Josh Gold
Bob Noha Sensei has practiced Aikido for 54 years. He has founded four Aikido dojos and has been Chief Instructor of Aikido of Petaluma for the last 38 hears. Bob was a former instructor to U.S Air Force Military Police and has an extensive cross-training background with experience in Kenpo Karate, Boxing, Judo, Pa Kua, Hsing-I and 49 years of training in T’ai-chi Ch’uan.
Tom Collings’ very heartfelt article advocated ways in which more people, especially younger people, can be attracted to the practice of Aikido. His love and concern for the art’s future came through very clearly. This is a worthy goal and I want to express gratitude for his care regarding the future of the art and admiration for his specific program for achieving the goal.
I would like to offer some additional thoughts on how the art can be made more appealing to another part of the population — the 27% of people, according to a PEW survey, who designate themselves as spiritual, but not religious. One of the important points made in Tom Collings’ article is that branding is crucial to success.
Our dojo has specifically focused on the spiritual, but not religious, part of the population. We have had some success in attracting people in their late twenties to early 50s, both men and women. People in this age group have had some significant life experience and a realization that there is more to life than 9 to 5 and pray for the weekend. At the same time, they also recognize the value of enhanced functionality in work, home, and other important aspects of life, as well as the need for physical activity to promote good health.
Where I think the art has fallen short is in not presenting specific practices to lead people to experience the refined states of spiritual wholeness O-Sensei so eloquently talked about and more importantly modeled. This approach to Aikido offers an opportunity for deep spiritual experience in a practice with a physical and functional form. The vast majority of people suffer more from a lack of wholeness and meaning in their lives than from the effects of violent attacks.
The number of police officers who committed suicide outnumbered those killed in the line of duty for the third straight year according to an article in USA Today. This gruesome statistic highlights the great need for practices that promote spiritual, mental, and physical wellbeing even in the most dangerous jobs, let alone for the majority of us who don’t experience the kind of danger police officers do.
I propose that we work to develop a third-tier of practice to complement Tom Collings’ proposed structure of practice. Aikido has the potential to produce the same profound spiritual awakening in people that Zen, Yoga, and many other spiritual traditions offer. To realize that potential it needs to be a specific priority in Aikido classes.
One practice we do is to work with the same technique from the perspective of manifest/physical; hidden/energetic and divine/emptiness of small self. These are three states of consciousness that O-Sensei himself talked about in his lectures and modeled in his Aikido. It does not require one to be at O-Sensei’s level or anywhere near it to have meaningful spiritual experiences.
As Tom Collings so clearly stated, to be taken seriously, you have to deliver on your promise on the benefits the art offers. We can offer several perspectives on the art depending on who we are trying to appeal to. I think the greater number of long-term students are likely to come from people at or near middle-age looking for meaning and wholeness in their lives regardless of their age. If we want to promote the art as one of spiritual wholeness, we need to be able to offer practices that give our students that experience, just as Tom Collings’ article says about self-defense. I think significant progress can be made in the six month timeframe he outlined for self-defense competence.
I share a dojo space with people who practice Kenpo Karate, Escrima, and Kickboxing and have even sat on their promotion boards. We have always operated with mutual respect for the specific aims of our practices.
Respectfully submitted,
Bob Noha
Aikido of Petaluma
Antonio Aloia
“Where I think the art has fallen short is in not presenting specific practices to lead people to experience the refined states of spiritual wholeness O-Sensei so eloquently talked about and more importantly modeled.”
👆🏿 There it is, in nutshell.
But here’s the rub. A “religious” Aikido is more digestible, granted, but lacks both the integrity of a workable Budo and the profound mystical spirituality of transformation.
It winds up being neither “fish nor fowl”.
To address the physical dimension, the philosophical dimension, and the spiritual dimension with equal enthusiasm and rigor is simply beyond most folks. And beyond most Aikido teachers, as well.
Aikido (imho) is full 3-course meal, and requires a mature and sophisticated palate.
Just soup and salad … just meat and potatoes … just a sweet dessert – is to miss the fullness and depth of the experience.
Aikido’s future is more in the balance than ever. I wonder if it will ever realize the Founder’s Vision.
~ David Brown
3rd Dan
Aikikai
Hi David,
Thanks for you comments. I understand your skepticism that the kind of practices I discussed are beyond most people. I have not found that to be the case, after teaching in the Washington DC area in the early 70’s, Buffalo NY and Niagara Falls Ontario in the mid 1970’s and Northern Cal. since 1982. I have had students of all ages and educational backgrounds from graduates of Harvard Medical School; Olympic Athletes to people like myself of modest backgrounds. I do think the practices have to be carefully crafted. But if they are people respond very well to them.
All the best.
Bob Noha
Thank you Bob.
Please allow me to respectfully applaud your approach and all your efforts .
I hung up my hakama a decade ago, so I must admit that there may well be some teachers-and-dojos that are taking a fully integrated approach to the Art.
During my career, Saotome Sensei came about as close as anyone.
He brought a lot to the table.
Superb Martial Man
Top Drawer Intellect
Philosophically Sophisticated
Highly Artistic
Fascinated About Consciousness
His background, talents, interests, and aptitude made him well suited for just such an attempt.
And, like us all, he packaged it in a personality that was not without its quirks and ‘less than’s’.
But, since I was always interested in the all-out full-tilt boogie approach:
Intellect
Heart
Body
Soul-Spirit
I found that I had to venture beyond (sometimes waaay beyond) the confines of Aikikai Hombu type dojos and teachers.
Philosophy
Depth Psychology
Transpersonal Psychology
Sacred Tradition
Zen
Bujistu and Buford
Japanese Culture and Aesthetics
… and yes, some excellent New Age Human Potential stuff as well.
In the words of Buckminster Fuller,
“The world is now too dangerous for anything less than Utopia.”
~ David Brown
Thanks David,
Great thoughts.
Bob
I have always said that if Bucky had practiced a martial art, it would have been Aikido. 🙂
Sean Conley , 5th Dan USAF
I don’t understand why Aikido is one of the the few (if not the only martial art) where there is even a choice? Why can’t there be the focus on spiritual growth AND practical martial art application for self-defense? It’s as if it’s implied that one has a fork in the road and to choose one one automatically looses the benefits of the other. I’m very confident that both can be done simultaneously!😎
I agree entirely with Robert, when people find a spiritual connection they often discover something that leads them to search for more. Particularly when the spiritual or even consciousness aspect manifests itself physically. The more you believe the ki is there, the more the ki becomes real. … and even tangible to the touch. This is the stuff that keeps you going when the body wants to hang up the belt. Once people discover the spirit side, they will stay the course for life.
Age will take its toll . . . no one escapes alive !
Thank you for your article.
Historically it was believed that students in the 20th Century were not interested in the philosophical/spiritual aspects of Aikido and therefore it was not really discussed in many of our dojos.
I personally was interested in these aspects and found this attitude extremely frustrating.
Over the years I have been pleasantly surprised by the numbers of people who have heard of Aikido and it’s philosophy and were drawn to Aikido not because it would make you the toughest person on the block but because of its philosophy of harmony.
A major part of marketing of anything is understanding the needs and wants of your customers.
Some of you may be familiar with Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. According to Maslow, we have five categories of needs:1, physiological,2, safety,3, love, 4, esteem, and 5, self-actualization. In this theory, higher needs in the hierarchy begin to emerge when people feel they have sufficiently satisfied the previous need.
We might want to consider where on this continuum do potential students fit and do they actually move from survival to self actualization as a result of their Aikido practice?
For me this is what Aikido is all about and if we don’t provide our students with a program of personal development they will look somewhere else for it.
Thank you for your thoughtful article.
Thanks John,
We can all learn a lot from Maslow and what our students and we need.
All the best.
Bob
In the Netherlands sensei Piet Lagerwaard developed a training for older people (55 or older). I, as an 70 year old woman and practicing buddhism, started the training a year ago. It is an amazing experience bodywise and helps to feel whole in a spiritual sense. Even at my age!
That is inspirational. Thank you for sharing it.
All the best.
Bob Noha
This is too vague for me. What does “spiritual” mean? What does “spiritual but not religious” mean? What is “spiritual wholeness”? What are the criteria for “personal development”?
And, as Jason Rudolph asks, why can’t these things accompany a practical martial art?
Thanks ppl, for the discussion. Aikido techniques are kata. No one criticizes Karate kata, even though when you turn to the left in the kata, there might be ten people on your right. Kata are not applications, but that’s not a reason to stop doing them. Secondly, the reason for doing Iriminage is that we learn something from it that we wouldn’t learn from just bashing someone in the nose. That does not mean that we won’t flatten someone’s nose if that’s what we decide to do. Yes, we could add a few things to make our students better fighters. 10 more techniques, done well, and your students will be able to fight. Practice some applications, it’s a martial art and we can learn from that sort of practice. However, Aikido is more play than fight, and we learn a lot from playing with sankyo, for example, and we don’t need to feel badly about it.
I am not entirely sure what ‘spiritual’ means here. It is contrasted with physical and mental, but is not religious, especially as this is understood in the Judaeo-Christian tradition. I am also in the correct age category, being 76 and having practiced since about 1968. The Japanese have an elegant description of this age group: kouki koureisha: elderly people at the final stage.
All my teachers have been Japanese, direct students of Morihei Ueshiba, but none of them made a very good job of explaining what ‘spiritual’ meant, as this seems to be largely understood in aikido. Hiroshi Tada made a great effort, but it seems that the spiritual aspect of aikido is best learned by practicing, rather than philosophizing about it.
One of my teachers was K Chiba and when I told him that I was going to live in Japan and practice aikido there, He gave me some very severe advice: Do not go to Japan just to practice aikido. ‘They’ will suck the blood out of you and when they are done with you, will throw you away like a piece of garbage. Get a good job first, in a god university, and when you are financially secure, then find a dojo.’
I followed Chiba’s advice and have just retired from Hiroshima University. Hiroshima has strong claims to be very ‘spiritual’ anyway, because of the atom bomb, but the Japanese shihan made no effort to present aikido as a ‘spiritual’ art. You HAD to deal with atemi and also give as good as you received. He trained with the jo and also did Brazilian jujutsu.
I injured my shoulder and could not practice. I was heartened when one of my students (a 3rd dan whose two teenage kids also practice) told me: ‘You have to come back. No one teaches like you do and all the students have gone.’ I am the only member of the dojo who is not Japanese, though I teach in Japanese. We have no problem with numbers and I wonder whether the problem is peculiar to the US, or Europe.
Peter Goldsbury
Hi Peter,
I appreciate the opportunity to clarify what I mean by spiritual.
O Sensei in both the Secret Teachings of Aikido and The Heart of Aikido referred to manifest/physical; hidden/energetic and divine/causal emptiness states of consciousness as well as the void.
All the great spiritual traditions East and West have very similar if not almost identical views of these dimensions of spiritual consciousness. They represent an important part of our human potential.
In Tibetan Buddhism they refer to the Bardo realms between the physical and the realm of pure light or the void. Many Christian contemplative texts have similar structures including St Teresa of Avila and St John of the Cross.
In the Jewish tradition, Issac Luria, a teacher of Kabbalah in Israel in the 16th century, had a cosmology strikingly similar to O Sensei’s. A local Rabbi in Northern Cal. who is also a nidan in Aikido wrote a very interesting book on the great similarities between Luria’s work and Aikido.
Sharkara the reformer of the Indian order of Swamis referred to these states of consciousness as gross, subtle and causal.
According to Shankara and other spiritual writers past and present every human goes through these three basic dimensions every day. He referred to waking, dreaming and deep dreamless sleep.
Among modern writers Joseph Campbell and Ken Wilbur have shown the very clear relationships, at the level of spiritual experience, among contemplatives in all the major spiritual traditions. The Dalai Lama and Thomas Merton, a Trappist Monk, met and found common ground not at the level of religious doctrine but in the experiences of these refined states of consciousness. There is a very moving photo of the Dalai Lama laying a wreath at Thomas Merton’s grave site when he visited his monastery in Kentucky.
In the Sufi tradition there is a fine book (Heart , Self and Soul) by Robert Frager a direct student of O Sensei and a Sufi Sheik (also a Harvard PhD) that provides a detailed description of Sufi spirituality that has profound connections with Aikido.
My T’ai-chi teacher called these states human, earthly and heavenly and provided detailed practices to directly experience them.
We spend about half of our time in my dojo on specific practices (not philosophical discussions) to directly experience these basic states of consciousness and then experience how they are functionally manifested in basic Aikido techniques.
I believe in our modern era where knowledge of all the great traditions past and present are available to us, Aikido can and should take its place with these great traditions. My experience in over 50 years as an Aikido teacher is that there is a real hunger for this deep spirituality and that Aikido is one way to fulfill that desire. One developmental psychologist I read talked about spiritual intelligence as what is of ultimate importance to you. I have seen directly how Aikido can help people to experience these ultimate truths.
All the best.
Bob Noha
Hello Bob,
One of the reasons why I do not teach aikido as an explicitly spiritual art is that I am not sure that I am able to, given my situation here in Hiroshima, and also that none of my teachers did so. Of course, they were part of a cultural / spiritual tradition, but so was I. Only that it was a different one. I spent several years in a religious order, so I am reasonably well aware of the various religious and spiritual traditions. I think that Shinto and Omoto are quite important here, especially for understanding Morihei Ueshiba. However, I do not teach any of this to my students. Keiko is what matters to them.
Best wishes,
PAG
Bob,
What a marvelous lay-out.
Bold and nuanced. Straight forward and subtle. Simple and complex.
👉🏿 “O Sensei in both the Secret Teachings of Aikido and The Heart of Aikido referred to manifest/physical; hidden/energetic and divine/causal emptiness states of consciousness as well as the void.“
__________
Modern Koan:
“What’s the most important leg of a three-legged stool?
Why, it’s the one that missing, … of course.”
__________
The multi-faceted approach, of which you speak so eloquently, requires that we unravel the skein of our living experience, examine the strands, study their various natures and qualities, refine them … and then consciously reweave them into our own unique braid.
More than a mere reassembly of the parts; it is a fusion and integration that makes possible a new and creative synthesis.
As in cuisine, that mysterious flavor experience of what the Japanese call “umami” shows up when this kind of
fusion, integration, and synthesis come together harmoniously.
We poetically call that … “the magic”.
O’Sensei gave us a template and a Path to discover that magic for ourselves.
It’s all about that missing leg, yo,
Respectfully,
~David Brown
Hi Peter,
I certainly respect your decision and sensitivity to your students needs.
I am also sorry to hear about your shoulder injury. I hope you recover fully and can continue training.
All the best.
Bob
Thanks David,
Your layout is most eloquent. In your previous response the sources you cited are certainly ones I have also referred to with great benefit.
All the best.
bob
So you think of Aikido as a meditation practice similar to the spinning of the Sufi dervishes? That clarifies things greatly. Thanks.
Sensei, I’d be very interested to know the title and/or author of the book on R. Luria! I just did a quick search and found articles by Daniel Cohn, Laura Brown, and Jack Susman, but no books (yet).
Thank you for this fascinating article and discussion.
Hi Erik,
I’m glad you enjoyed the article. Two books I referenced are: Physician of the Soul Healer of the Cosmos by Lawrence Fine and Kinesthetic Kabbalah by Daniel Kohl.
All the best.
bob
Thank you! I’ll go look for them.
I am a long time student of Bob Noha. The practices we do in class to experience the manifest, hidden, divine, and the void, are making a positive difference in my life. I know there is help available from the universe for whatever my call-off might be. I don’t have to fix everything. I get to work on myself. I can be easier on myself, as I work on getting to a state of wholeness versus conflict. I can sometimes feel inputs from the void entering my system and am always surprised. The biggest challenge for me is working on letting go of being in control, trusting that the inputs will come in if I am truly open to them, letting go, letting go, and letting go, again. I am grateful to my teacher, Bob Noha, for giving me hope and practices I can do to be happy. Even at 64 years old, I can still train the way that we train. Everyone supports everyone, to train however they can. It feels good to be where I feel accepted for who I am.
Since it has come up multiple times, another view of what spirituality means in Aikido may be worthwhile; and as part of full disclosure, I am a student of Sensei Noha.
When a group of people see a gorgeous sunset, one so spectacular they may be moved to tears, they may very well give thanks for it, and each in their own way based on their religion.
They were all moved by the same sunset in a similar way; this was the spriritual experience. They all gave thanks for it in their own way; this was the religious practice or experience.
We can practice and cultivate Aikido for the spiritual experience, leaving the religious understanding for each individual.
I have been moved many times by events and practices that endevor to allow the deeper experience rather than on a better technique. When this is done, the techniques become the medium of experience rather than the goal, just as a painter using paint, brushes, and canvas, endovors to convey an experience to the viewer. Their goal is the final viewer experience, not just better and better brush strokes.
Some may say that this can only be done after much phisical practice and training, but that is not what I have found. I have worked with many white belts who, when given the chance and guidance, have had deeper experiences of oneself and their interaction with the world (and often with comments like “cool” or “wow”).
What attracted me to Aikido originally was that it was not focused on self-defense, but on using the training as the means to challenge, discover, and develop the personal, and spiritual self. It still is.
Delightful article and fabulous Sensei!
I am very glad for this article and comments by Peter Goldbury. I have also read Tom Collings article and felt the same that it was rather short-sighted. Aikido is spiritual, certainly at the level of training O-Sensei endorsed in his later years. It’s a matter of scholarship to tie the traditions Bob talks about with O-Sensei’s philosophy. It’s not an easy fit from Omoto-kyo to Sufism and every other deep spiritual tradition but I think the perennial philosophy is worth restating for the benefit of those unaware of aikido’s contribution to it.
I was also glad to read in this article that O-Sensei had come across the three (four) states of consciousness. I have independently arrived at this and talk about it in my upcoming book “Aikido & The Fight for Love.” There are indeed three ways of approaching aikido, and in the same class too. Each person should be able to approach a class at the level they wish to work on. The spiritual, in my view, is probably the best because the learning curve is faster that way, since the basis for technique is at this level. Techniques though can be learned most obviously at the surface, manifest, level. Energy would be the next level, including how to sense ourselves, which naturally leads to ‘reading’ our partner’s tensions and thereby apply the right technique. The final level, the spiritual, is about letting go. By letting go, apart from natural misogi (purifying defilements in mind and body) we realize the great mission aikido, which is to discover for ourselves the spirit of love and to spread this as a matter of course.
I am also a person, like Noha, who, in comparing and combining insights from taiji with aikido, has gained a great deal. In short, in my view, when aikido is practiced with the right spirit, these insights come naturally to us, without necessarily learning these things from our particular instructor. I therefore find myself mid-way between Noha and Goldbury. “Pure” training, while trying to figure out aikido on our own, quietly, diligently, over many years, may also deliver us to what we seek from it, if we would only listen to its original teaching.
Hi Keni,
Thanks for your comments.
I look forward to reading your book.
All the best.
Bob
Dear Bob,
Are these designations of ‘Divine, Manifest and Hidden’ a direct translation of, and reference to, the original three realms in the Kojiki—the Sangen? and with its subsequent use with the various threesomes.
Or are they a separate reference to a specific usage? 🙏