This realization captures the feeling the founder had after the profound experience of gaining genuine insight into the discipline of his art.\u00a0 Yet, for most of us who read this statement, we will think of it in very idealistic terms.\u00a0 The founder\u2019s realization, however, was anything but idealistic.\u00a0 If we take our ordinary state and smile lovingly at a mugger, we will most likely get killed.\u00a0 The point here is to transcend our ordinary state, which means the loving smile emerges from the depths of dealing with very real and extreme violence.\u00a0 The founder studied self defense in a traditional and realistic setting.\u00a0 He dealt with attackers who meant him serious harm.\u00a0 Out of THESE interactions, he looked beyond the immediate threat and realized the point of training was not petty hatred and vengeance, but to find love for this aggressor.\u00a0 With this love, he found genuine power, not of his own personal ego but emerging from universal forces.<\/p>\n
O\u2019Sensei used two key words in this line \u2013 Budo & love.\u00a0 Budo is the path of the warrior, defined in terms of mortal combat.\u00a0 Let\u2019s be realistic for a moment.\u00a0 What would be our first reaction in the face of the threat of death?\u00a0 I recall speaking to a detective in the Eastchester Police Department, who upon hearing I taught martial arts, wanted to run his philosophy by me.\u00a0 He explained that when in a fire fight, if you are supposed to be protecting an innocent civilian, just drop them and do whatever you need to do to protect yourself.\u00a0 He felt this was the best way to insure his survival.\u00a0 He did not seem to want to listen to any other point of view, so I simply did not support his theory.\u00a0 But let\u2019s think about what happens when we practice.\u00a0 Many of us have experience training against a knife attack in a dark room.\u00a0 If someone attacks fast in the dark and we are fearful, we generally have trouble assessing the distance and direction of the attack.\u00a0 Against a real knife, we would surely be killed.\u00a0 So the detective advocated hunkering down in fear to protect oneself, which is exactly what leads to getting killed.<\/p>\n
Love, on the other hand, is the unconditional caring for the well being of others.\u00a0 Aikido is the development of unconditional caring for others (even the attacker) in the midst of mortal combat.\u00a0 Why does this make sense?\u00a0 We can see the problems with batting down the hatches in the midst of a panic attack.\u00a0 But dripping with love does not seem like much of a solution either.\u00a0 Here again we can investigate the matter.\u00a0 Imagine seeing your spouse threatened.\u00a0 If your<\/em> life was threatened, you might be afraid.\u00a0 But what happens when you see your spouse\u2019s<\/em> life threatened?\u00a0 Are you still as fearful of losing your own life?\u00a0 Most of us would experience some reduction in fear for ourselves. (As a note, if we substitute fear of losing our spouse for fear of losing our own life, we actually accomplish no martial gain).\u00a0\u00a0 In class, we know a reduction in fear for ourselves translates into an increased possibility of survival.\u00a0 As described above, suddenly we can perceive the distance, direction and speed of the attack with greater accuracy, and our reflexes are not so obstructed from immediate reaction.<\/p>\n So here we can begin to see the logic of the founder.\u00a0 Caring for others (in this case the attacker) gives us the strength to relinquish our fears for ourselves.\u00a0 With the reduction in fear, we are free to see and respond to an attack with greater perception and creativity in self defense.\u00a0 Our response time is faster and we don\u2019t unbalance our posture out of fear.\u00a0 By extending this approach to ever increase our perception, we can discern the faults of the attacker and deliver to THEM the same sense of peace we learned to access ourselves.\u00a0 When we are peaceful, the attacker may not experience our peace through a gentle smile, but perhaps a stern strike or wrist lock delivered out of caring for their suffering and seeking to correct their imbalances.\u00a0 Again, the founder teaches that these skills do not emerge from our own limited ego or a wish to harm, but from more universal forces of compassion we are able to discover through this elimination of fear and increased perception.\u00a0 So by investigating our own practice we can begin to see the point of the founder\u2019s realization that \u201cTrue Budo is Love\u201d is not at all idealistic, but fundamentally logical and actually the most efficient approach for real self defense purposes.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" This realization captures the feeling the founder had after the profound experience of gaining genuine insight into the discipline of his art.\u00a0 Yet, for most of us who read this statement, we will think of it in very idealistic terms.\u00a0 The founder\u2019s realization, however, was anything but idealistic.\u00a0 If we take our ordinary state and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[6,1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-29","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-philosophy","category-uncategorized"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1TrRx-t","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/scarsdaleaikido.com\/aikidoblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/scarsdaleaikido.com\/aikidoblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/scarsdaleaikido.com\/aikidoblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scarsdaleaikido.com\/aikidoblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scarsdaleaikido.com\/aikidoblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=29"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/scarsdaleaikido.com\/aikidoblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":132,"href":"https:\/\/scarsdaleaikido.com\/aikidoblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/29\/revisions\/132"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/scarsdaleaikido.com\/aikidoblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=29"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scarsdaleaikido.com\/aikidoblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=29"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/scarsdaleaikido.com\/aikidoblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=29"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}