Dec 25, 20248 min read

You Have to Practice That Way

In 1971 I moved out of a University of Texas dorm and into a house that I shared with friends. In those days in Austin, you could get a 3-bedroom place for $150/month. We were smack in the middle of Dickens' yin/yang: the best/the worst of times. It was easy to make the rent and have plenty of time to pursue your interests, but if your interests weren’t too attuned to your studies, there could be real trouble. A failing grade could end your student deferment and you’d wind up in the jungles of Vietnam. Thus we became unwilling scholars.

Or maybe it was Yeats' widening gyre[i] we found ourselves trapped in. It certainly felt that the center could not hold. But was that a good or a bad thing? The turmoil in the streets was approaching revolutionary fervor. Our leaders knew their dirty war was unwinnable. Still they kept sending their young to be sacrificed.

But a different revolution seemed to be in the wings: a revolution of consciousness that sometimes felt like humanity’s evolution into a new way of being. It was wonderful and terrible to live through a time when “mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,” and all possibilities swirled around us. It seemed like we could wipe the slate clean and begin anew. So out went the baby with the bathwater.

That Christmas, John Lennon wrote a brand-new carol in which he told us,

“War is over if you want it.” [ii]

So war was a choice? This was a new—or at least, seldom proclaimed—idea. War had seemed to most of us an affliction like the plague, a pestilence that swept over you whether you wanted it or not, destroying communities, scrambling coalitions, threatening our easy lives.

This insane war was something I had blamed on the older generation. But you’re saying that war is my choice? Well, that’s different.

We had high ideals in those days. World peace was a concept tossed around readily, along with ideas like eliminating money, dropping out of society to live in utopian communes, or freely loving whomever one wished without jealousy.

The problem was our petty disputes. Living with a bunch of guys for the first time revealed certain deficiencies. Yeah, most of us were slobs. Disagreements arose over who would cook, who was going to do the dishes, why one friend never seemed to come up with his share of the rent. And then there was the discord over women. Clearly our plan to purge the world of jealousy was not working… at least not for some of us.

There was a lot of friction, and at one point one of my housemates asked, “How are we going to achieve world peace when we can’t even get along with our best friends?”

He had a point.

The history of aikido, an art that claims to be a path to conflict resolution, is beset with inner turmoil. Following the Japanese tradition, O-Sensei (Morihei Ueshiba, the founder of aikido) chose his son, Kisshomaru, to inherit the mantle of Doshu and assume the role of head of his organization, Aikikai. Then, in 1969, he awarded the rank of 10th Dan (10th degree black belt) to his Chief Instructor, Koichi Tohei, making him the highest-ranking instructor in aikido.

O-Sensei died on April 26 of that year. It seems that he had set up the perfect conditions for discord.

The Chief Instructor and the Doshu had different ideas of how aikido should be taught.

Tohei had learned the principles of ki development from practicing misogi chanting and Zen meditation at the Ichikukai Dojo. He had also learned Shinshin-Toitsu Do (the way of mind and body unification) from Tempu Nakamura. He saw these as being the underlying principles in aikido and based his teaching around them.

Kisshomaru wanted the emphasis to be on the waza, the martial integrity of the aikido techniques. And so began a split that has persisted in aikido to this day.

Kisshomaru Ueshiba forbade Koichi Tohei from teaching his ki aikido within Aikikai. Tohei tried to accommodate, teaching ki development without aikido outside of the Aikikai dojo, and aikido without emphasis on ki within the dojo. But friction between the two men increased until, in 1974, Tohei left Aikikai to form Shin Shin Toitsu Aikido, splitting the aikido world.

Several of the Aikikai instructors followed Tohei, including Koretoshi Maruyama, Shugi Maruyama, Iwao Tamura, Minoru Kurita, Fumio Toyoda, Roy Suenaka, and my teacher, Shizuo Imaizumi. Five years after O-Sensei’s death, the organization that he created had broken into two parts.

The instructors who followed Tohei set up Shin Shin Toitsu Aikido (Ki Society) dojos in Hawaii, California, Colorado, Illinois, South Carolina, Pennsylvania, and New York. But this arrangement did not last either. In the following years, all the instructors who quit the Hombu dojo with Tohei left him in turn. Dissatisfied with either his teachings or his organization, they each formed their own schools or returned to Aikikai.

Now we have such a splintered array of aikido schools, it’s hard to keep up: Kokikai, Yoshokai, Renshinkai, Shinwakan, The Aikido Schools of Ueshiba, Fugakukai International Association, Aikido Yuishinkai, Keijutsukai Aikido, Seidokan Aikido, Wadokai Aikido, Kokusai Aikido, Tendoryu Aikido, Shingu Style, Nishio Style, Yamaguchi Style, Manseikan Aikido, the Pacific Aikido Federation, Iwama Ryu…

Including my school, Shin Budo Kai.

I first encountered aikido in 1991. When I started the practice, I felt that I was taking up the thread that had been dropped 20 years earlier, back in those days when our high ideals were swept away in the chaos of anarchy. We had believed in a lot of good things, but we didn’t have a practice, a discipline, to lead us along the difficult path we would have to follow to achieve such high goals.

Our lofty principles were quickly abandoned in the mayhem of promiscuous permissiveness. It turns out that it’s good to let Dionysus out to frolic now and then, but maybe not to let him try to run the show.

When Lennon had written “War is over if you want it,” the choices had seemed to be either aggression or pacifism. Aikido offered a third path. It accepted our innate violence and transformed it into a way of reconciliation. I devoted myself to aikido, feeling that I had at last found a practice that could transfigure not only me, but possibly the whole world.

About a year after I began training in aikido came my first great disappointment with the art. Through a chance encounter in a community college gym, I met a talented young martial artist named Stan* who had also just begun doing aikido. I started going to classes under his teacher, Karl, as well as attending every class my Austin Sensei Larkin taught.

What I didn’t know was that Karl and Sensei Larkin had a long history, and each considered the other an adversary. Karl had recently returned from 3 years in New York, studying aikido at Imaizumi’s dojo, and his return to Austin was an attempt to carve out a place for himself within the Shin Budo Kai domain controlled by my sensei.

One night after class, Sensei Larkin took me aside and delivered an extended rant, focusing on what an evil influence Karl was having on me. If I wanted to remain in my sensei’s dojo, I was forbidden to practice with Karl.

The lecture left me broken-hearted. Karl was a gifted aikidoist who was teaching me the art from a different perspective than my sensei. Stan was a clever, athletic student who learned much faster than I, but who was willing to work with me to practice this art I loved. Why couldn’t I train with everyone? Didn’t aikido claim to be a way toward resolving conflict? What the Hell? Was it all another sham?

I found myself going into a deep depression. I quit going to any aikido classes for a while. I wasn’t interested in taking part in hypocrisy. Was this just another group proclaiming high ideals while practicing the usual duplicity that seems to infect every human endeavor?

I decided that I needed to talk with someone. I set up a meeting with my senpai, Daniel, a senior student who had recently tested for nidan (2nd degree black belt). I went into my own long rant, describing the situation to Daniel, bemoaning the personality clash between the two senseis, and ending by saying, “I thought aikido was supposed to help you overcome your ego.”

He looked at me with his sad eyes and said, “You have to practice that way.”

In his last interview before his death, John Lennon several times repeated the phrase, “everything is the opposite of what it is, isn’t it?”

And so the groups with the loftiest ideals seem to be those most plagued by inner turmoil. My wife’s Pilates classes don’t seem to have the problem that I have encountered in aikido dojos. Don’t like your Pilates instructor? Go to a different class or a different studio.

The highest ideal that Pilates subscribes to is the importance of strengthening your body’s core. But Aikido claims to be a path toward resolving conflict, and that’s where all the trouble begins.

How are we going to achieve world peace when we can’t even get along with our best friends?

In the aftermath of the Covid pandemic, we seem once again to have plunged into a time where mere anarchy is loosed upon the world. We’re plagued by wars of conquest, religious wars, the accumulation of wealth into the hands of the rapacious few, the fall of democracies and rise of autocracies across the planet. My own country has become divided into factions more contentious than we have seen since the Civil War.

It seems to me that we all must choose how we are going to respond to the chaos around us. I chose the path of aikido because I believed it to be a way to resolve hostility in the world. I might look around now and conclude, “Well, that didn’t work…”

But perhaps the best thing aikido has to teach us is how to stand strong within our own integrity. Aikido can show us how to live without succumbing to aggression or fear. Its practice can reveal how we are all connected and how our contentions may be reconciled.

A.J. Muste protested the Vietnam War by standing night after night in front of the White House holding a lit candle. A reporter asked him, “Do you really think you are going to change the policies of this country by standing out here alone at night with a candle?” Muste replied, “Oh, I don’t do this to change the country. I do this so the country won’t change me.”

Perhaps when Lennon wrote, “War is over if you want it” he was referring to the war within ourselves. O-Sensei told us, “Masakatsu Agatsu,” True victory is victory over oneself.

Aikido can teach us this. But, as my senpai told me long ago, “You have to practice that way.”