i wonder that i don’t blog more about aikido here. it’s a pretty big part of my life. maybe because there’s so much about it that i hardly understand that it’s hard for me to wrap my brain around trying to explain it to readers who know even less about it. i realize that i don’t talk about it very much except with my friends in the dojo. it’s…too hard to explain. at the same time, i love it. it’s changing my life, changing me. so, maybe i’ll just start trying to blog it here more often and see what comes out. i’ll try to save the nitty gritty details for the training log, since that’s mostly for my own reference anyway.

what brought this subject up was that i was reading a friend’s blog, which is mostly focused on aikido. he was musing in a post about the subject of ego in the dojo and whether it’s different for men than for women. oh, kittlings…those of you who know me know that questions which reek of “men are from mars, women are from venus” make me hiss and spit and arch my back like a halloween cat. so i started to comment, but then it turned into a long long diatribe about aikido that was less about gender and more just about me. i didn’t post it to his blog because, well, i got more than a little off topic. but so i’ll post it here, because this is my blog and i’ll get off topic if i want to:

answering this post is something of a paradox, or at least an exercise in frustration, because i hate being called upon to speak for my gender. i’m only one person. i have no idea what it is like to exist in someone else’s skin. the fact that we both have boobs doesn’t automatically buy us much in common. and i don’t subscribe to the notion that there’s is this deep divide between men and woman in terms of behavior, even with regard to learned patterns of behavior in our particular society. i am resentful of any axiom that tells me that my gender is the reason i am apt to behave in a particular way. that’s like taking free will from me and handing me a package of determinism, all wrapped up in pink (girls like pink, apparently, altho i do not).

but, putting gender rants aside i’ll try to answer your question about ego on the mat at least from my own (female) perspective. i don’t often feel a sense of competition, of one upsmanship, on the mat. when sensei reprimands the class for fighting one another, i never feel like it applies to me. so maybe that means that there are a lot of guys on the mat who approach me differently because i’m a woman. does that mean that we can learn more from one another, train better in a cross-gender situation? maybe. i can’t speak for what it’s like for guys any more than i can speak for what it’s like for other women.

i approach most of life and particularly athletic challenges with a sense of competition with myself. i don’t care if i can run faster than the guy next to me as much as i care if i can run faster than i did last week. my sense of self-worth is all tied up in my pursuit of self-improvement (with a healthy dose of catholic guilt tossed in on top to provide necessary motivation).

but on the occasion that i do meet with a training partner who is too rough with me? i do feel that desire to prove how tough i am, that challenge to my ego – not through muscling him to the ground (my skill in aikido is always going to be about technique, not strength) – but through proving (however stupidly) that i’m tough enough to take what my partner dishes out. i HATE to have to tell my partner to back off a little. it’s rare that i need to, and even more rare that i actually do. on the other side is the partner who is too careful, perceives my inexperience (or my gender, or some combination of the two) as a weakness and treats me like a china doll that could break if it hits the mat with any force. a good training partner finds my boundaries and pushes them, ever so slightly. this makes me better. i imagine it takes years of experience to get good enough to be able to truly to perceive your partner’s skills, weaknesses, thresholds, and to adjust accordingly. while i strive for that, i suspect i err on the side of being too careful myself. i’m a pacifist. physically besting someone at the risk of his/her injury will never bring me satisfaction.

so what’s a pacifist doing in a martial art? it’s a reasonable question. i guess the answer is that i recognize that the world of is made up of conflict. to avoid conflict is to imply that all conflict is bad. but conflict just is. when you boil down the essence of a good play, it’s about conflict. without conflict there’s no story. no action. no movement forward, no change. aikido attracted me because it is about coping with conflict. engaging with, even encouraging conflict, but dealing with it in a healthy respectful manner that, in the most ideal circumstances, makes both parties better/stronger/happier/safer, whatever. we don’t fight, we train.

i train in aikido because it scares me, just a little bit, all the time. every single time i walk into the dojo, there’s some part of me that wants to skip out on class, to take the easy route, to stay home, sleep in, whatever the path of least resistance is for that given moment. and every time i walk out of the dojo, regardless of whether i’ve had a good class or a horrible one, i’m a better person for having trained. for having faced the things that intimidate me. in that regard, if i am sensitive to my own strength, my own reserves of energy and emotion and patience and skill, i am my own best training partner. i find the edge of what i’m capable of, and i push those boundaries ever so slightly. it takes years of training to become sensitive to your uke, to know exactly what he or she can take. i think it takes the same time to get to know one’s self, to know what it is i can or can’t take. in the process, i often push myself over the edge, take on too much, and then i have to draw back, admit defeat, heal or recover or generally hibernate, and then find the courage to start again. other times i allow myself too much slack, i treat myself like a china doll that i’m afraid of breaking. but you know what happens to china dolls? they sit on the shelf and they gather dust. i joined the dojo at a turning point in my life, when i was starting over, remaking myself and my life. i’d been kicked and i was down, and i was ready to take what the world was dishing me and prove that i was stronger (and in the process, hopefully actually make myself stronger). i decided that i’d rather risk getting broken than staying on the shelf.

fuck, now it’s 2:30 in the morning. how about a little self-discipline when it comes to bedtimes, huh?