心の平安は嵐を静めます
Kokoro no heian wa arashi wo shizumemasu
Inner peace will quiet any storm
The best Aikidoists excel at turmoil. I don’t mean creating turmoil (that’s a topic for a different day). What I mean is to excel in the throes of turmoil. Aikido training teaches us how to bring order to chaos which is a method of quieting down our inner turmoil.
Turmoil is “a state of extreme confusion, uncertainty, or lack of order.” In Japanese, one way to say, “turmoil” is senka (戦渦) which means “chaos of war” or “war turmoil.” When we are experiencing turmoil, everything around us seems like it is burning down. However, turmoil might seem like an outside disorder because people are attacking us, but the real turmoil we are experiencing exists inside of us. What is happening is that something externally falls on top of what we are already dealing with internally. This is why we tend to have a heightened reaction to something that we would normally have little or no reaction to. Modern psychology dictates that there are three responses to stress: fight, flight, and freeze. Each one of these three responses is based upon one’s habituated way of responding to any threat big or small.
Therefore, when we are confronted, we either resist, run away, or stiffen up. However, there is a fourth option - Aikido. One unintended benefit of Aikido training is that it teaches us to relax when we are confronted by an external threat. Maybe relax is the wrong word because relaxing brings to mind someone lying down and sipping a tropical drink. Perhaps a better term is quietude. In Japanese, “quietude” or seijaku (静寂) means “silence” or “stillness.” In quietude, we neither resist, run away, or stiffen up because those actions are “reactions” to stress and are mindless. Quietude is a balanced inner state where we are mindful but what that means is that we have separated the inner from the outer and the past from the present. This separation enables the stress to be singular and not attached to any previous experience and thus we can deal with it more mindfully.
Turmoil may seem like an external event even though it seems to begin that way. External turmoil has a way of kicking up the senjin (戦塵) “battle dust” which falls on top of our preexisting inner strife which instantly activates us and triggers our habituated response to stress - fight, flight, or freeze.
This phenomenon rings true in Aikido class as well. In class, when a beginner is grabbed or struck, they experience one of the three responses to stress and either resist, stiffen up, or try to pull away and many times they do all three. Being physically attacked is the best way to ascertain one’s true response to stress. There is this interesting phenomenon that happens after about three months of training - the student starts to learn to relax or begins to understand quietude. At this point, they may still feel the pangs of stress, but they don’t immediately allow it to activate their usual stress response. Later, as they become more experienced, their learned response to stress becomes quietude, calmness, or stillness. It is not that they don’t feel the stress but rather they have learned to separate the inner from the outer and the past from the present. Doing this enables the trained Aikidoist to as Ken Watanabe Shihan says, “Bring order to chaos.”
The order we are creating in the midst of turmoil is inside of us and the order we learn to create cultivates inner peace. The best Aikidoists know that “Inner peace will quiet any storm” and that is why they excel in the throes of turmoil.
Today’s goal: Do Aikido and don’t let life’s turmoil cheat you out of enjoying your day.
Watch this video to better understand dealing with turmoil