Kindness Is Not Weakness

One idea that many beginners have is "Aikido seems too nice and too soft to be a valuable martial art in reality. This can never work." This thought usually comes from two things: 1) the difficulty which beginners have at developing a level of proficiency in the art, and 2) the fact that aikido teaches to resolve conflict through non-violence or at the most, controlled but safe violence, a skill that is counterintuitive to our instinctual reaction to meet violence with violence.

But what I tell beginners who hold these ideas is: "Never mistake kindness for weakness." Just because someone is kind to you does not mean that they are also weak, in character or in body.

When practicing any form of budo, we must always cultivate the self while moving along two different but parallel paths. The first and most obvious path is the physical form of the budo we practice. In our case, this is the physical practice of aikido. On the mat, we work to develop our bodies physically. We learn how to protect ourselves when we fall, we learn how to move our feet, hips, and hands, and in general how to control our body in relation to our opponent in a violent situation. This practice helps us develop the physical form of budo and is done to element bodily weakness and cultivate strength, flexibility, and agility.

Parallel to this physical development and just as important is the development of our mind and our worldview into one that is infused with kindness. In this mental development, we focus on three elements: 1) control of our mind through the disciplining of our desires, 2) calming our mind during times of mental and physical excitation (violence, for example), and 3) cultivating a sense of oneness with the world around us. By cultivating these principles, we consider everything in a situation and its impact on ourselves and, just as importantly, the impact on our partner. We learn not to only focus on the impact to ourselves, a very selfish and potentially dangerous worldview. As such, our budo becomes much more humanistic.

This last element is especially important. If we cultivate a sense of oneness with the world around us, we begin to develop a very personal sense of responsibility in everything that we do. Why add additional suffering to the world just to make ourselves (seemingly) suffer less? To do so will not ultimately reduce our level of suffering. To think so is nothing but egotistical self-indulgence. Cultivating a deep sense of personal responsibility to the world around us will begin to change how we treat the world and everything in it. For example, when we begin to realize that everything we do has an impact on everyone else around us, we then feel a deep sense of personal responsibility to make everything around us better for us and those around us since, ultimately, everyone is born the same, suffers the same, and dies the same.

To develop these two paths in synchronicity is of utmost importance. History is littered with the legends of martyrs who refused to fight back on a principle of humanity and peace for its own sake. What good is a philosophy of peace if it results in an unnatural death? Who will then be there to carry it forward?

It is admirable to be kind. We should all be kind and do everything possible to cultivate a kind manner in all things. But when faced with death, kindness by itself can only take you so far. We must be prepared to enter fully into violent conflict to protect ourselves and those around us if necessary. But this does not mean that we are not kind during violent conflict. I know this sounds contradictory, but it is not. When we use violence infused with kindness, we attack an opponent's attitude vice their body. We attempt to influence rather than to injure. Using the controlled violence of aikido techniques tempered with our deep sense of personal responsibility to everything in this world allows us to reconcile what seems to be a contradiction: kind violence. It allows us to successfully diffuse violence rather than to escalate it.

Thus, we should always remember in both our physical practice and our mental practice of our chosen budo that weakness is not a necessary condition of kindness. In fact, kindness should become a necessary condition of our strength.

If we practice this way, we can never go wrong.