I was between jobs, between schools, between lives when I walked into the small dojo in Grant’s Pass, Oregon, in 1978. I was sleeping on the floor of my brother’s apartment and working at a small leather factory to keep body and soul together, and my big brother was all excited about this new martial art he had started training in.
So I followed him to class one night. The martial art was aikido, and I was immediately intrigued by its flowing moves and spectacular throws. But beauty is one thing and utility is another, and I dismissed aikido as lovely but impractical. Perhaps sensing this, the sensei asked me to come on the mat after class so he could show me a few basic techniques. He told me to hit him. So I did.
My fist never reached his face while I ended up pinned facedown on the mat. Here I was, a strapping young man in his early 20s, fresh out of the woods where I’d worked as a lumberjack, and not altogether unfamiliar with the destruction you could wreak with enough stupidity, testosterone, and muscle. Yet this slender long-haired hippie put me on the ground and held me there without breaking a sweat.
That was the night I met one of the great loves of my life though it took a decade for aikido and me to hook up again. I was on the East coast this time where I found a dojo tucked away in the northwest corner of Connecticut run by an extraordinary woman who just happened to be one of the top-ranked aikido teachers in the country. It was like walking down the street eating an ice cream cone and suddenly tripping over Yoda. And for the better part of the past 30 years, Sensei Laura Pavlick has patiently taught me the secrets of aikido.
Only aikido’s secrets aren’t really a secret. There’s no super-special insta-kill strikes, no unbeatable chokehold combo moves. Aikido isn’t about that at all. In fact, it’s the opposite. It is the far more subtle art of non-aggression, of welcoming an attack into the folds of your perception and realigning it in a direction more suitable to your well-being. In the end, it is an expression of love.
I have long described aikido as the vocabulary of conflict. Most of us only have two responses to an assault: yes (acquiescence) or no (strike back or run away). When you train in aikido, you learn an entire dictionary of responses to attack. You learn the adverbs of deflection, the adjectives of redirection. And at some point along this journey, you learn that this vocabulary works for nonphysical conflict as well.
My novel, Dark River, is immersed in aikido’s philosophy of responding to disharmony. The main character, Asa Cire, reacts to attacks, physical and otherwise, with whatever seems appropriate at the time. A Buddhist might call his approach upaya-kausalya, or “skillful means.” A Daoist would describe it as wu-wei, or “effortless action.” Whatever you choose to call it, Asa’s reflexive responses require a vocabulary rich in conflict resolution.
Not long after I had been awarded my second-degree black belt by the US Aikido Federation, Pavlick Sensei would periodically ask me to substitute teach a class for her, and I did so initially with trepidation – after all, who was I to be teaching these people – and latterly with a similar eagerness with which I attended classes as a student.
What she was doing didn’t dawn on me for an embarrassingly long time. Once after she asked me how a class full of beginning students had gone, I said “Damn, that was hard. You really gotta know your stuff to teach beginners.”
“Hmm,” she said. “How about that.”
I’m sad to say that the idea of teaching as a form of learning had never occurred to me until that moment.
Aikido is practiced in a very formal way, in which not only the teacher, but the dojo itself is held in high regard. There is an entire ritual to entering the dojo. In the foyer outside, you remove your shoes, placing them neatly on the low shelves. When you enter, you bow to the kamiza, the shrine at the top of the mat on which there is a picture of aikido’s founder, a practice sword and fighting stick, and freshly cut flowers. After changing into your training uniform, you step onto the mat, sit on your heels and bow again. When class begins, you bow to your sensei, who returns the honor.
This ritual has always served me as a means of cleaving myself from the “real” world, with whatever stresses were bearing on me, to enter the world of the dojo, where I am, in fact, training to meet those stressors. It is not unlike entering a church, a separation of the profane from the divine.
Of course, I haven’t stepped into the dojo for the better part of a year now. Instead we practice outside, not in pairs, but training in solo kata with our weapons, learning evermore complex sequences of attack and parry. It is lovely practice, on the grass or asphalt, and we still observe the basics of formality.
But it’s not the same as grappling with someone, redirecting their strike and sending them whirling across the mat. So I wait, patiently impatient, for Sensei to reopen the dojo, whenever that time arrives.
It will be good to go home again.
Recommended Article: Dark River – a Review
Amazon Link: Dark River – a Review
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