The long, winding path
From the time I was born to the time I got to grad school, I had moved 20 times. I would not stop moving until about 2011. My childhood and young adulthood were not so great — my mom and I were not close, and I had a mostly absent step-father. There was a lot of turmoil in my life.
In the early 90s, I was working as an exercise rider at a the Fair Hill Training Center in Maryland, and worked on various horse farms around southeastern Pennsylvania. I was feeling pretty unfit, even though the work was extremely demanding. Breezing a very fit 1,100 pound 3-year-old thoroughbred with the attention span of a newt is no joke. I started to think about the things I would like to do to get fitter.
And on New Year’s Day in 1992, my boyfriend broke up with me, and I was looking for a distraction. I looked in the Yellow Pages, and found things like Aerobics, Aikido, Health Clubs, Karate, and Tae Kwon Do. I sadly did not find any medieval sword fighting clubs.
I thought to myself, what is this “Aikido” thing? I had no idea what that word meant. I knew is was a martial art, but didn’t know which flavor it was. While I have always been fairly physical type of person, I have always hated macho dude-bro culture. So I thought martial arts were a non-starter.
But, I went to the dojo and watched a class. It wasn’t too far from my home. I had literally no idea what was going on, but I was captivated. Is it dancing? Is it fighting? What?? I had never done any martial arts, unless you count punk rock mosh pits.
I joined, and started going a couple times a week. Soon after, I hurt my shoulder, broke several toes, cried, tested, went to a bunch of seminars, hurt my shoulder, cried, tested again, dated a guy in the dojo, broke more toes, learned to roll, learned to breakfall, decided that I was never ever, ever going to date in the dojo, and tested again. I probably cried some more.
While I was at that dojo, I trained all over the place. I attended my first summer camp (in D.C.), trained at Saotome Sensei’s dojo in Takoma Park, and visited New York Aikikai (NYA) at least once a month. I attended seminars with Saotome, Ikeda, Yamada, Sugano, Henry Smith senseis, and others.
After a while, I decided to leave Delaware, and pivoted to a new career, which took me all over the country, finally landing me in Seattle. I went from the Bay Area (Berkeley Aikikai), to North Carolina (a little dojo that I can’t remember the name of), to Richmond (Aikido in the Fan), to Chicago (Chicago Aikikai), to St. Petersburg (Aikido of Largo), and finally to Seattle (West Seattle Aikikai).
In California in the late 90s, Aikido saved my life. I was still eventing, and was doing a cross-country course at Ram Tap. My mare hung her knee over one of the last fences, and we crashed spectacularly, eliciting gasps from the bystanders. I was shot off of her like a lawn dart, but I rolled out of the fall, without my mind even engaging. Spiral fractures, paralysis, and brain injuries are pretty common with that type of fall. I credit Aikido with saving me from a humiliating ambulance ride, and maybe even my life.
With all this moving, each time I changed dojos, my training hours reset. This is pretty common. Usually, dojos won’t honor the hours you’ve spent between tests — they start your hours as if you just tested. This would occasionally cause a lot of frustration, but I just kept going.
Eventually, I started to equate this lack of progress with my training, and it just made me feel terrible about myself. Being “held back,” dojo politics, and toxic environments and chief instructors became too much, and I finally decided to quit. I was absolutely unable to get ahead to the next kyu rank and it was really frustrating. So aikido and I had a conscious uncoupling.
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I decided to do Crossfit for a couple years. But soon, I realized I was miserable without Aikido, and I started thinking about training again. I walked into my current dojo in 2011, after months of worrying “will [this dojo] be good enough, or will it be hokey [bullshido]?” I went in one night to watch a class, and there was kyu testing going on. I immediately had that same feeling that I had back in 1992 — that this is the right place for me.
Only this time, my then-partner (a violent, malignant narcissist abuser) was trying to alienate me from it. He ridiculed my practice and the people there, and actively resented the time I spent at the dojo, holding it against me. It was just really bad. It took me a while and a lot of struggle, but I got out of that situation. It took me a while to figure out what was going on in my life fix it.
One day at a seminar at this new dojo, I ran into someone who looked SO, so familiar. He remembered me too. But we couldn’t figure out where or when we remembered each other from. It took like an hour before we figured it out. Turns out we had trained together more than 20 years before at NYA.
Another time, an Aikido friend visited the dojo while on a business trip. By now, he was a Sandan, but he still greeted me with a bow “Hello, Sempai!”
I realized that even though I had all these lost connections through my whole life, the one constant, the one thing that was reliable and where the connections were, was Aikido. I couldn’t lose it again.
What has this path done for me? In a lifetime of instability in work, family, relationships, location, it’s provided me with constants. I didn’t exactly have a healthy family, role models, or relationships. And I lost almost every friend I ever had by moving. But the ones I made in Aikido have lasted. Every time I go to a seminar, I see someone I know. Sometimes from decades ago. They may not recognize me, but I recognize them. And for a minute, I don’t feel like so much of a ghost.
So here I am today, after 33 moves. One of the things that moving that much does to you is that it creates a sense of permanent insecurity. It creates the sense that you pass through peoples’ lives unseen and unremembered, like a ghost.
To me, Aikido embodies what relationships should be. Yes, there can be toxicity, and relationships should never be toxic (I talk about that toxicity in Stupid Girls and Troublemakers). But 90% of the time, Aikido embodies a relationship built on equity, giving and taking equally, and learning.
When you have trauma, I think one of the most important things is to be able to see and experience positive interactions. I really think Aikido, in it’s best form, helps to reset that. Even if it means gaining autonomy over your body and personal, learning to control chaotic situations, conflicting emotions, or relearning that touch is not necessarily violence. Any martiality can be in the service of compassion.
So when I think about my lifetime of Aikido practice, I feel tremendous gratitude toward my training partners and teachers. I feel gratitude for all the training partners that freely gave their bodies, time, and energy to help me to figure out this complex and almost always confusing art, and were gentle and patient (or demanding, difficult, and weird — I feel gratitude for you as well), and helped to show me how beautiful it can be. I feel gratitude toward my teachers, who made this their life’s calling.
Staying on a path despite the difficult experiences is also a good lesson.
So thank you to everyone I train with on a daily basis for entrusting your bodies and confidence with me. Your training manifests through me.
Aikido can help you to survive, if you need it to. It can provide you with a family, if you need one, and it will be there, if you take care of it. So please take care of it.
From a talk I gave in December of 2018.
