Aikido and Violence

By Paul Linden, PhD, Aikido of Columbus

www.being-in-movement.com

In my practice as a somatic educator, I often have clients who are working on issues around anger and violence. In working with these people, I usually start with Being In Movement body awareness training and end with Aikido practice. About ten years ago, I taught a course in a lockup facility for violent adolescents. Many of them were bigger and stronger than I. I'll always remember one particularly big, tough kid. After doing some Aikido, he looked at me with great puzzlement and asked, "How come you can move us and we can't move you?" And my reply was very simple: "That's because you are big and young and strong and I'm little and old and weak!" What I was doing with the Aikido was undermining his and our culture's understanding of what strength is.

Underlying anger and violence is usually a belief that safety depends on being strong, and part of that is the idea that strength is tough and hard. Rather than preach at people, I use physical experiments to test this "philosophical" belief system.

I have a person stand in a deep, strong hanmi stance, and I stand in front of them. I ask them to resist when I push on their shoulders. People generally don't find this difficult, though I sometimes have to coach people on how to focus their posture to deliver efficient resistance. Then I have them say something angry, mean or insulting to me, and they immediately lose stability. When I ask people why that happened, they often guess that when they started talking they lost focus. To test this hypothesis, I have them stand in the same stance and talk about pizza, and, much to their surprise, they do not lose stability. I then explain to them that the body does not function well in states of unkindness or hatred. The same experiment can be carried out with manipulative or jealous or arrogant statements. Basically, any psychological or spiritual negativity results in weakening of the body.

Then I follow that experiment with a second experiment. I have people stand in the same stance and say something kind while they resist my push. People generally experience that kind or generous statements increase their stability and their ability to resist strongly. These movement experiments undermine people's notions that anger and opposition are the sources of strength, and they experience that in fact, kindness promotes physical strength. In talking about these two experiments, I usually say that you can be angry or you can be strong, but you can't be both.

There is another experiment that I often use alongside this anger/kindness exercise. I have people stand in the same deep, strong stance as before, and I push on their shoulders as before. Then I have the people lift their eyebrows. Immediately they will fall back. I explain that the reason is that the fear/startle response is a movement pattern which includes lifting the eye brows and also retreatingÑand firing off any piece of the pattern evokes the whole pattern. I make the point that they arenÕt afraid of anything at the moment, but fear is a "mechanical" process that they can switch on physically. And by going back to kindness, they can switch fear off.

The point of these experiments is that fear and anger are physiological actions -- and they can be replaced by the physiologically incompatible action of compassionate power. In body work sessions, I can lead clients step-by-step into this awareness. What will anchor the awareness in their daily life functioning is an experience of the effectiveness of dealing with violence through kindness and nonviolence. And that is Aikido.

The movements of Aikido are soft, circular, gentle, and powerful. Giving people an experience of that anchors the new awareness in their bodies, which enables them to use gentle power in place of violence in their daily lives.

Not long ago, I did one class for a group of incarcerated juvenile sex offenders, and I used these and other similar body awareness exercises exercises. The participants were especially struck by the experience of gentle power in Aikido. I was told by their therapist that for weeks afterwards in therapy, when one of them started to get tough and hard, the others would say "Remember that Paul showed you that power was soft."

If you're interested in learning more about the applications of Aikido outside the traditional dojo setting, here are two resources you might find helpful. To see more of the body awareness exercises I use in working with violence and trauma, you could take a look at my e-books Winning is Healing: Body Awareness and Empowerment for Abuse Survivors and Embodied Peacemaking: Body Awareness, Self-Regulation and Conflict Resolution. Go to www.being-in-movement.com/catalog

You could also get information about using Aikido in trauma work and other nontraditional areas from Aiki-Extensions www.Aiki-Extensions.org . AE is not an Aikido organization. It's an international association of people interested in Aiki-based networking and project development. There are, for example, committees on the use of Aikido in bodywork and psychotherapy, in elementary education or teaching people with disabilities, in peacemaking and so on.

In this violence-filled world, Aikido's greatest contribution may be outside the dojo, in changing people's beliefs about what power is and about how to live non-violently.