I am not a black belt

Summary

I am a black belt. I am a second dan (nidan 二段) Aikido black belt with the original school of Aikido, the Aikikai foundation. I started Aikido practice in early 1997 after a holiday trip to the US. When Aikido was introduced in Brazil, it had inherited local rules from the Judo federation back then, so pre-black belt students (mudansha 無段者) have colored-belt ranking system from yellow to brown. photo by: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Chrkl Everyone starts with a white belt, which usually comes in the same package with the dogi, the practice uniform, when you buy it. It took me some time to learn that the white belt is a kind of “self assigned” symbol. To get one, you just need to buy the uniform. One you go through you first evaluation or “exam”, you may or may not advance to 5th rank (gokyū 五級:ごきゅう). Later in my experience I also learned that kyū progession through different colors wasn’t really practice or understood as practice by black belt dan practitioners. It was learning. Learning in the sense of discovery. As you were so early in your practice that you could only discover things that exist. Like sitting in the cockpit of an airliner for the first time. You don’t even know where to look at, let alone to touch. You need time just to find things and learn what they are. There are between 2500 and 3500 different techniques in Aikido depending on the naming used to explain the variations. A 5th kyū student with less than 6 months of practice may have tried, with luck, 100 or so different techniques. Ever since early practice, students learn to associate parts of techniques to their names. Then they memorize complete technique names and learn how to execute them with training partners. Advanced western students or Japanese students can be called a name of new technique, a technique they might have never trained before (like technique number #2311) and build it on-demand in their heads before putting it to practice. Something like looking at a fragmented...