Martial Nonviolence

 

The amazing gift brought by people who really make a difference in working toward Peace is that they do conflict well rather than avoiding it. There is a delicate balance struck between domination and surrender in the practice of conflict across its many manifestation. It seems to me there are any number of valid choices in response to conflict - from becoming limp in order to do no harm to the choice to cause pain and even damage while doing as little lasting harm as possible. The choice I have a hard time respecting is to voluntarily lack careful decisions about and practice of your choice of response.

When I was a boy I struck another boy who took the lead in a group that chose to victimize me. I struck him in the face, knocked him to the ground and saw the look on his face as he became the victim instead of me. I ran home from his house crying while they all watched dumbfounded. Thereafter I developed a willingness to allow myself to be harmed in order to model non-violence. This I practiced. Then, it became clear that there was a middle ground that would allow me to intervene when others were being victimized which the surrender method did not provide. For several years I studied what was available to me - the percussive (punching and kicking) martial arts. It became clear that this was not the middle ground I had imagined so I stopped, despite enjoying the rigor and competition. In 1990 I renewed my search for the discipline that would fit my desire for a conflict method that matched my ideology and discovered an art that has some grounds for identifying itself with peace and harmony.

Aikido as metaphor

One way, rather than The Way, I approach peace work is the practice of Aikido. Since it involves taking control of another person's balance there arises the specter of domination. Since it seeks a transformation of the conflict experience, rather than practicing total annihilation of The Enemy, practitioners run the risk of being overrun by an attacker. These are the tensions, both in the bodies and in the minds of the persons participating, that make Aikido work when it works as self defense and fail when it fails. The practice of Aikido, however, can be related to but independent of physical combat concerns, in that it shapes in the practitioner, like other martial arts, a pervasive energetic insistence on this particular being different. Combat systems rightly insist that the difference is "you thought you'd be beating me down and now the reverse will be the case". Breaking with this contemporary emphasis and historical background Aikido insists, from the philosophy through technique execution, that the unexpected shift of expectations will be "whatever you thought was going to happen, I insist that everyone, including you, be able to walk away from this when they choose and with their identity and body more or less intact."

Martial Nonviolence (tm) is the process art of conflict that honors the need to struggle while insisting that friction not be framed as a zero-sum game in which someone must become the victim.

 

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The Myth of Peace:

Authentic Responses to the Violent Body

You may or may not realize that you are part of a global identity shift toward social justice Paul Hawken called “the largest social movement in all of history” he wrote that “no one knows its scopeand how it functions is more mysterious than what meets the eye.” I believe you, specifically, are part of the group that is responsible for describing this movement’s scope and painting for the public eye the beauty of its mystery. This movement involves new, deeply democratic disciplines I call the Process Arts which are sprung from psychology. Perhaps this movement also involves what our colleague Thomas Moore refers to as the Monk Who Dwells in Daily Life, or what Dan Noel meant by neo-shamanism, or the citizenship James Hillman laments the lack of in a world that, after the century of psychotherapy, “is getting worse”.

For better and worse, use and misuse, psychological metaphors are everywhere in culture from obsessive compulsion built in to advertising and fictionalized on television (Monk) to the practice of various therapies. This is a compensatory response. The largest social movement in history reflects a shift that titanic industrialism made necessary. The empire of the mechanized imagination pays attention exclusively to multiplying and distributing what we make and can not adequately consider the otherwise obvious cost to the non-mechanical world.

An entire category of vocations has arisen within this violence done to Place that pays attention to how we do what we do before, during, and after Production and Progress. As a result of this psychologizing influence and the commensurate growth of process consciousness, culture itself is being made as an artifact rather than simply arising. We now have not only psychotherapy as such but also psychology’s pantheon of progeny: process level innovations like systems management and organizational development, consulting, life coaching, self-help and the recent resurgence of democratic practices like mediation, dialogue, and deliberation – an entire vocational spectrum of participatory processes explicitly focused on collaboration and implicitly redefining peace as conflict done well. I call these peace-culture-making disciplines the Process Arts. I feel romantic about those who share these vocations and call these people Guardians of Peace and seek them out across the nation, going from conference to gathering to Open Space to dojo to social action, hoping to practice with them the purposeful building of cultures of peace.

This is the new global mythology Huston Smith preaches, Sam Keene swings, and of which Joseph Campbell frequently spoke: people are beginning to build communities on purpose which care for the soul in and of the world by practicing an active imagination and mythic consciousness that insists with the body on the value of pathologizing and conflict done well. In the end it is in this new myth that a conference like this and a mind in search of a mythology of violence are obliged to engage. We are here because mythological psychology in motion listens deeply to Psyche in a way that authentically acknowledges the presence of the repressed and pathologized, in this case Violence.I tell this story and forward this myth by speaking in the tongue of a martial art called Aikido, not because it is The Way but because it is a deeply beautiful way among many newish ways that are building this idea together.

The specific process of listening to violence is inextricably somatic. It involves thought and image with body in a practice where the focus of the eyes and of agenda…softens and the trained body hears a multitude of process-level options – choices about how we do what we do. Aikido covertly teaches this phenomenological approach through sympathetic responses to attack – homoeopathic movements – and literally translates as something much like “the way of harmonizing conflicting energy”. It is also known around the world as the "Art of Peace". Aikido blends, turns, circles, and extends such that violence is met with a martial resolve that even a perceived attacker must not be brutalized. In this way the aikidoist refuses to retaliate and neither fights nor flies. Aikido models holding ambivalence in tension – suffering the presence of violence in sympathy with its bringer without being overcome by the process. The cycle of violence comes to rest.

It is not an accident that this gathering is part of the “Nature and Human Nature” series. At last year’s conference I began a conversation with Bessel van derKolk about somatic healing responses to trauma which extend into culture-making beyond the therapeutic encounter. I invited him and everyone there to experience Aikido with me the next morning. After staying over specifically to participate in that training Bessel left with body evidence, video images, and the conviction that Aikido was, in his words, “The King” for returning to and healing trauma. Now he wants to know why Aikido works so well even with conflict that is ancient and internalized.

But in this group I’m not just talking about Aikido. I’m following Aaron Kipnis and Chris Hedges and the questions with which they were both addressed at the end of their bracing monologues. Kipnis was asked “what do you suggest are effective strategies to confront the causes” of vast psychopathology. He confessed his feelings of helplessness and replied in effect – get individual connection where predatory behavior becomes more difficult. Ginette Paris asked Hedges “how tolerant can one be of intolerance?” He answered that you can’t tolerate intolerance in good conscience but left open the implied question: how then may I engage?

I propose that the question should be framed “how can you be tolerant (peaceful) while confronting intolerance (violence).” That is why we are talking about the principles behind Aikido, because that very question is the reason for its mythology and growth in the narrative of culture and the reason why its philosophy leads thousands of practitioners around the world to doing conflict well. This is true when the violence is in the past, as in the case of psychotherapeutically re-stimulating the experience of abuse, or the past present and future as Israeli and Palestinian aikido practitioners trained together in peace in Cyprus through the Training Across Borders program developed by an organization called Aiki-Extensions.

I mention aikido in this academic temenos because liberal education is required to allow the confounded or frightened mind of the body and body politic to cultivate other options than attack and defense. As David Miller tirelessly advocates – visited by a strange idea, just as with a guest in your home, the job of the honest citizen is to entertain uncomfortable and inconvenient notions. As Wolfgang Giegerich suggested to me on a walk through El Capitan Canyon, some form of dialectic practice is required in the Commons for the democratic body politic to function. The personal body needs similar training to ground the mind in the experience of responding to what feels like an attack with a multitude of intriguing options beyond the familiar: surrender or crush. Learning and practicing “aiki principles” (harmonizing conflict energy) by whatever path has ever been the core of the education required to be an adequate citizen. That is why Aikido is required in graduate education at the California Institute of Integral Studies and will soon be required for high school seniors to graduate in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, thanks in greatest part to the work of the President of Aiki Extensions, Don Levine, Emeritus Peter B. Ritzma Professor of sociology at the University of Chicago.

Creating an environment that facilitates the practice of the aiki principles I mentioned demands process-level practice that is tantamount to the building of community on purpose with the object of redefining peace itself as conflict done well. This is daunting work made more difficult to embrace by a history of tribal elitism, habits of rank and class compartmentalization, and the gravity of orthodoxy. But even in the most traditional aikido practice training happens in a carefully ordered ritual space called a dojo that must have particular sympathetic and intangible qualities sensibly present. Even in the most rigid of traditional settings, performing with the body this redefinition of peace as an ongoing practice creates a subtle guardianship of this idea of peace that is neither defensive nor fear-based while it acknowledges fear and responds to the need to resist oppression and injustice. This is what is best in all forms of martial art taught by compassionately rigorous teachers and is currently forging alliances across the world in “Peace Dojos” of many different martial persuasions.

I came to this myth making by way of an initiation into violence. My father was abused by his father and vowed never to show his children his anger. He has never directed it at us to this day but my sister and I saw its effects on others - strangers, on my parents’ relationship which ended in divorce, and on him despite his considerable compassion and commitment to justice. As a twenty five year old I made the decision to pack up my belongings in my car and drive from TX to CA to live in an aikido dojo as an apprentice, wake up at 5:30 in the morning to begin cleaning and training and do nothing but that all day every day. I took this step because I was done with the usual responses to conflict in my own life and had been training regularly for some time, enough to be an enthusiastic beginner. Consciously choosing a mythology for the first time of many, I wanted aikido to be as deep in my body and thought as possible. 

Days before I was scheduled to leave, in the dark of night, a dark skinned teenager and the boy to whom he was teaching his trade used an automatic handgun to compel me onto the surface of the gravel parking area behind my apartment building. For some reason my heart did not beat much faster and I remained concerned rather than panicked about what might happen. I’m told (and can now vouch) that you never know how you’ll react to a real attack until it happens. They robbed me as I reassured my attackers that everything was going to be fine, and then kicked me in the head and ribs repeatedly while threatening to kill me over and over.

When I realized I might become unconscious and then have no choices I leapt from the ground toward the one with the gun and they ran instead of shooting me. To my great surprise and later satisfaction my first thought after I realized I was running after someone with a gun and stopped, was how much it must suck for them…I imagined waking up in the morning and looking in the mirror and realizing again that this violence is what I do and who I am. 

The police department arrived 45 minutes after they were called. To fill out a report. Telling them the story was when my heart began to beat fast and I began to weep. I decided I did not require medical attention and the man and boy who attacked me were never caught. Since they now had keys to everything and the landlord wouldn’t be bothered to change the locks, my roommate and I slept armed for the few days remaining until I left for my apprenticeship.

Today I am a fourth degree black belt, finishing my dissertation at Pacifica dealing with the materials we are discussing here, and a non-profit executive and professional community building and conflict facilitator. I work through many kinds of personal and cultural violence in a variety of settings because mythologies of violence are one of the most obvious terrains of everyday life. I direct a non-profit in the San Francisco Bay Area called Association Building Community that is dedicated to building the culture of process arts. Our goal is to see these peace practices so widely practiced that they are adopted as an essential part of learning as early as the Liberal Arts are introduced: Reading, Writing, Arithmetic, and Relationship.

When I demonstrate and teach, I call what I do Martial Nonviolence. It arises from the same place of discovery as Jennifer Selig suggested – where violence and non-violence are twins in the same complex and energize each other. Through consciously relating the two and drawing out their associations, understanding becomes possible so that alternatives to projecting and embodying literal violence become practical and become common community practice. Martial Nonviolence, therefore, is as a demonstration of cultural activism. Rather than using traditional more passive approaches to resistance in the presence of violence, Martial Nonviolence practices a less literally violent imagination and aiki-body while in the motions of conflict and concrete struggle. At the basic level this involves getting off the line of attack far enough to remain whole but near enough to make change that will release everyone involved from the cycle of violence. This involves learning a hundred ways to encourage and then ground whatever appears to be an attack through blending and creating circular responses to direct aggression. This is universal to all aikido.

This is my answer to the question “we hear that the situation is dire – but what is there to do now?” With all the energy available to peddle fear and get high on the narcotic of war, instead train yourself and then your people to get out of the way of binary literalisms. Get off the line of that attack far enough to retain complexity and un-imprisoned by the simplistic role of the victim. But stay near enough to make change that will release everyone involved from the cycle of violence. Mythologize, by which I mean building a community of understanding. Teach and practice the process arts you have learned. Aikido itself is the most widespread example I know of harmonizing energy in this way that is also an ideal metaphor and mythological complex for extensions of sympathy into the world as the movement of process arts. I now work within the organization I mentioned earlier, Aiki Extensions which extends the aiki-based process arts beyond the traditional dojo into the inner city in San Francisco and also Brazil, Ethiopia, and the Middle East.

I won’t tell you what you should do but I will tell you what you could do if so moved. As James Hillman has suggested, the shadow of psychology has to do with personalism: reducing psychic experience, including felt responses to real systemic abuse in the contemporary world, to the internal, personal, and historical. Beyond that, Archetypal Psychology risks bearing out recapitulating industrial psychology’s dilemma by sharing the shadow of the theoretical in depotentiating the literal and frowning on the concrete. This makes it hard to stand up, as directed by Thomas Moore today, and deal directly with violence. At this conference we speak with abstractions in private about the archetypes associated with violence. But we must cross the bridge at the beginning and the end of the day into and then out of the field of action. Make a shift that is fundamental to all process arts from “either or” to “both and”. Talk about and then move into organized action engaging both the metaphorical/imaginal and the literal/concrete. Train your body-mind in the process arts, whatever they may be for you, to insist with your body and theory that everyone involved practice Martial Nonviolence in conflicts, especially those involving violence. Dance with dilemmas like a martial artist. Outcomes should stay mysterious until all voices have spoken and been heard. Frame your work in these terms to be clear we are working together, ask for help and prepare yourself to insist both actively and passively on the process of peace, and create communities which support and do this together. And move.

 

 

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caveats

Disclosures: this page was primarily created by Brandon WilliamsCraig, originator of the methodology discussed.

The talk above was written for the Foundation for Mythological Studies 2008 conference Nature and Human Nature - The Mythology of Violence.