Aikido as Transformative and Embodied Pedagogy by Michael A. Gordon

Author:Michael A. Gordon
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030239534
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

Intersubjectivity Through Aikido

Aikido is a Japanese defensive art developed by founder Morihei Ueshiba (b. 1883, d. 1969). From its Shinto spiritual underpinnings, Aikido integrates many other martial forms, such as jiujutsu, kenjutsu (sword), comprising a modern form of budo or warriorship. However, in its most popularized and widely adapted form, Aikido represents the culmination of spiritual awakening of the founder through his epiphany about nondual existence, non-resistance, and the realization of inseparability from the cosmos.

The word aikido is self-revealing and descriptive. AI can be translated as ‘harmony’ or ‘to blend’; KI represents life force, the Universe itself, or ‘universal love;’ DO means ‘way’ or ‘path.’ Thus, the art represents a way of harmonizing one’s self with all of creation; the cultivation/purification of oneself so as to live in non-resistant interdependence with all living beings. Much like satori or enlightenment achieved in Zen meditation, where one’s ‘bare attention’ leads to the ‘pure experience’ that Nishida describes (Yusa, 1997), Aikido involves a kind of ‘stripping away’ of self-other separation, of self-defence, and provides a spiritual approach that suffuses the partner training with an ethos of mutual liberation, interdependence, and flowing intersubjectivity. Beyond any anachronistic setting in budo and samurai culture, Aikido is a thoroughly modern art that emerged in its full form after the devastation Japan suffered in WWII. Designated when the founder described it as the ‘Art of Peace,’ Aikido itself was born of founder Morihei Ueshiba’s spiritual epiphany through not only mind-body unification but also mind-cosmos unification: ‘I am the Universe!’ 3

Aikido, while conventionally regarded as an art of tactical self-defence, is a dynamic, relational, and experiential model of contemplative awareness-in-action. It offers practitioners across all walks of life a practical, nuanced, and adaptive approach to cultivating self-actualization in daily life through an embodied practice of non-resistance to conflict, developed reflexively and progressively through emergent and nonreactive human responsiveness. As such, the proposal here is that Aikido represents a second-person model for interrelationality, intersubjectivity, contemplative education, and daily life. 4

As regards second-person of intersubjectivity, which presents an ‘inter-space’ between first-person (the constructed self) or third person (the constructed other), Yuasa (1987), commenting on Tetsuro, asks: “What does it mean to exist in betweenness (aidagara)?” 5 What Yuasa is addressing here is not merely a phenomenological problem but a methodological, even an ethical, one; in an increasingly complex and competitive world, we need relational, collaborative, and dialogic approaches in order to move beyond mindfulness-based practices that risk abetting socially constructed patterns of materialism, exploitation, privilege or narcissistic self-absorption. 6 Cultivation of ‘inner’ traits of introspection, emotional labelling and self-regulation, and stress reduction—while highly beneficial as interventions against self-harm or one’s own outward reactivity—doesn’t necessarily engage the relational aspect of conflict or imbalances of power that permeate the human world and runs the risk of reinforcing a subjectivist first-person interiority.

What takes contemplative practice from an independent to an interdependent worldview is groundedness in intersubjectivity. In Buddhism, for example, meditation is an experiential method of self-inquiry in which one observes the illusory ego-construct of separateness, with the ultimate aim of releasing one’s self from this illusion.

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