 10 techniques, I thought, "Well, okay, it's totally feasible”. At 20 techniques, “it's not that bad, let's keep going." But around 30 techniques, I started feeling the lactic acid. I was like, I’m not completely sure I can make it. At 50, I wanted to die; at 100, I was like, "Okay, now I stop. Thanks, everyone. I've got nothing to prove." I looked at my partner, who didn't even break a sweat because he knew, he had tried it before. Obviously, he didn't talk, just kept counting. But he gave me one of those looks—meaning an hour-long conversation that we can essentially summarize as "don't u dare to stop; keep going." So, I thought, "Okay, I'll do another 10 just to show him that I tried. I'll do another 10. Okay, let's do another 50 just to show that I've done 150." While thinking, "Okay, let's try another 5 or 10 because my partner isn't stopping at all." So, there was no way to say, "No, look, I was here dying, but somehow I was in this loop, and around 200 techniques, my brain just shut down. I was counting without reflecting at all, executing the technique without thinking about anything. It became an exercise that went well beyond physical fatigue because, at that point, I realized that the breakdown was purely and exclusively mental, not physical. At some point, I kept going by inertia, and I don't know how we reached 1000. Yes, I couldn't sit in the seiza position for a week because I had sores on my feet, muscular pain to kill, an incredible fatigue. I don't remember few times I've been so exhausted, but the satisfaction of reaching 1000 makes it indescribable. Above all, I understood the incredible power the mind has in controlling repetition. That movement repeated so many times eventually became a habit. And even when it became a habit, the mind was still saying, 'Oh, I don't want to do it, it hurts, why do I have to do this? Why do I have to repeat this endlessly?' It's a bit like what we say when we realize we're repeating actions we don't want to do but have to do. In the moments when my brain shut down because I entered my partner's flow, that was the moment when the practice became a ritual. I understood that it wasn't a physical practice but a meditation exercise. It needed to be sublimated in this way, giving space only to the mind. I had to work on perfecting my concentration and attention in terms of the mind, not the body. When I made this switch, when there was a shift towards the sacred element of doing this exercise in the most perfect way possible—paying no attention to the body but focusing on mind control—that exercise came naturally. And not only did I not wait to do it again, but I never skipped a Senbongeiko because it had become a fundamental repetition that taught me something about myself. So, without bending our feet, hands, or ending up vomiting and other somewhat dubious elements, let's reflect on everything we don't like to do during the day but have to do. And we realize that it's a habit that we mistreat in every possible way. Let's transform it into a ritual, say to ourselves, 'How can I make this movement, this exercise, this action perfect? How can I transform this action into something that only I can do? How can I give it my essence? How can I make it sacred? Let's try to do it at least for one action of our day that we are forced to repeat. Let's transform habits into rituals, and you'll see how much of your day changes, and especially how your perception of time changes that day. Comment on the post of this episode on Instagram and let me know if you've tried doing this exercise, or if you've already transformed your habits into rituals, how do you feel about this possibility? And don't forget to send me a DM on Instagram so we can develop ideas together for the next episodes. As you know, this space for me is a pretext to create a community that engages in dialogue. And if you think this exercise can be useful to someone, share this episode and leave me feedback so we can grow this show together. Thank you for being with me, and I’ll see u in the next episode.