About the Book

It's 25 years ago, and I'm in an unfamiliar place, an aikido dojo or training hall, watching people practice what looks like some kind of dance as they lift their arms, join and move gracefully together. They take spectacular falls and somersaults every so often, but it's the harmony that impresses me--the sense that they're relating to each other from moment to moment as they move together.

I had read about aikido, in books that told of a great teacher in Japan, one Morihei Ueshiba, who had mastered traditional martial skills dating from the samurai, and had then transformed them into ways of defense that also protected the life of the attacker and brought a practical but peaceful resolution to the encounter. Now I was witnessing aikido in action.

A few days later I've become a member of that dojo, donned the black-and-white training clothes, and gone on the mat, looking forward to the dance of aikido. And there are dance-like moments when I find, through luck and help, moments of harmonious relationship. But there are many other moments when I become glaringly aware of how I've learned to defend myself awkwardly and inefficiently, pushing and pulling to no avail in moments of stress, trying to win out in the habitual ways I have long relied on.

"When the going gets tough, the tough get going." But how? I saw that I didn't really know how to face that moment of controlled danger in aikido, when someone is striking, sincere and true, right toward me. The means of coping I had learned in the past didn't work with aikido. Something else was needed, something my teachers at the dojo were trying to show every time they demonstrated a technique. "Join and blend, join and blend." But each experience, with a different partner every time, was different.

How to be well grounded in myself yet relate to others? How to find the angle, the half-hidden opening, that will allow two people, originally opposed, to move together, without resistance? The big lesson may be about returning again and again to asking what we need to know more about, both in ourselves as we are and in a greater wisdom that we can watch and listen for, both in stillness and in spirited movement.

Yet any big lesson is made up of many smaller ones. Here is a look at some of those lessons, from the book's table of contents:

The Gift of Danger