My knees are a bloody mess. It’s been a while since I did suwari-waza, the strange practice in traditional Aikido dojos of doing techniques, samurai-style, on your knees. Last week, the sensei spent almost the entire class doing suwari-waza and, when I stood up, the skin on my knees was entirely rubbed off. Ouch!

And yet here it is, the following week, and I am showing up again.

I took up Aikido ten years ago, at the ripe old age of forty, and have been struggling to learn it ever since. The kids wanted to take a martial art and I thought judo might be nice. Something difficult, real fighting, like wrestling.  I looked around for a judo dojo but couldn’t find any near our home. But I did find some Aikido dojos that taught kids and that intrigued me. At the time, Steven Seagal wasn’t yet an incarnate lama, just a Hollywood action star, and I was intrigued by those flashy moves he did. It seemed elegant and different, not like the typical side kicks you saw at the local tae kwon do school.

So, my three sons and I started Aikido together. Week after week, year after year, we drove 30 minutes each way for Aikido classes two or three times a week. One by one, though, the kids lost interest and quit… but I was hooked.

My first teacher was a former ambulance driver who trained at the New York Aikikai and was the apprentice (uchi deschi) of Seiichi Sugano Shihan.  He teaches the traditional “Aikikai” style of Aikido that is taught at Hombu Dojo in Japan and he is affiliated with the U.S. Aikido Federation (East), run by Yoshimitsu Yamada Shihan.

I also trained for a time with Huruo Matsuoka, Steven Seagal’s oldest student and uke, whom you see getting slammed to the mat (hard!) in Seagal’s first movies and in Seagal’s Aikido documentary, The Path Beyond Thought. Matsuoka Sensei is one of the nicest guys you’ll ever meet, a truly gentle and wise man, a devotee of macrobiotics, and he teaches Seagal’s somewhat unusual style of Aikido that is called “tenshin” Aikido. Around the time Seagal discovered that he is an incarnate Tibetan lama or tulku, Matsuoka had some falling out with the pony-tailed Hollywood star, returned to Japan and studied with Abe Sensei, the founder of Aikido (O Sensei’s) calligraphy teacher. Matsuoka came back to America in the early 2000s and started some new dojos where some of my old sensei’s students and my friends came to study. Matsuoka’s Aikido is very advanced and technical – too advanced for someone like me. But I learned a lot from him and heartily recommend his dojo to anyone who lives close enough to study with him.

I now study with students of the legendary Kazuo Chiba Shihan, spread out in locations all over the world. Chiba Sensei is a fairly scary figure in Aikido circles, someone who doesn’t tolerate fools lightly and who is more than willing to make believers out of skeptics. From what I can tell, Chiba’s approach to Aikido is practical and very direct – “we like to make sure a certain amount of pain is involved,” my current teacher says with a smile. What Chiba Sensei’s students are trying to teach me is how to take someone’s balance first before you try any technique — a basic concept in judo (called kuzushi) but which many Aikido schools neglect.  Chiba-affiliated dojos (part of the Birankai federation) in British Columbia include Still Waters Aikikai in Sidney and Mountain Coast Aikikai in Richmond.

So, I’ve been at it for ten years now… and have only scratched the surface. I have to say, I’m really lousy at Aikido. I’m stiff as a board… clumsy… my knees hurt… my ukemi (falling) sucks… and I am still struggling with moves that any beginner knows how to do. But I feel at this point I can at least describe why Aikido captivates so many of its adherents and yet, to outsiders, seems so strange. My wife considers it a bizarre “cult,” akin to people who are in telepathic contact with aliens.

First, Aikido, at least in the mainstream Aikikai style, is the best workout you could ever have. It manages to combine a lot of stretching with tumbling and falling… a serious cardiovascular workout… and the kind of muscular training you’d get with, say, wrestling…. and a little self-defense. After an hour of Aikido, my gi is soaking wet, every muscle in my body hurts and I feel like I’ve been doing yoga for a week. I’ve been tossed around like a sack of potatoes by experts and have had my wrists and shoulder joints twisted out of their sockets. It’s great!

Second, Aikido teaches you weird stuff you don’t learn in a typical rock-‘em, sock-‘em kicking and punching martial art. Whether you’ll ever use this weird, esoteric stuff is another question entirely – but you definitely feel like you’re learning strange Shaolin voodoo, not just how to kick someone in the balls.  I studied Shito-Ryu Karate as a kid with a wonderful hippie carpenter and nidan and love traditional Japanese karate… but Aikido is from an entirely different planet.

The hard part for me is learning how not to use my muscles.  The tendency of every beginner is to try to muscle through the techniques, forcing someone to the mat, for example, or really cranking on a wrist lock.  But the people who really know Aikido use very little muscular force.  They use the weight of their whole bodies… and the ability to move their opponent off balance… so the techniques seem almost effortless.  That is why Aikido is great for women because women are generally not as strong as men and so must learn how to do the techniques correctly.  It’s also why Aikido is a great martial art for people as they get older.  It’s one of the few where technique really can overcome brawn… providing, of course, you actually learn how to do it right.  And that’s the trick!

The post My First Decade of Aikido first appeared on Robert J. Hutchinson.

A sick, twisted member of my Aikido dojo sent me this video: Nuns practicing karate and, at the end, a little judo and Aikido. (One of the nuns does a pretty good sumi-otoshi there, albeit with a judo flair.) Some people really do have too much time on their hands.

The post Video: Contemplative Nuns Doing Aikido first appeared on Robert J. Hutchinson.

Anyone who has struggled with the arcane texts of contemporary analytic philosophers will appreciate this delightful cartoon on YouTube.

The post The Absurdity of Analytic Philosophy first appeared on Robert J. Hutchinson.

Growing up in the 1970s, and attending a Jesuit high school and university, I heard a lot of talk about “practicing” non-violence.  This was the era of the anti-war priests Dan and Phillip Berrigan… of Catholic Worker protests… of James Douglass (author of The Non-Violent Cross) and his wife Shelly.  Everyone was a pacifist, everyone talked about Gandhi and “practicing” non-violence.

But I could never really figure out what that meant, how you would actually “practice” non-violence.  Eventually, I decided I could never be a pacifist either philosophically or temperamentally. Pacifism could be a moral choice for an individual (such as a Buddhist or Christian monk or nun who chose martyrdom rather than act in self-defense) but never as a philosophical stance.  That’s because pacifism as a philosophical stance requires that you choose suffering, not for yourself alone, but for other people who might not agree with or want to embrace your high-minded philosophical principles.  It would require you to stand by while a woman was being raped and, because you’re so spiritually evolved, not kick the rapist in the teeth.

Also, I’m Irish… which makes me temperamentally rather ill-suited to pacifism.  When someone attacks me, or someone I love, my natural reaction is to, well, fight back.  Preferably with a head butt.

But here’s the thing:  Because of my Aikido addiction, I’ve ended up actually practicing non-violence on a regular basis.  Every week I go to my Aikido class and practice having someone take a swing at me… and not punch back!  In fact, I’ve learned that punching back is actually the least effective thing you can do if you want to avoid getting hurt.  (That is why police hand-to-hand combat is largely based on Aikido:  cops want to control a suspect, not trade punches with him.)

As I’ve pointed out before, I’m not very good at Aikido precisely because my natural inclination is to resist, to fight back, to muscle my way through a technique.  If someone resists when I try to do a particular move, I typically try harder! I use my strength to force my way through it.  This makes for lousy Aikido.

Aikido is not wrestling.  It’s not even jujitsu.  It’s an attempt to paradoxically control and neutralize an attacker without resisting, without using strength.  This is why it’s so difficult to learn… why people seem so fascinated by it… and why it’s not very practical as a street martial art.  Nonviolence truly is not easy.

Aikido uses a lot of mystical-sounding explanations involving “center” and “ki” and “blending,” but in essence what you’re trying to do in Aikido is to re-direct an attack, using timing and your body’s own momentum, so that neither you nor your attacker is hurt.  To do this, you have to first “take someone’s balance,” typically by “entering” into their “space” with your whole body weight or, alternatively, with a distracting smack in the kisser (known in Aikido as “atemi”)… and then, again using the movement of your entire body and your hips, to move the attacker in the direction where his or her balance is weakest.  When it works, it’s amazing:  a tiny wisp of a woman is able to toss a big guy across the room.  (I know, I’ve had it happen to me dozens of times!)

Where I get bogged down is that my first reaction, when someone resists me, is to use my (sometimes greater) arm strength to force them where I want them to go.  The problem with that is that there is always a bigger fish in the sea… and eventually, when faced with a bigger guy, the technique simply won’t work that way.  What you learn eventually is to not resist resistance... not to force anything.  (“Resist nothing” is what Eckhert Tolle heard in his moment of enlightenment.)  If some big galoot grabs your arm, hard, you simply let him have it.  You move your whole body around and away.

Actually, the Aikido techniques that I love the most, like nikkyo (shown above), are the ones where you specifically allow someone to do something to you… and then do it more! For example, say someone grabs your lapels with both hands.  Your (my) natural reaction would be to pull away, to resist.  But the Aikido thing to do would be just the opposite:  To put your own hands over the attackers hands and arms, pull him tighter toward you, and then lean forward into him with all your body weight, easing him to the ground in a way that makes him scream from the pain in his wrists.  (You gotta love that nonviolence stuff!)  The wrist locks of Aikido are famous for this.

Eventually, though, the regular physical practice of nonresistance does have a spiritual effect of sorts (at least theoretically).  You become less reactive.  That was, I think, what the founder of Aikido had in mind in his vision of Aikido as some sort of mystical technology for universal brotherhood.  Rather than meeting an attack head on, butting heads, an Aikido person tends to move out of the way instead… and sort of redirects the aggression in the way he or she wants it to go.  Pretty soon this becomes second nature because you do it 40, 50 100 times a night in Aikido practice.  I won’t get all Zen on you and claim Aikido has all sorts of practical applications in business and home life… but a little of that is undoubtedly true.

P.S.  The big bald guy in the photo isn’t me… but someone who knows what he’s doing.

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Part of Aikido’s weirdness comes from its strange history. Aikido is a modern martial art that evolved out of Daito-Ryu Aiki-Jujitsu, a deadly, no-holds-barred fighting form taught secretly to the Japanese samurai. The principal aim of the art was to teach samurai how to quickly kill opponents on the battlefield if they lost their weapons. Like other types of jujitsu, it involved joint locks, throws and “pain compliance” techniques.

The last master of Daito-Ryu, Sokaku Takeda, was a mean, nasty SOB who allegedly killed dozens of men in unarmed “duels.” In the early 20th century, he taught his samurai jujitsu to a strange Shinto mystic and dreamer named Morihei Ueshiba, who had founded a rural commune in northern Japan and then spent his entire inheritance on private lessons from Takeda. Ueshiba eventually learned enough from Takeda to receive a “license” to teach Daito-Ryu but, instead, used what he learned as the base to create a new martial art which we now call Aikido – which means the Way (Do) of Harmonious (Ai) Energy (Ki).

Just as the founder of Judo, Jigoro Kano, modified the throws of classical jujitsu to create the modern sport of judo, so, too, Ueshiba took the brutal, bone-snapping techniques of Daito-Ryu and created a martial art that, he believed, promoted peace rather than mayhem. Ueshiba also added a whole new approach to doing the techniques of Daito-Ryu that involved circular movements that, his followers believe, made them far more effective and powerful – but which his detractors believe actually weakened the techniques and made them less effective.

In any event, Aikido evolved as a martial art that seeks to use circular movements and precise timing in order to “neutralize” any attack and use an opponent’s strength against him. In practical terms, it involves learning a variety of throws and joint locks that take literally years to learn well but which, if done by an expert, are actually quite effective. Many of the coolest moves you see in spy movies – like in the Jason Bourne films — are actually Aikido techniques. Modified versions of the techniques are also used a lot by police, especially the joint locks.

Does it work? I am asked that all the time.

The easy answer would be, well, that depends. The more honest answer is: In a street fight against a hardened criminal, probably not.

But then again, karate or tae kwon do or any other after-school pansy martial art wouldn’t work, either. Any bouncer will tell you that real fights are brutal and quick – and no place for anything fancy, whether spinning wheel kicks or Aikido throws. Real rights are where the toughest, most ruthless, usually most experienced bastard wins.

If you want to train for that type of fight, the best training is probably a good Brazilian Ju-Jitsu (BJJ) or Mixed Martial Arts (MMA) dojo that tries to be as realistic as possible and where people regularly get their ribs and noses broken – and even that probably wouldn’t really prepare you to face the average, run-of-the-mill convict.

But the reality is, most people don’t square off in the street against Jean Claude van Damme. What the average person encounters, and which Aikido is actually quite useful for, is the drunk in the local pub… or the too-friendly groomsman (for women) at a wedding. Some oaf grabs your lapel… or tries to push you. For these types of real-life encounters, the joint locks and simple throws of Aikido can actually be quite effective.

For most people, though, Aikido training really isn’t about fighting. It’s about not-fighting, about winning through non-resistance, about redirecting aggression so it doesn’t hurt you. The esoteric side of Aikido is that the techniques are most effective when you don’t try to use muscle at all but timing, gently knocking someone off balance enough so, with hardly any effort, you can guide him or her face down on the mat. That is why Aikido people whirl their opponents around in a characteristic circular motion that takes away their balance.

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