It seems to me there are any number of valid choices in response to conflict - from becoming limp in order to do no harm to the choice to cause pain and even damage while doing as little lasting harm as possible. The choice I have a hard time respecting is a voluntary lack of careful decisions about and practice of your choice of response.
My choices
When I was a boy I struck another boy who took the lead in a group that chose to victimize me. I struck him in the face, knocked him to the ground and saw the look on his face as he became the victim instead of me. I ran home from his house crying while they all watched dumbfounded. Thereafter I developed a willingness to allow myself to be harmed in order to model non-violence. This I practiced. Then, it became clear that there was a middle ground that would allow me to intervene when others were being victimized which the surrender method did not provide. For several years I studied what was available to me - the percussive (punching and kicking) martial arts. It became clear that this was not the middle ground I had imagined, so I stopped despite enjoying the rigor and competition. In 1990 I renewed my search for the discipline that would fit my desire for a conflict method that matched my ideology and discovered an art that has some grounds for identifying itself with peace and harmony.
Aikido as embodied metaphor
“In aikido we do not train to become powerful or to throw down some opponent. Rather we train in hopes of being of some use, however small our role may be, in the task of bringing peace to mankind around the world.” - Morihei Ueshiba, O'Sensei, Founder of Aikido
One way, rather than The Way, I approach peace work is the practice of aikido. Since it involves taking control of another person's balance and altering their perception, there is always in martial practice the potential for the use of strength for domination. Since aikido seeks a transformation of the conflict experience and the cycle of violence, rather than practicing total annihilation of The Enemy, practitioners run the risk of being overrun by an attacker. These are the tensions, both in the bodies and in the minds of the persons participating, that make Aikido work when it works as self defense and fail when it fails.
The practice of Aiki as a Way (Do or Tao), however, is both fundamental to and independent of physical combat concerns, because it shapes the practitioner to insist that conflicts shall have a different outcome from the usual: there can be only one winner and they get to do as they like. Combat systems appropriately seek always to win. While training toward fluency, however, so that success is more frequent, aikido whets its effectiveness against an ever more difficult challenge by insisting that mastery involves the unexpected shift of expectations from "whatever you thought was going to happen, now it will be as I would have it!" toward insisting that every person, even with the least acceptable behavior, be able to make it through dilemmas intact and, if possible, with additional learning and options. This deconstructs the cycle of violence itself rather than simply defeating a particular group of attackers.
Martial Nonviolence or MNv® is the proces art of conflict training that honors the need to struggle, and feel like a winner and a loser at times, while insisting that friction not be framed as a zero-sum game in which someone must become the victim. It has verbal and somatic components which combine physical aikido with intuition, mediation, social activism, and performance (acting and improvisation) skills. The end result is a profusion of options and different concrete outcomes than anyone thought possible. That these outcomes work for the good of all is still, and will always be, dependent on the character of those involved. That is why conflict studies which build character and compassion in community are so necessary in our world.
Learning Martial Nonviolence is also part of the search process for people ready and willing to be a part of a professional training partnership which practices doing conflict well in order to build peaceful communities. This partnership calls itself Guardians of Peace and which is always in formation.
Please email
Council at GuardiansOfPeace dot org
for more information or to recommend a candidate.
Technique conventions
Both English and Japanese descriptions of techniques are used during training, though MNv uses local (in this case English) plain language descriptions.
FreeAiki reproduces Aikido of Berkeley's testing requirements, so those wanting Aikikai recognized rank may test for Brandon and Kayla Sensei, but also welcomes training partners who are learning other styles. The most important value is that techniques result in the multi-layered shift that the term 'aiki' represents. No matter one's tradition of origin, an application of technique either does or does not:
- base the movement of a consistent posture on
- borrowing an attacker's balance and
- blending to deconstruct an attack
- so that violence on anyone's part becomes extremely unlikely.
Aiki is aiki, even in other languages, images, and martial expressions. In the end, one either blends effectively or not, while it is also true that even in the most effective application there is always room for discovery.
Historical examples of aiki in process arts...
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