Original subtitles

Like many young boys, I was probably drawn to

the martial arts for all the wrong reasons.

But as fate would have it, I was very good blessed by fighting the right teachers.

This quickly changed my life, and the quality of my life, by understanding the

laws of cause and effect, and how the impact other people.

Martial arts then became a path to cultivate compassion and understanding,

and helped me realize how we can all help on another.

Then and only then, I came back.

It became a perfect vehicle to develop the

physical self and the spiritual man simultaneously.

I got to the point in my life where anyone I would meet, I would always look at them

and understand that this person is my mother, my father, my brother,

my sister, all my family.

You never know how long the battle is going to be.

You always have to be ready.

My name is Ben Dang, and I've been studying with Steven Seagal since then for

the talk of Seagal since then, for around 14 years now.

My name is Larry Reynosa, and I've been training with Seagal since 1983.

Now I want to thank you for your time.

I want to thank you for your time.

I discovered Seagal since then, in the late 70s in Japan.

I went to Japan to find an Aikido teacher, and then I went and saw his dojo in Osaka,

and I was thoroughly impressed.

But I was a little concerned about the idea of

coming 13,000 miles to study with an American.

I was looking for a practical.

So ultimately I went back to Seagal's sensei's attention dojo.

I'll never forget the first day I met him because he was wearing a plaid shirt,

blue jeans, cowboy boots, and have very long cypress.

I had a friend.

He said, oh, you got to go to Steven Seagal.

He's this American guy who went to Japan and trained over

there and got really high ranking and came back here.

He has a school.

My name is Garrett Green.

I studied Aikido for about the last 10 years.

First impression, as I'm sure most people say, is very big.

It's very tall.

Big hands and a presence that, you know, even

somebody that doesn't study Aikido can feel.

There was a magnificence about him as well.

He was one of the first angles to be given credentials to teach Aikido in Japan.

When he would walk in, he'd feel someone enter the room.

When he spoke, when he shook your hand, when he looked

into your eyes, there was an incredible truth there.

And immediately I was interested.

I feel like I was very fortunate.

I was in the right place at the right time.

Tenchin Dojo is in Osaka, in Juso.

Juso is outside, it's on the outskirts of Osaka.

The Dojo population was probably three quarters

Japanese, one quarter European and Australian.

Everybody seemed to respect each other regardless of, that

was a nice thing about Japan as a great deal of respect.

It wasn't fun, it wasn't a lot of laughs.

A lot of times there would be people joking around laughing, talking,

not a lot of talking.

As soon as you heard Sensei's tread coming up the stairs and it was easy to identify,

you could tell that the level of attention and the level of seriousness changed.

There was no more talking, it was like everybody knew that they better pay attention.

He did all the talking.

I think that Sensei, you know, as an Anglo, I think that in order to be

treated as an equal, my understanding is that he actually had to be better.

I think that there were people that came in and challenged him.

He didn't have to be tough, he just was.

You don't get to deal with the man to start with.

You've got to prove yourself against his students first.

I had no idea what he was doing.

He's very fast.

Like lightning.

You'd sit there and you'd watch him do a technique, and he did it so fast.

I had no idea what he just did.

What did he do?

It was too fast, I couldn't see it.

When I saw everybody else doing it, they

didn't do anything like it the way he did it.

Every move, every gesture, how he taught class,

how he performed the techniques was powerful.

Since I taught a pretty form, he taught, and when

he did speak, he taught in Japanese, it was pretty.

..

He

would always stress the basics.

It was pretty detailed, and it was pretty technical.

That was really my first exposure to IKEA in any way.

I was training with someone that was teaching a very practical IKEA form.

It should be practical.

If you practice on a practical level, then you

can take that form and you can dance with it.

But if you are trained in a dance form, and you suddenly

need to use it practically, you might be disappointed.

You don't take a knife to a gunfight, basically.

It was one of the things that I was taught by him.

The major difference is that I saw where so many

other people struggled to explain to articulate IKEA.

They really had a struggle with that, because

what they said and what they did didn't equate.

I've heard this conversation many times.

This is what you do if you get punched.

And then to see the punch stop in front of the nose.

Or this is what you do when you get hit from the side, and then see the hit stop.

And then this is what you do if you get choked, and yet I don't see people choking.

So there was a real inconsistency in the teaching.

I got one type of sensei, and all of a sudden he

said, but this is what you do if you get punched.

And all of a sudden you would see that fit coming right at you, and go right at it.

If he didn't move, you would get punched.

That was the truth.

That's something we can really relate to, because in fact, if we didn't move,

we'd get punched.

Stephen Segal's IKEA is more applicable to on the street applications.

A lot of us join and learn his style of IKEA because you want to have confidence.

Third

time I see this today, people turning the wrong direction.

You're going to kill yourself.

It's like saying, okay, I see a guillotine.

I think one will slip my head in.

So easy the other way.

I guess

the Japanese word is kibishi, which really translates roughly as severe, and

definitely the seagull sensei's form is, you know, it's severe.

Not severe in terms of people getting injured, but it is a form that works.

Does this work?

In a situation if somebody comes in a taxi.

Would this work?

There was a great lesson there that I keep reiterating.

Is that truth of that honesty and training?

Because without the honesty and training, there is nothing.

That's what's great about Takasensei's IKEA.

The image of him that I remember the most would be the way he would start class.

In front of the showman and he would, out of the showman, turn around, not at us.

It was powerful.

Not just a powerful image, but a powerful feeling.

There's two levels where, you know, Takasensei trains,

and that's one with the beginner, and he's very kind.

He's gentle.

He's incredible.

He has the ability to deal with you at a level that you can understand.

I had no experience with martial arts at all.

He would often talk about tae sabaki, ashi sabaki, hand position, foot position.

He'd do the technique with you.

He'd explain things about what you were doing wrong.

He'll let you know about your openings.

He'll let you know about your holes.

Some classes, he didn't talk at all.

He would just come in, do techniques.

Hi, those old.

We'd get up and do them.

They'd cross attention to his hand movements.

He would walk around to each of the different couples doing it.

Then he'd give you tips, pointers.

No, no.

Save his places where?

Behind.

Or to the side.

First one person's the naga or the thrower that gets to

practice the technique that's presented by the teacher.

And then, of course, the uke is the one that is on the

receiving end that gives that person the opportunity to train.

Then they switch those rules.

All that stuff he talks about with kicks and avoiding overhead strikes,

it's all very precise.

You'd get individual attention.

He's quite capable of doing this, is taking

you just a notch beyond what you're capable of.

Get your feet out of there!

Get your feet out of there!

Get your feet out of there!

As my level of understanding climbs a notch, he has more notches.

That creates confidence.

He always wanted you to do a lot of ukeming, and that's how you learn.

To learn how to fall, how to conquer the fear of falling, how to not panic in a

fall, is more valuable from a self-defense point.

I mean, we will all fall down.

It's more likely that you will fall than it is that you will be attacked, ever.

So, learning how to deal with the ground is, I think, a valuable tool.

If you did a fall wrong, you know, it hurt for days.

Tukemi is to provide the honest attack that might occur as a possibility on the street.

We used a lot of tape in those days that the

Tommy were very hard, and that's where we trained.

You learn a lot from taking the fall.

Your ability to fall precedes your ability to throw.

That means that you have to be on top of your

ukeming, that means you have to be there.

Which is really what it's all about anyway.

I learned how to fall really well, because the mats were really, really hard.

You know, when Sensei calls you to take ukeming, the hair

on the back to your neck starts to raise a little bit.

You're like, okay, you get inside this guy's reach, you better be paying attention.

I have more than once been caught thinking that he

was going one direction when he was going another.

It can be downright painful.

The opportunity to take ukeming from the Sensei is like, you know, not that many

people get that opportunity, so I was very grateful.

Anybody that has been on the mat with Dr. Sensei knows that there is truth in Aikido.

It's undeniably powerful, effective.

Then when you stand to the truth, you know, sometimes that's brutal.

He's yelled at me.

Yeah, definitely.

It's the moment of truth.

You get out of your parking lot.

You're sleeping a bit with a wife and somebody comes into the window.

This is the time of the day.

And the guys who are up here are giving you permission to go.

And if they can't take that, they can't beat you.

They won't beat you.

They'll go somewhere else.

When you're absolutely out of gas and you can't breathe and he's yelling at you to

get back up again and smacking you or throwing people on top

of you or saying, get them or you're up against the wall.

Get on your knees and lift yourself up.

Turn over.

I'd rather suffer his anger than his indifference.

There you go.

Get out of the way to move.

Go on.

Go on.

Go on.

Go on.

Go on.

Fuck your fans.

Hey, I'm out of here.

I see you trying to pull your pants up and get into the time like this.

I'll come at you myself.

That's where you feel the most, the most love.

It's weird because you feel bad when he yells at you.

But it definitely came out of love.

You know, I never felt he hates you.

He's mad at me.

He's not.

There's nothing in it that you feel threatened by him.

Okay, I don't know what happens to you so I have a baby.

Give me a straw, a straw.

You just spot everybody.

Everybody just stop.

Stay away from me.

Put them into the wall.

Not you.

Get up there.

I was more mad at myself for not being able to do what he wanted me to do.

You just want to do it.

You'd always feel that he's doing it for your benefit.

If he yelled at you, that would make you come up to where you needed to be.

He did it out of love.

The best advice he ever gave me was to not be female.

Don't think of yourself as less or weaker or not

able to do the things that the guys are doing.

Don't make that the reason that you can't do it.

I'd have to do the work that I've done.

I was not able to do that.

I was able to do a lot of work.

I was able to do that.

I was able to do this.

I was able to do it.

I got yelled at, I got slammed to the ground, I injured, which all the guys did too.

There was no difference.

You know, when I was out there, I could be a guy, I could be a girl.

It did not matter.

Debbie was a very, very good Aikidoist and very strong will.

The way to take a sense, it teaches that it doesn't matter.

Your strength doesn't matter.

If you adhere to basics and the principles that

we practice, women can be incredibly powerful.

He used to always say, you know, you actually have an advantage.

Being female.

Women can do better Aikido than men because they don't have the strength.

They have to do the technique better than we do in order to make it work.

I think it's the best art for women to take because it doesn't require strength.

It really requires agility, if anything.

And women are more agile than men in many cases.

Women being smaller and sometimes, you know, less physically strong than men

can benefit so much more from the Aikidoist.

It was always saying, you know, it's not a male-female thing.

It has nothing to do with that.

Try to get that out of your mind.

It has nothing to do with how big you are, how tall you are, or, you know,

how many muscles you have.

Aikido isn't based on that.

It's how strong your mind is.

Essentially, the idea is not to have to use the form.

It's to sense what's going on and supplies or figure out

a way to create a situation where it doesn't get physical.

You kind of become inner strength.

You know, you get an inner feeling of calmness and just the

fact that you become aware of everything that's around you.

That's, you know, that's one of the things that people train in the martial arts for,

is to raise their level of awareness of the moment.

And definitely, he caused that happen.

He caused you to be on your toes.

One time, he was showing me something and I looked at him

and he was getting frustrated with my inability to do it.

And I looked at it and I said, I'm trying.

And he looked at me and he said, trying.

He said, stop trying.

Just do it.

Trying is cerebral.

Trying is crap.

Students that have come up under him understand.

You don't judge.

You just do.

You just worry about doing your job.

Through the physical aspect of hard training, your mind gets set in a certain way.

At that point of physical exhaustion, something happens to you mentally.

Something happens to you spiritually.

And I want to say growth happens.

I want to say understanding.

But it's more than that.

It almost builds you from the inside.

It makes you stronger.

It makes you look at yourself from the inside.

It makes you see yourself, your weaknesses, your point of pain threshold.

At what point do you break mentally?

At what point do you say that I said I had enough?

And it pushes you beyond that point.

I felt that that kind of training would get you to the point where they are on.

You can't do that stuff, but you're a rock inside.

If there's one person that I could say has an amazing will, is Stephen Seagal said.

I got a flyer.

There was an open house given by Stephen Seagal.

I could make it, but I sent a couple of my students down to check it out.

I think some of the people that were watching

the demonstrations were a little bit astounded.

Because he would do his thunder and lightning show at that point.

A couple of my students came back not only just excited but nervous.

They virtually told me that he had taken some guy and smashed him all over the mat.

And that damn near killed him.

As soon as he said that, it was very interesting because of my interest, Pete.

Somebody doing real like you.

It was shortly after that, of course, that

I invited to my west side, Gojo and Ventura.

And he taught the very first seminar there.

Public seminar in America.

But most of all these seminars that we've had in the past that the one main and

common thread that's from all their conversation

is that I can't believe how approachable he is.

He's so easy to talk with on the mat.

He's very, very, very gentle, very, very soft-spoken.

He can be the most gentle.

He can be extremely gentle.

And he can also be extremely dangerous.

The people that are the most capable of deadly

Waza are also the most capable of being gentle.

How do you have the loving, harmonious, flowing, caring, gentle side of Aikido?

And how does that relate to what we do in the

Dojo when we beat the hell out of each other?

And it's very rigorous and seemingly cruel.

You find out that you just, you can be a nice guy and yet be a lethal weapon.

The spiritual side kind of came out of that.

Life and death is that exact, you know, that exact same, uh, that contrast of,

but you can't have one without the other.

And to embrace one, you need to embrace both.

To accept one, you need to have, you need to have both.

If you train enough, you get both sides of the coin.

You train to the point of exhaustion.

Physical exhaustion where your body can't go anymore.

You must have refused to, um, listen to the brain.

It was just about jumping in there and training as hard as you could.

And he would take us till we just literally couldn't get up anymore.

It was just a matter of tape up and get on the mat.

It's beyond stamina.

You need to be on your toes.

You need to be the best that you can be at all times.

You have to be balanced, you have to be on it.

It's a constant process and that's another thing.

You just realize the more you learn, the less you know.

And each time you get a little bit closer, you realize how far you still got to go.

The more talent you have, the more demanding it's going to be.

There's a certain kind of trust and standard in anybody that's come up under him.

He knows and expects excellence.

He is not interested in compromise.

He expects the best from you.

He expects perfection from you.

He expects perfection from himself.

He expects perfection from his student.

He has a certain standard of what a black belt

martial artist should be, especially in Aikido.

And that's somebody that has true skills and has been trained well in the basics.

I think it must have been like three or four years

before I took the black belt test the first time.

Maybe five years.

The don represents an internalized understanding of the mechanics.

One of the reasons that he would run a pull class before the test was so that he

would drain your back, so that he could see what you have when you got nothing left.

How deep can you dig?

And basically he shut the blinds, locked the doors, and it was pretty interesting.

It was very intense.

And he was so simple.

It's so simple, but it's so hard.

And I tested twice and didn't get it.

And other people tested two and three and four times.

So it wasn't an automatic thing.

We say if you can make it 15 seconds, 15 seconds.

And that's how intense these tests were.

I have seen few people pass the test their first time.

And in fact, I would go so far as to say that not

passing the test your first time is part of the test.

So you experience this a little bit of a piece, the calm before the storm.

Very peaceful, up into the time where he says go.

I just want

to go down so that when he's here next, I can be able to cut my head.

See, I'll turn if I want to.

..

I don't have time to move and you're over there.

This is the worst place you could be.

If I don't have time to move, I have people up here.

I'll either move that way.

I'll try to do a few things out there.

We're going to take the time to show you guys that just right here.

This is the worst place you could be.

I can't say a foot.

Come up in here.

Where did you come?

Come up in here.

Say not again.

Where did you come?

The dawn test represents the opportunity to

show that you have internalized the practice.

And the Rondori is the main thing of the black belt test.

This was a lesson in fear and overcoming your fears.

The Rondori is where the test... that's where the test lies.

Basically, in Tiger Sense, it's a way of thinking that

this is the standard of shodock of the black belt.

Rondori, Rondori is a multiple attack, multiple person attack.

You sit on one side of the dojo, three guys are facing you, and when he

says, Hajime, begin, they just run at you full speed and just try to take you down.

In my mind, it's sort of the essence of the form.

That is to say the idea of the form is to be able

to deal with more than one attacker at a time.

I mean, if you're dealing one-on-one and certainly we train, that's how we train.

But the idea is to finish your form ready for another attack.

That is to say, finish in a balanced position.

The reason for that is... I mean, Osensei was a product of sword culture.

And sword culture was very seldom one-on-one.

Sword culture was more often more than one attacker against a single opponent.

So you have to put your forms together.

That is to say you have to blend with one

attack coming at you, neutralize that attack.

And then immediately be prepared to deal with the next attacker.

Basically, you let go of everything that you think you know.

It's an exercise in freeing yourself up of thinking about all these things.

Thinking about how your knee hurts or how this last

time this guy clubbed me from the side or any of that.

If you think it's too late, if you take the time to make a decision, it's too late.

If you do, if you hang on to that and you stand in, you think you know.

Or in other words, your own arrogance or egotism if you want to call it.

If you stand in that, you'll get smashed.

And that's the value of the Rondore.

Because basically when they say go, these are three guys

that are one breath away from being in reality on the street.

I mean, there have been situations I think on

the street that I wouldn't want rather than this.

You can't even be thinking fear, not fear, anything.

Because any thought that goes through your head,

it's immediately visible in your body, physically.

It's a matter of relieving yourself, having to worry about anything.

And being able to deal with whatever situation they can throw at you.

Whatever three minds and the dynamics of three

people coming at you at full speed can do.

Rondore is your first opportunity to get a clue about the infinite number of ways to

attack you, to grab you, to punch you, to kick you.

And when I say that I mean that they were free to do that, they could punch,

grab, kick, spit, bite, whatever they wanted to do.

Of course, on the other hand, you were allowed to do that too.

If you didn't even care so much in the Rondore, if you didn't get a technique,

you didn't care what it was you had to do.

Whatever it was, as far as he was concerned, that was it.

You just have to do, and you have to do it very quickly.

The main thing is being there in the moment,

and dealing with nothing but what's there.

When you've got more than one person coming at you, and they are all coming at

you with the same intent and simultaneously, you don't want to get

captured, and you certainly don't want to get taken to the ground.

In that instant, he wants you to think, this is

life and death, these guys are going to kill you.

They get you, you're dead.

Once they hit you, I mean, you realize this is for real.

And it gives you an opportunity to understand what letting go is all about.

The world doesn't change for anyone.

I don't care if you're a woman, I don't care if you're a baby.

The world doesn't change, the evil doesn't change.

All those things that we have to face don't change.

The only way we can teach anybody is by being real.

If you can stand up, that's good.

If you fall, make them stand up again and again and again.

There's no favorites in the coaches, there's no women, there's no men,

there's no old people, there's no young people.

You come up for a show, don't you?

Everything's the same.

It was the

most serious thing I ever experienced.

And even thinking about it, I get a knot in my stomach.

Somebody that's 120 pounds is going to have a tougher time

dealing with these three Mac trucks that are coming after.

You know, it doesn't matter.

It's what's inside, what you have, your character.

And that's what's going to come out of the test.

And you're sitting there and you're trying to

prepare and you're just trying to relax your body.

And you're trying to just clear your mind so that everything

is whatever it is that comes to you can deal with it.

It's hard to do, it's hard to relax, it's hard to breathe.

Because you've just been doing techniques and you're a little bit winded.

And he can say, how'd you make it anytime?

He'll be talking like this and then all of a sudden go.

How'd you make it?

And you're supposed to go.

So you can't even really be listening to what he's saying.

I'm always looking at him as one.

See?

I'll stop and start.

I'll come in here and make him think he's got me.

Come this way.

But as they grab me, one thing I'll never do is let them know that he's on.

What I'm always trying to do is keep that up.

Going to the ground is not the option.

That's not what he's looking.

You take the test and it's over in a second.

If you could stay up, if you could control the three people, if you got to the point

where he felt you were controlling those people, then you pass.

I mean, that was it.

You went through the fire and you came out the other side.

At the end of the day is that poor Matzoga got his tooth knocked out and another got

his shoulder separated and I had gotten poked in the eye and it was amazing.

We were all over that dojo.

We had jumped over the office furniture.

We had come under the student benches and chairs were

knocked out of the way and it was just incredible.

That as real as, you know, it could possibly get.

It's hard.

It's the hardest thing I ever did.

Rondori, the three-man attack, teaches you that with your will,

you can make anything happen.

It teaches you that no matter how bad a situation can get, it teaches you to face

those situations where the right mental attitude, the right state of mind.

When you have that mind, that in your mind, that at any

moment your life could end, but that you don't care.

It wouldn't bother you if your life ended.

You cannot be afraid to die, basically, as the mindset you have to have.

The practice of Rondori kind of allows you not to think about your limitations.

It allows you to go beyond where you thought you could go before.

And that is what everybody needs to be successful.

Anyway, you practice that philosophy of letting

go and not limiting yourself in your real life.

Then you have no limitations.

My life has been influenced a great deal by,

as I can teach, not accepting your own limits.

Somebody were asking, what's the most valuable

lesson I ever learned from Steven Seagal?

It's that it's possible to be the lessons of Aijido.

I was raised by him, so I feel that he is the source.

Everything that he does is powerful.

Mentor.

Master.

Charismatic.

Loving.

A great teacher.

Warrior.

He personifies that in my mind, the spirit of a warrior.

I'm inspired today by this man simply to become a better human being.

He changed my life.

My introduction to him and my training by him has changed my life.

Show me what you got when you got nothing left.

Show me what you got.