Aikido and the Practice of Emptiness
Me playing with the Eagle Pose, a spicy way to practice centering in yoga
Today, I danced into ecstatic bliss. My neck tension dissipated, my posture improved the rest of the day, and there was clear energy in my thinking and feeling states. Today's sweaty dance session produced a deep sense of gratitude for the movement arts, in all its forms. It had me thinking about all the ways I want to become more alive in my body.
This coming year, I have hopes to start training in Aikido. I've been to a few classes at my local dojo, yet I'm feeling a call to deepen my practice in this unique style of martial arts.
Aikido is a non-competitive system that blends with the energy of an attack to redirect and neutralize the force, rather than defeat or overpower it. Because of this, a student’s size and strength are not as important in effective Aikido technique. Some of the more physical aspects of Aikido involve throwing, joint-locking, striking and pinning techniques, along with traditional Japanese weapons like the sword, staff and knife (here is an aikido demonstration). Yet Aikido is not just a series of physical tactics. Literally translated to "a way of adapting the spirit," Aikido is a training of the mind, with a heavy emphasis on energetic and emotional stability through posture and breathing.
For founder Morihei Ueshiba, the aikido practice is a path of self-development, promoting the positive character of the ideal warrior and ultimately transcending dualistic conflict. As a boy, he witnessed countless beatings of innocent people, including his father. As a result, he dedicated most of his youth to mastering several martial arts, including jujitsu, fencing, and spear fighting. Yet he realized that his impressive physical abilities and sheer fighting skills were not the answer to what he sought. He eventually had a series of spiritual awakenings throughout his life that shifted his thinking about martial arts.
In 1925, after Ueshiba had defeated a naval officer's attacks unarmed and without hurting the officer. Ueshiba then walked to his garden, where he had the following realization:
I felt the universe suddenly quake and a golden spirit sprang up from the ground, veiled my body, and changed my body into a golden one. At the same time, my body became light. I was able to understand the whispering of the birds and was aware of the mind of God, the creator of the universe. At that moment I was enlightened: the source of budō [the martial way] is the spirit of loving protection for all beings ... Budō is not the felling of an opponent by force; nor is it a tool to lead the world to destruction with arms. True Budō is to accept the spirit of the universe, keep the peace of the world, correctly produce, protect and cultivate all beings in nature.
He experienced another revelation witnessing the destructive impacts of World War II:
The Way of the Warrior has been misunderstood. It is not a means to kill and destroy others. Those who seek to compete and better one another are making a terrible mistake. To smash, injure, or destroy is the worst thing a human being can do. The real Way of a Warrior is to prevent such slaughter – it is the Art of Peace, the power of love.
Aikido follows the principles of nature, specifically four qualities that reflect the nature of the world. According to Morihei, "depending on the circumstance, you should be: hard as a diamond, flexible as a willow, smooth-flowing like water, or as empty as space." Taking whatever comes at you, including violence, and meeting it energetically. In fact, much of aikido is about energy management of you and the other. Your job is to deal with your energy, their job is to deal with their energy, and you work together to join your energies. Operationally, this means bringing your attention back to where you have the most control: to yourself. We have very little control of others and the world.
Once we manage our own moods, emotions, attention, and presence, we can then interact with the world in a more responsible and skillful manner. This is called "centering" in aikido: the starting point for all positions and moves. The practice of centering trains us to relax. To align our bodies so that the weight is directed to a common center in the lower abdominal area, our gut-power center (hara). To be centered is to be in a temporary state of alignment of body, mind, emotions and spirit. But as all states are temporary – slipping out of this alignment is inevitable. So in a sense, the practice of centering isn’t so much about being fixed in your center. Rather, it’s the capacity to accept temporary imbalances, make necessary adjustments, and return to your center when you slip out of it. The more self-directed you are despite outside influences, the quicker you get back to center.
The mental and spiritual processes of Aikido remind me of Tibetan Buddhist teachings. Pema Khandro shared of a place within us that's even deeper than our subconscious mind, our social programming and the undigested emotions from traumatic events. Underneath all of that is an underlying, natural wakefulness of openness and emptiness: our buddha-nature. Emptiness is a mode of experience in which you refrain from adding anything to what you are experiencing. In other words, you perceive things empty of your usual stories and reactions about them (or at least not overidentifying with them).
Even though the doctrine of emptiness can seem abstract, practically speaking it has positive implications for every day experience. We begin by unlearning, through mindfulness, the tendency towards concretizing reality, or investing in thoughts that keep us fixed and rigid.
Even though we experience our obstacles and neurotic mind states as solid, definite and somewhat inevitable, they don’t actually have that quality. Our own habit of perceiving things as solid is what causes a patterned, predictable, solid experience. We discover that most of the time we are relating to our interpretations of reality, rather than relating to reality itself. This may initially be a disappointment but it is ultimately empowering – because reality itself is more open-ended than we think – therefore it is more workable than we think.
Thinking of emptiness is a way of continuously unravelling fixed preconceptions. While this could be disorienting, it also has another effect. Buddhist views are not just questions of ontology – the question of what is reality – what is not reality. Instead the teachings themselves are evocative of particular experiences. What is the result of dismantling our concepts? We are left with a heightened sense of non-conceptual presence.
-Excerpt from Pema Khandro's teachings in The Guide to the Bodhisattva’s Way of Life, the Bodhicharyavatara
As Buddhist philosopher of the second century Nagarjuna states, "Thanks to emptiness, everything is possible.” Emptiness makes room for other modes of experience, particularly ones that enable us to sit with the intensity of emotions and energies, and let them pass with the support of our open, non-judgmental awareness. In Aikido, this process invites us to relax, relate, and move with the energy. We let go of control and force. As Buddhist nun Pema Chödrön writes, the teachings of emptiness give us nothing to hold on to:
As human beings, not only do we seek resolution, but we also feel that we deserve resolution. However, not only do we not deserve resolution, we suffer from resolution. We don't deserve resolution; we deserve something better than that. We deserve our birthright, which is the middle way, an open state of mind that can relax with paradox and ambiguity.
Holding the paradox is not something any of us will suddenly be able to do. That’s why we’re encouraged to spend our whole lives training with uncertainty, ambiguity, insecurity. To stay in the middle prepares us to meet the unknown without fear; it prepares us to face both our life and our death. The in-between state—where moment by moment the warrior finds himself learning to let go—is the perfect training ground. It really doesn’t matter if we feel depressed about that or inspired. There is absolutely no way to do this just right. That’s why compassion and maitri (loving-kindness), along with courage, are vital: they give us the resources to be genuine about where we are, but at the same time to know that we are always in transition, that the only time is now, and that the future is completely unpredictable and open.
As we continue to train, we evolve beyond the little me who continually seeks zones of comfort. We gradually discover that we are big enough to hold something that is neither lie nor truth, neither pure nor impure, neither bad nor good. But first we have to appreciate the richness of the (seemingly) groundless state and hang in there.
It’s important to hear about this in-between state. Otherwise we think the warrior’s journey is one way or the other; either we’re all caught up or we’re free. The fact is that we spend a long time in the middle. This juicy spot is a fruitful place to be. Resting here completely—steadfastly experiencing the clarity of the present moment—is called enlightenment.
