Josh Gold
More than anything else, Budo training teaches empathy. If you can dish it out, you can take it in equal measure. Otherwise don’t.
Aikido, more so, researches the finer nuances.
How many times have I experienced big, tough, macho, sissies frightened of the small woman in the class, because when they escalate, she reciprocates. It still has not sunk, and for some fools, it takes a long time.
But that’s the rule of the dojo. Your escalation is a request to match the intensity.
Respect is paramount. Lack of self-respect is reflected in lack of respect for others.
It’s a well-known statistic of psychiatry that people often marry their violent parent in finding a partner that at first appears to be otherwise. What is it in the human psyche that provides the hand-in-glove fit?
It may be possible that unresolved life lessons about protecting integrity are not yet completed. The body memory forgets nothing. Every experience is locked in forever until resolved and transmuted. The frontal lobe conscious memory may forget, but the unconscious biological patterns remain.
Some therapies attempt suppression or desensitization but these merely weaken a person. Our inner demons must be faced, but before they can be faced, the psyche must know that it is strong enough to do so safely. Cognitive behaviours and fears that began as physical experience are hard pressed to be altered by mere talk. If the original experience was physical, the whole body-mind needs to become safe in meeting a similar, albeit modulated experience.
Anxiety has a basis in something real as well as conceptual and a point of resolution can be arrived at by producing a safe similar experience. However, in order to be truly effective, only the individual can make that choice. Imposition or unexpected circumstances are often contributory to the cause of the phobia.
A safe overlay resulting in a more positive outcome with a similar experience, can indeed be therapeutic, or at least auxiliary to other methods of healing.
Why Budo? Why not dance; or yoga; or jogging; or gymnastics; or rowing or something else?
All bodywork is good. It expands the mind in context with actuality. But Budo addresses something closer to our primal needs for defence. At our very roots, and no doubt embedded in genetic memory and in most lives, also fearsome past experiences, is the need to defend.
If even but re-enacted, a successful outcome begins to have a salubrious effect. As training escalates skill levels, it may be possible to overrule the previous victim state and become a successful protector. Some do reach this state.
Consider, what we consensually do in the dojo would be considered assault in other circumstances, where no consent exists. But we experience it well and go home happy, if at times bruised as well.
The intent of a dojo is to heal the psyche and empower skill, acclimatize and enable. To the extent it is real, it is indeed real. Certainly more real than talk that painfully revives a dead experience. Active training does not relive the dead, it revives the living, producing a healthy overlay to our cellular memory that is likewise more than merely conceptual, but real.
Budo training is more than only acclimatization, however. It progressively immunizes against at least the likeness of violence. Budo does not desensitize. Budo sensitizes in a radiant and dynamic way.
Life is a journey. A journey full of gifts. Some of these gifts of energy are so intense as to be unpleasant. Even traumatic. But the journey is unavoidable. It has to be met. The loving universe is ruthless.
How can we meet the rigors of the journey? Anything that enables the hard dance of survival navigation is a welcome friend.
The novelist Marcel Proust put this succinctly when he said: “We do not receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey through the wilderness, which no one else can make for us, which no one can spare us, for our wisdom is the point of view from which we come at last to regard the world..”
It helps to prepares us for a better quality journey through this “wilderness,” if some experience is re-enacted in a modulated way, in a safe training environment, so that, if and when a time should come, we are well drilled, sufficiently to at least survive an intense experience. Such training may also serve to modify deeply entrenched old patterns.
In resolving and balancing fear, doubt, pain, denial and suppressed memories which may be raging under the surface modifying and distracting the fullness life; in digesting and transmuting these thereby, we also stand a good chance of learning the lessons of empathy. This makes us more conscious of our own behaviours with the rough edges that grate and add to discord we don’t even know we carry. Not until these surface and dissipate in balanced energy.
Without such an internal balance, instead of noticing the actual, as it is, we tend to live out of suppositions, unfounded fears and preconceptions which tend to objectify the different, the dreaded “others,” and thereby we become perpetrators of suffering, even when we don’t know we may be doing so. Even the “nicest” person’s footsteps may be causing harm, because it is not about forced niceness or insincere acting of hypocritical manners. Rather such deep sincerity of truthful action as the pivotal and far reaching manners of old. Reigi is or should be, the practice of empathy. However, sometimes it happens that a “rough diamond,” one with a heart of gold, may appear as having bad manners, these only being offset by the depth of his otherwise good intent.
These nuances should be studied. For example, reserved manners often reveal suspicion or extreme caution; and that a reason may exist. The true budoka however, evolves from either too gentle manners, or no manners at all, to a certain aura of grace and dignity which is above formality, and yet both evinces and evokes a measure of mature spirit.
At the foundation of Aikido is empathy and empathy is the core of harmony; since harmony comes from the ki-no-musubi, that, knowing no separation, moves as one, but without loss of either energy or integrity.
Nothing good or lasting happens overnight. Addressing doubts by way of actively confronting patterns of behaviour and memory, in an active way that is regular and empowering, not only enables, not only adds to healing of old patterns, but also enables empathy.
The Way or Do, is not separate from life. Do or Michi is inclusive of life, indeed at the core of life. Training waters the roots of the tree and what, at the core, we are. Budo, Aikido, Kami-no-Michi is the Way of Life.
Empathy is the basis and lubricant for real and practical harmony.
Nev Sagiba
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