WHY TRAIN?

 

YOU CAN START ANY TIME IN YOUR LIFE

YOU CAN DO IT YOUR WHOLE LIFE

IT WILL CHANGE YOUR LIFE

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POSTURE, CONNECTION, CUTTING 

Aikido teaches your nervous system to respond to conflict with grace by learning three things: 

1. How to keep your own posture intact when someone is grabbing or hitting you​

2. How to stay safe by looking at, connecting to, and keeping a solid hold of your partner 

3. The difference between pushing, pulling, or hitting back, and cutting the way you slice through a tomato with a sharp knife

 

These three skills directly address the most natural responses to getting grabbed or hit. It is natural to curl up and protect our own middle when we feel threatened. We want to turn away from conflict instead of stay with it. We often tense up and hit back in ways that are painful but not powerful. 

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By learning these specific skills, we are training our nervous systems to respond, instead of react. 

 

A WAY OF LIFE

Aikido is a lifelong path that anybody can do because it's all about learning who you are and what you are really capable of. Will you learn specific skills that might help in a physically dangerous situation? Sure, but this is a very small part of aikido training. Most conflicts are inner conflicts. Our true opponents are ourselves. Learning who you really are and what you can really do is endlessly interesting, endlessly deep. It changes your whole life in really great ways. ​

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Perhaps the best place for a beginner to see aikido as a do, or a way, is the relationship between members and the dojo. The dojo is a formal environment with layers of etiquette that is built and maintained by the members. There's something really special that happens when we all work together to create this taut, earnest, sacred space. We all start to go deeper in it. 

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HONESTY

Whether you want it to be or not, studying any serious martial art is a fantastic mirror.

 

When you are a beginner, this mostly just feels like getting way too much feedback that you're not good at aikido yet! But I encourage all beginners to keep going, and notice what you do with that pressure. Do you go dull and unresponsive? Dissociate? Does your inner critic light up and start taking everything you do apart? Are you an apologizer? Maybe you say mean things to yourself, judge the teacher, or you can't feel what is happening in the moment... but you find it almost impossible to come to your third class.*

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Training is beautiful because you get a chance to see and deal with those parts of yourself that keep you from growing and changing. Looking at what training brings up in you and learning how to set it aside is just as important as any other part of training. 

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*This is a thing! If you make it to your third aikido class, you almost double your chances of training a whole year

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