Aikido as an Encounter with Healing
Inryoku Volume 5 Issue 4
By Jamie O’Hara Zeigler, 7th kyu
When I started aikido at the age of 45, I had never been inside a dojo except as a parent. Falling terrified me. Conflict—especially physical—was best avoided. And I would go out of my way to feel safe, which meant practicing people like me. Three months later, I look forward to falls, and I prefer practicing with everyone across the gender spectrum, regardless of age and rank.
The mat is a place where practitioners, at first strangers—women, men and non-binary—meet with a shared purpose and goal. That goal is at once serious, and playful. Within this space, mutual respect can thrive. Community flourishes. A sense of familiarity emerges, and with it, play.
As a child I was prepared for an egalitarian world. As an adult, I rarely found that world in the home or in the workplace, where power struggles over ego, entitlement, competition, and inherited views about gender played out in many ways. I struggled to create and find the conditions for what I knew to be an essential evolution around a simple notion: as equals, we bring one another balance and wholeness. Off the mat, there are times when I have met with resistance and rejection for expecting equality and mutual respect. Hence, I fostered a sense of caution: avoid unnecessary conflict, especially with men.
It is fortunate to be alive at a time when we have been called to reevaluate our interconnectedness, and our sense of wholeness. We are re-examining and reassessing socially conditioned roles, aligning the inner and outer selves, in a balance of masculine and feminine. As we open our minds to the complexity of these forces, we allow the space in between to thrive.
O’Sensei taught how harmony exists even in the space of conflict when we recognize the universe inside ourselves and in one another. As a female practitioner, I see this principle alive in the male practitioners I have the privilege to learn from and practice with today. On the mat I have encountered humility, patience, and gentleness where I feared competition and one-upmanship. I see collaboration, problem solving and gratitude, even when I am struggling so much I think I might be holding my partner back.
On the mat I have begun to complete a healing process that has been ongoing. I encounter grace, humility, and patience from male-identified practitioners with whom I enter this space of intentional conflict with intention. We attack. We respond. The move is rarely over before someone hits the ground. We bounce back up. We thank each other. And when I say thanks to those who are senior in the practice by years they say back what I know as a teacher to be the words of the true educator : Thank you, but you teach me, too.
Aikido requires stamina and resilience, but also humility, gratitude, grace, and cooperation of us all. I am learning how the practice of harmony in motion makes room for us all.