Emotional Aikido

I spent a lot of Sunday morning looking through my feed and equally getting updates on Houston flooding, the protests in SF and Berkeley. But here in LA, the weather is great, I've walked Mr D, talked to my neighbors, gave my landlord (who lives next door to me) a loaf of bread I made for him yesterday, and I'm gearing up for some writing. As I was taking all this in, I was thinking about that Chinese proverb, goes something like, good luck bad luck, who knows - basically saying you never know whether something that seems "good" is going to end up "good" or "bad."

I've been corresponding with a new friend about our shared meandering paths around the warrior ethos - we both studied Aikido, have been exposed to US Military culture, and ended up with a Zen perspective. He wrote:  

"We are drawn to Zen to help accept what we cannot change, but also to focus our power on what we can."

Which caused me to revisit a thought I've had in recent months - as I grapple with my inner conflict for protesting and confrontation (two things I am not normally meek about). I have this feeling like there is maybe something more I should do... that I should want to fight the fight with fighting. But I don't want to fight. The whole aikido attitude is about taking the energy and redirecting it back to a place where the attacker is not able to harm anyone, even himself. But I wonder, how am I able to do that?

From my research writing about trolling, gamergate and online harassment for my Cyber book, I know one of the points of all this emotional roiling is to infect others with these destructive negative emotions.

It's like this scene from Princess Mononoke. 

You see this in trolling online. If one is not careful, the emotion can infect and take you over. And maybe this is where the aikido comes in, but not through physical interaction, but the emotional interactions.

My mantra for the past year or so has been "Calm and Drama free." At first I was focused on reducing the things in my life that caused drama - the things I had control over. That was relatively easy. Then it became clear that no matter how calm and drama free I made *my* life, others would bring drama into it: my upstairs neighbors, clients, normal dramas dealing with people, hey, even I create drama at times. So I worked on techniques to minimize the drama that was created. A big part of that was in not getting hooked by the emotion and create a kind of vaccine against these negative emotions.

Meditation helps a lot with this detachment. You go ahead and feel the emotion, identify it as such, but make no judgment about it. You let it go and flow. Non-identification.

Sometimes I feel like I'm metaphorically smacking a negative emotion down -  someone brings some drama into my circle, I then attempt to "catch" the emotion and pin it to the ground - ikkyu works great. Now that I'm writing this on the ole blog, I think the concepts of tenkan and irimi work with the concept of emotional aikido. You can enter into the emotion, and you can turn away from the emotion so you and your opponent are both facing the direction. In both cases, you want to disarm the emotion so it doesn't hurt you or the attacker.

Irimi takes heart, vulnerability, and courage. I would say this is the emotional technique I am working with most right now. Taking my vulnerable, courageous, electrified, chain-mailed heart to battle for humanity. Entering into their fear with a calmness of my own. 

I remember some times practicing on the mat, back in the Berkeley gym. The level of intimacy of practice at times remains terrifying even in my memory. I wanted to be a warrior of force, but I find my strength these days is that of using my heart. To enter into places no sword can go. I have practiced aikido more years off the mat by now, than I did on.

So maybe in writing this, I've answered my own worry about wanting to do more about the whole "protesting stuff."  For me it's more about the emotional warfare. Instead of the protesting in your face stuff, I'm fighting for the freedom of your heart.

Thanks to my awesome new friend for provoking these introspections. I look forward to our continued conversations. <3.