On June 12th, Hiroshi Isoyama Shihan will be visiting Southlake, Texas where he will be the leading instructor at an Aikido seminar. Isoyama Shihan currently holds an 8th Dan within the Aikikai and is the Chief Instructor at the Ibaraki Shibu Dojo in Iwama, Japan on behalf of Ueshiba Moriteru Doshu.

Isoyama Shihan started his career in Aikido at the age of 12 as a student of Ueshiba Morihei O-Sensei, the founder of Aikido. During his long career in the martial arts, Isoyama Shihan has been the Chief Instructor of Defensive Tactics for the Japan Self Defense Force Academy, and has been an instructor to the U.S. Army on self defense tactics. Some of his first students were members of the American Military Police, and eventually included amongst others, Steven Seagal Sensei, as well as members of Japan’s armed forces.

For more information about this event please visit www.isoyamaseminar.com.

The customer is always right. If you want his money that is.

The attacker is always right. At least she will believe so.

The salient feature of Aikido is that it does not evaluate, but harmonizes everything that is thrown at it. Well, real Aikido, I don’t know about pseudo-budo.

When you evaluate the “rightness” or the “wrongness” of an attack, you become entangled in the attacker’s unwell, or inventive attacking mindset of conflict, instead of simply dealing with the actuality at hand. Ideas and opinions don’t win fights. Good responses do. Conflict is merely a reflection of the torment the attacker carries in his mind. Adding to it is like adding petrol to fire. Explosive.

I learned in twelfth grade psychology class that the major cultural difference between East and West is collectivism versus individualism. Although I have not traveled beyond the United States and its nearby protectorates, befriending Asian people has reinforced what my psychology teacher and accompanying textbook taught.

There is a tendency in the East, including Aikido’s homeland of Japan, to accomplish what is best for the group. This group may be limited to immediate peers, or branch out to an individual’s entire corporation or organization. It may even become national or encompass the perceived entire world.

Many people forget what it was like to start for the very first time.

So many people would like to make a start, but out of either fear, timidity, unsureness, or a list of other reasons, never do.

If you made it past the wishing and hoping and perhaps occasionally enquiring, and have got as far as actually finding and visiting a dojo; CONGRATULATIONS!

That was the first test, “Grasshopper!” Your warrior spirit is showing! Make no mistake about it, whatever anybody says. Any Budo is a warrior yoga not to be taken lightly.

Simple ink on paper, three figures in a line. Circle. Square. Triangle.

Terry Dobson once asked O Sensei to tell him what the circle, square, and triangle meant in aikido. The master told him to figure it out for himself. I love that, it’s Beautiful.

This is how zen koans work. The answers you arrive at must come from you, must be really yours, not something somebody else has said. They must be authentic expressions of your lived experience, of the living energy of the question interacting with your own experience. They must really be authentic, and if a teacher rolls out his or her understanding too readily, too often, his generosity and helpfulness may displace the student’s work. Too forthcoming, he may actually weaken the learning process, and he may build dependancy and laziness, under the guise of teaching. Such a teacher may wind up with lots of followers and few real students.

“Discussing Aikido during dinner using props…”

“So the salt and pepper packets are the feet… the toothpicks are the jo and… wait, where did I loose you?

How many times do you find people who say, Aikido has everything you need in a martial art? Obviously, looking at the history of aikido, and various training that the highest teachers of aikido practice might have experienced, this is not true. In their youth, all students try different martial arts, and gain a variety of skills, if not from training in martial arts, then from experiences of their life, and their everyday humdrum lives. Everything you do while being alive is some sort of training, more or less.

Training is the adaptation of techniques to a specific task. From the time your headlights come on as a child, and your memory clicks on, you have those memories the rest of your life until the time you die. You are continually adapting and training your body and mind to function in the world around you.

This is possibly the most ancient of battles and it’s still raging. In a sense it’s not a battle at all, but a seeking of balance. However, by the time human beings appeared, it defined our existence from the core, and it still does.

Externally we can not live without either fire or water. Nor the earth and air. The planet is carbon based minerals surrounded by a thin later of air which modifies their changes, at the surface at least. The vast bulk of the planet is water. All this is cooled and heated by the cycles of the sun. These primaries, identified by the ancients as the original ancestors: fire, water, air and earth, are not entirely separate entities. The each exist in each other. They intersperse each other. At the surface, the atmosphere is about 78% nitrogen, 21% oxygen, 1% other stuff (carbon dioxide, water vapour, argon, etc.); the oceans, water: 2 hydrogen, 1 oxygen; the solid crust, 62% oxygen (by number of atoms), 22% silicon, 6.5% aluminium, bits of iron, calcium, potassium, sodium, etc.

The ancients noticed this from day one; and our scientists are still analysing details. Some are lost in the details often drowning in too many details and miss the underlying principles. The great universe, put in the simplest way, sources these basics from the plenum which compose it, hydrogen, helium, carbon, nitrogen and so on. These originate from one.

When I went to Japan in 2007, I learned that one must find one’s own way in Aikido, regardless of style, affiliation, or teacher. Two teachers confirmed this, one ancient (85), and one relatively modern (53), each separately affirming what the other said without any collusion and without ever having met. I did not ask them a direct question, but they seemed to know what I was looking for.

Now it makes much more sense than it did at the time – I seem to learn the important things by a sort of slow release process, in contrast with my cultural disposition and desire for everything right now. My own few students are always (the few that I have) asking questions about things that they will not be able to understand for a while, but this seems too patronising to say to them, so I try my best to answer their questions in the full knowledge that it won’t help them. When they do understand, they will not even remember what I said.

Imagine this scenario. You are on the battlefield. The enemy is strong, well armed and advancing.

Suddenly the general calls a meeting. The minutes reveal something like this.

“Well, sir, I didn’t like the way you barked an order the other day and you really hurt my feelings.”

“Captain, I’m so terribly sorry. I don’t know what got into me. I must have been having a bad day. Will you accept my sincerest apology…”

Readers have for many months been able to read literally hundreds of blogs written by a number of talented writers cum martial artists who have graciously contributed to this website. The likes of Ellis Amdur, Peter Goldsbury, George Ledyard, Nev Sagiba, Clark Bateman, Lynn Seiser, Toby Threadgill, Mark Bilson, Todd Jones, David Lynch and others have provided very thoughtful and stimulating content to the Aikido Journal website and we are very grateful for their input.

If you have something of importance to say and have confidence in your writing ability, we encourage you to submit your text for review by the Aikido Journal editiorial staff. The process for doing so is outlined below.

In the end, it does not matter who wins, loses or draws: The balance of nature will always win. The greater part of our histories were wasted in misdirected efforts that accrued no lasting gain. Much good was lost and what little we gained had to survive immense attrition, often to be lost again.

Had we learnt the lessons that truly matter, we would now be travelling in a life enhancing direction, instead of an extractive, depleting death generating trajectory of pollution, wars and extinction.

The air. Without it we would die. But we contaminate it with blithe disregard, and continue to do so.
Water is essential for life as well. We continue to subvert it every way we can.
Our existence is only possible between a very fine scale of opportune stability which can support it, as we now are embodied. And yet we behave as it were an unlimited resource.
The biotic layer of earth that supports our life and our food is only a few inches thick.