Aikido As Transformer

Aikido as Transformative
and Embodied Pedagogy
Teacher as Healer
Michael A. Gordon
Aikido as Transformative and Embodied Pedagogy
Michael A. Gordon
Aikido
as Transformative
and Embodied
Pedagogy
Teacher as Healer
Michael A. Gordon
Simon Fraser University
Vancouver, BC, Canada
ISBN 978-3-030-23952-7 ISBN 978-3-030-23953-4 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-23953-4
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Foreword
How do we align with those deep currents that flow within and between
us? How, in an age of such stunning threat and conflict, do we hold the
spirit of mutual protection and preservation?
We are steeped in a worldview of distinct subject and object, a materi-
alist, positivist quest for absolute truth and control over the other: plant,
planet, and sometimes person. As both product of and perpetuator of
that worldview education centers on acquisition of external and largely
abstract knowledge and instrumental skills. These are worthwhile expec-
tations of schooling. The trouble—it is not hard to recognize—is that
this worldview (and this knowledge), for all its might and value, leaves us
distant from the earth, one another, and ourselves. From this detached
stance, the world is disenchanted, to use Max Weber’s term. And we end
up doing quite stunning violence to each of these realms.
Five hundred years ago, Leonardo da Vinci anticipated the conse-
quence of this, at the time, emerging view. He named it an abbreviators
approach. He saw that in missing the embeddedness, embodiment, and
interconnectedness of the thing we observe in favor of some abstract,
abbreviated representation of it or merely its immediate utility, we miss
the fullness and even enchantment of the thing itself. He made explicit
that taking this shell, thinking we have the nut, leaves us doing injury to
knowledge and to love.
Though we can now acknowledge the domination of this abbreviators
approach, we can also recognize a great shift in worldview that is well
v
vi Foreword
underway, a shift toward a more interdependent, integrated, systemic,

and holistic view. This invites a profound recalibration of knower, know-
ing, and known.
This new and improved worldview may update the dominant one
and provide a more accurate and judicious guide to actions and ethics.
However, a worldview, in the end, is itself an abstraction. It is necessary,
but alone it is not sufficient to undo the damage to knowledge and to
love.
Our great ability to objectify and abstract has left us outside the world
and our bodies, searching for a way back in. Today we are not simply
looking for a description of life; we are hungry for an experience of being
alive. That experience comes from being embodied in the world here
and now. The question becomes how do we move toward not only an
upgraded worldview, but also to a world presence—a way of being and
knowing more congruent and integrated with this new view.
There is a long tradition from Plato to Augustine to Descartes and
beyond, of thinking ourselves as detached from the body, the body of
nature, and from one another. Our physical body has been perceived as a
container of suffering—the prison house of the soul for Plato; the throb-
bing source of moral failure as Augustine understood; and for Descartes,
a machine on which the head rides around. Though we have fascination
with some bodies, the body as source of knowing has largely been dis-
missed as illogical, subjectivity reserved for the artist, senses viewed as
untrustworthy, feeling seen as merely a byproduct of thought.
Although we are not even close to having it all mapped out, we have
been putting our parts back together. That is, mind and body, gut and
brain, hand and head, thought and feeling, self and world exist not sepa-
rate from one another, not even as connected as early mind-body medicine
understood, but as a complex, interactive unity within and between us.
What Michael Gordon does in this fascinating book is to describe a
practice of dynamic presence—a do, a way—that brings us back into the
world and our self in a profound way.
His approach, framed with rich scholarship both East and West, and
colored with his own vibrant lived experience, recognizes our knowing as
enacted—we call the other into being and are likewise called by the field
around us. As such, deep knowing is an emergent property of our meet-
ing the world. From research on empathy, interpersonal neurobiology,
and cross-cultural perspective, he maps our knowing as extended, beyond
our individual brain and mind. Further, this knowing is embedded in the
Foreword vii
world, touched by currents seen and unseen. Foremost, it is embodied,

full of all the felt sense, movement, feeling, images, thoughts, and spon-
taneous wise action that come from deeply inhabiting this form of ours.
Drawing especially from experience of Aikido, Shodo—the way of cal-
ligraphy, psychotherapy, education, and motorcycling, Michael Gordon
uncovers the underlying contemplative practice of skillful embodiment
and somatic-energetic attunement. This expanded, integrated way of
knowing sets that stage for an ethic and a telos that helps balance princi-
ples and practice, worldview and world presence. In so doing, this moves
past subject-object distinction toward intersubjectivity and then, the step
further, into an ecological perspective whose ethic emerges organically as
a commitment to collective well-being, to love.
This work is profoundly relevant for education and for life—for how
we meet the world. Beyond the conventional knowledge and skills of
education, it is the practice of self-cultivation toward psychospiritual
development that is the heart of this work and the potent offering for a
way of being.
Carrollton, Georgia, USA Tobin Hart Ph.D.

Professor of Psychology
University of West Georgia
Preface
On Joyful Immersion
One of my earliest memories as a young boy is of learning to fly a kite.
Standing out on the windswept muddy flats of Vancouver’s Locarno
Beach, the tide exposing a seemingly unending expanse of wet sand out
into the harbor. Or perhaps it was the long grassy knoll rising above
the rocks leading up toward the cliffs around the University of British
Columbia and neighboring Wreck Beach. I felt the wind push and knock
me about as I struggled to keep my feet planted, my tiny hands wrapped
around the plastic spool of nylon string, the other end of which was con-
nected to a brightly colored diamond-shaped kite, flapping in the wind
like a restless bird set to take flight. Perhaps, an adult or parent was
holding the string along with me, arms wrapped around, coaching me
through the steps, or maybe holding the kite slightly aloft for takeoff.
‘Run!’ they said, releasing the kite. ‘Run, run, run! Let the string out
now!’ I felt the whoosh of air as ran headlong into the air current, the
kite struggling and pulling against the string, trying to tug it away from
my grip. And then suddenly, a feeling of ease, of lightness and giddy joy:
The kite was soaring upward, darting through the gusts of wind but sta-
bilizing and pulling skyward as I let out the string. It was exhilarating
to feel connected to that magical object, as if I too was flying toward
the sun like a bird, feeling the pulse through the string of the kite as it
danced above me, guiding and joining with it through the choreography
of my hand movement.
ix
x Preface
Sense memories like this come flooding through as I let my body and
imagination revisit these early experiences. As a young child growing up
on the west coast of British Columbia, our family and that of my parents’
close friends co-rented a house in the summers on the Sunshine Coast,
a forested and rocky peninsula jutting northward a short ferry ride away
from the city, and which overlooked the Salish Sea toward Vancouver
Island. Now that I have bought a house on the same coast, I reflect
back on the countless hours I spent here mesmerized with the marine
life teeming in the tide pools along the rocky beaches. Countless more
were spent exploring the thick coastal forests with their majestic trees
and woodland creatures, tiny and large. The real and imagined world
I moved through intermingled through stories, drawings, and future
nature trips and, as a teenager, a developing passion for capturing this
sensuous beauty through photography.
Looking back, I can make a clear connection between my earliest
physical and emotional sensations connected to discovering my own
body sensations and movement, and that of the natural landscape and
life around me. This curiosity and intrigue would carry forward through
a plethora of physical activity: Skiing, racquet sports, soccer, hockey,
and baseball were part of my sporting and physical life, some of which
carry through to this day. Competitive team sports and their attendant
machismo tendencies, however, never really took root, despite the usual
boyhood fantasies about wartime heroism, battle courage, and myriad
other ‘combative’ or revenge scenarios. As I reflect back on these more
meaningful and authentic early kinesthetic experiences, two elements
stand out prominently. Firstly, that, as I just mentioned, competition was a
social or performative dynamic that did not ultimately resonate deeply. It
was the doing of the activity, the joyful immersion and call of natural curi-
osity and skill-enhancement that carried me through. Second is that the
mirroring of the rhythmic movement and energy of natural life around
me that did move me (i.e. observing, being in nature; solo, non-com-
petitive activities like swimming, cycling, climbing) have led to the most
lasting, meaningful, and ongoing interactive passions in my life. These
enduring activities fall into three broad autobiographical categories:
music, Aikido, and motorcycling. This book explores the latter two—
Aikido and motorcycling—as core practices in my life. I have deliberately
left music, acting and other creative pursuits aside in this study, as they
would likely comprise an entire other exploration. In place of the profes-
sional career and life path, I have pursued through singing, playing guitar
Preface xi
and piano, songwriting, and playing in musical groups since the age of
13, I have explored the kinesthetic, aesthetic, and rhythmic body move-
ment of music performance (i.e.) through the taking up—for the pur-
poses of this book—of another creative practice: Japanese calligraphy or
shodo. In essence, I wanted to ‘port’ my other lifelong practices (Aikido,
music, sports, photography) into something new, and specifically as an
exploration in the context of this study about self-cultivation—of practice
as a mirror of one’s spiritual development.
I bring up these early life memories to draw a line from my early psy-
cho-emotional and kinesthetic inclinations through to the present as a
way of getting at what Henry writes of as ‘life phenomenology’ (Henry
2008, 2015). Henry refers to the ‘auto-affectivity’ that inhabits and
informs our senses and connects us to the vital energy that suffuses life
all around us—in nature, and in our bodily, emotional and psychologi-
cal registers as we move through our world of experiences. Rather than
forming a phenomenological study per se, however, this book examines
the ways in which this universal and vital life energy (ki in Japanese)
infuses, animates, informs, and gives rise to self-cultivation and increased
relational awareness through conscious and concerted reflexive practice.
Overall, the various life experiences that form the ‘ground’ of this book
are drawn out across all aspects of living, with a particular emphasis on
interdependence and a specific emphasis on the practices of motorcycling,
Aikido, and shodo (Japanese calligraphy). While not everyone may take
up the practice of Aikido, shodo, or motorcycling, the virtue-ethic and
embodied approach to these practices as way is put forward here as an
orientation that offers more generalizable insights into teaching and
learning relationships that may become more fully conscious, human-
ized, and attuned aspirationally toward harmonious relationship-making.
This book evolved from my doctoral dissertation, titled ‘Practicing
Love: Embodied Attunement Through the Lens of Aikido,’ and which
was defended at Simon Fraser University in the fall of 2018. As a man-
uscript thesis it is comprised of essays which are self-contained, have
been presented at peer-reviewed conferences, and otherwise appear else-
where as peer-review publications in specified academic journals and
books. Collating these essays here as chapters from which they originally
appeared in thesis manuscript form invites a difficulty in linking them the-
matically, with the disadvantage that each piece cannot refer back to the
overall thesis in which they are placed. Thus, this opening piece serves
as an expanded and exploratory essay on the themes and concepts that
xii Preface
unfold through the book pieces and form the shape of this book. Overall,
the essays here shape the thesis’ dominant theme of practice as self-trans-
formation, toward healing or wholeness. This relationship to practice
reflects strongly the classical East Asian philosophy, such as Buddhism,
Confucianism, and Daoism, and their view of education as self-cultiva-
tion, especially through contemplative practices. From this viewpoint,
education is ontological in nature, and spiritually speaking, cosmologically
situated. One’s beingness, hence the ontological, is inseparable from one’s
self-development toward an understanding of their place and practices
within-the-whole. Learning as self-cultivation, then, is a circular, cyclical,
and holistic integration of practice and self-reflection that both occurs
through and results from intersubjective and non-dual awareness.
The book itself is structured, and its constituent essays organized, to
model this cyclical and holistic framework of self-cultivation. This learning
cycle is grounded with the purpose of virtue ethics as self-cultivation at
heart and, as we shall see shortly, is thus teleological in nature. The book
is organized into three parts that reflect this cyclical or holistic structure.
Part I follows this introductory essay and takes ‘A Psychospiritual View of
Self-Cultivation.’ The idea here is that our unique, localized, idiosyncratic
conditions form the ‘ground’ of our being, our immediate outlook, psy-
cho-emotional conditioning, or in Buddhist terminology, our ‘dependent
origination.’ The first chapter examines pedagogy as fostering ‘wholeness’
or ‘healing’ by developing a more holistic, ‘ecological,’ or non-dual view-
point. Part II moves into practice of this non-dual viewpoint through ‘An
Intersubjective View of Knowing and Being.’ The two essays here look at
the phenomenological, psycho-emotional, and relational aspects of Aikido
and motorcycling, respectively, and how they inform intersubjective
awareness from a practice orientation of mind-body integration, which
itself approaches a non-dualistic experience and outlook. Lastly, Part III
forms ‘A Relational View of Practice’ by looking at how the embodied
attunement practice of Aikido can inform transformative and self-reflec-
tive learning through ‘embodied habitus’ (Inoue 2006) of non-dual rela-
tionality in broader relational and pedagogical settings. The following
sections of this introductory essay expand on these themes of self-reflec-
tive learning through practice, through autobiographical notes that situ-
ate my research, more detailed unfolding of the holistic methodology and
conceptual framework, and the thematic and theoretical perspectives in
which the book as a whole is framed.
Vancouver, Canada Michael A. Gordon Ph.D.

Preface xiii
References
Henry, M. (2008). Material phenomenology (S. Davidson, Trans.). New York:
Fordham University Press.
Henry, M. (2015). Incarnation: A philosophy of flesh (K. Hefty, Trans.). Evanston,
IL: Northwestern University Press.
Inoue, S. (2006). Embodied habitus. Theory, Culture and Society, 23(2–3),
229–231.
Acknowledgements
I wish to express my sincere gratitude to my partner Helena for her inex-

haustible support, insight, and resolve in helping me through my doc-
toral degree journey. I would also like to extend my deep appreciation
to my senior doctoral supervisor, friend, and colleague Dr. Heesoon
Bai, without whom my discovery of my deeper potential on this path
would not have been possible. Thank you, Heesoon, for your belief in
me and my work from the beginning, and the patience and determina-
tion in helping me see my vision through to completion. I would also
like to acknowledge my doctoral supervisor Dr. Stephen Smith for his
humor, continued commitment, and critical insights into my work as
we pushed it along toward being more meaningful, alive, and relevant. I
wish to also extend my gratitude to Dr. Avraham Cohen whom as both
colleague, friend, and fellow aikidoka, saw promise and potential in the
rich interweaving of the psychological, spiritual, and phenomenological
aspects of the interpersonal practices and values we have in common. I
also wish to thank Dr. Mark Fettes and Dr. Vicki Kelly for their personal
and academic friendship and guidance along the journey toward this dis-
sertation. I am acknowledging here two pivotal teachers in my life and
work: Kazuko Ikegawa Sensei, for guiding me on the path to discovery
in Japanese calligraphy; and Sensei Stephen Duffin for his continued sup-
port, friendship, and guidance through Aikido both on and off the mat.
My heartfelt appreciation also goes out to Dr. John P. (Jack) Miller and
Dr. Jing Lin for their gracious support and guidance, and their unflag-
ging contributions in promoting holistic and contemplative approaches to
xv
xvi Acknowledgements
education. To Dr. Tobin Hart, I extend my deep gratitude for your men-
torship and friendship as a fellow traveler, scholar and human on the path
to creating a better world for all beings.
Lastly, to my parents, without whom I wouldn’t have come into this
world: For the difficult but transformative growth together along this
path of life, one which has allowed me to appreciate the best in each of
them and the opportunity to continue to discover the person I am.
Contents
Part I A Psychospiritual View of Self-Cultivation
1 Introduction: Practice as Transformative Wholeness 3
2 Teacher as Healer: Animating the ‘Ecological Self’

Through Holistic, Engaged Pedagogy 57
Part II An Intersubjective View of Knowing and Being
3 Awakening to Wholeness: Aikido as an Embodied

Praxis of Intersubjectivity 89
4 Moto-Morphosis: The Gestalt of Aikido

and Psychotherapy, and Motorcycling as ‘Way’ 109
Part III A Relational View of Practice
5 The Way of the Classroom: Aikido as Transformative

and Embodied Pedagogy Through Self-Cultivation 139
xvii
xviii Contents
6 Conclusion 163
Index 187
List of Figures
Fig. 1.1 Triangle, Circle, Square: Sangen. Brushwork, Zen

Master Sengai Gibon (1750–1837) Spiritual Roots
of Aikido 38
Illustration I.1 Sai Sei “reborn” 1

Illustration 2.1 Ai ‘harmony’ or ‘love’ 57
Illustration II.1 Ki, “universe; life force” 87
Illustration 3.1 Senshin, “purify heart-mind; reform one’s self” 91
Illustration 4.1 Shūchū, “concentration or focus” 125
Illustration III.1 Do, “way or path” 137
Illustration 5.1 Keiko, ‘training; practice; study’ 147
Illustration 5.2 Hara, ‘one point; centre’ 150
Illustration 6.1 Kokoro, “heart; mind” 163
xix
List of Tables
Table 1.1 The eightfold path and its three divisions 40

Table 1.2 Ground, path, fruition (conditional view) 40
Table 1.3 Ground, path, fruition (unconditional view) 41
Table 1.4 Ground, path, fruition via Aikido and Gestalt Therapy 45
Table 1.5 The cycle is the whole: learning as ontology 46
Table 1.6 Layout of essays 47
xxi
PART I
A Psychospiritual View
of Self-Cultivation
Illustration I.1 Sai Sei “reborn”

CHAPTER 1
Introduction: Practice as Transformative

Wholeness
I Did Not Die Today…

This book begins with a story about my own encounter with death. On
a hazy sun-drenched Summer evening in July 2010, I had a ‘brush with
mortality’—a phrase we shall see that has multiple meanings in this book.
I was making a short trip on my motorcycle to grab a bite to eat close-by
after an appointment in my hometown of Vancouver, BC. What hap-
pened in a flash, shortly after I donned my helmet and pulled on my pro-
tective gloves in familiar ritual, both froze and expanded my perception
of time and space and profoundly changed my life. I pulled away from
the curb in routine fashion and paused at a stop sign on a side street and,
seeing that the intersection to the major road was clear and the main
traffic light was red, I proceeded across the pedestrian-controlled traffic
light to make a left turn. Traffic flow was stopped in both directions at
the main red light. I looked in each direction, twice. What I couldn’t
have foreseen, despite all my normal and precautionary routines, was that
I was headed for a near-fatal collision with a car. As I moved across the
intersection, the pedestrian light still flashing a red hand to signal caution
in crossing, a driver approached downhill through the glare of the set-
ting summer sun to my left, seeing what I didn’t: a suddenly clear green
traffic signal. Already in motion, the driver now accelerated through the
green light. A tanker truck to my immediate left was fully stopped at the
intersection yet to proceed through the green light, air brakes applied,
© The Author(s) 2019 3

M. A. Gordon, Aikido as Transformative and Embodied Pedagogy,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-23953-4_1
4 M. A. GORDON
obscuring me from the oncoming car as I pulled forward past the truck’s
front bumper to make a left turn.
The oncoming car hit me broadside. The bike was hit with such
force that it was knocked out from beneath me, spinning and skittering
on its side axis into the middle of the opposite oncoming side traffic.
According to a witness, I was knocked head-down off my motorcycle,
straight into the pavement—mercifully landing after the car had pushed
through. While my head and neck made direct impact, I can only attest
to the fact that decades of martial arts training and break-falling in the
Japanese defensive art of Aikido had effectively saved my life, instinc-
tively putting me into a state of coordinated, relaxed body posture and
protective responsiveness. As the witness stated later: ‘I don’t know how
you survived that!’ As horrific as the accident was, I came out relatively
spared of physical injury—this considering I ended up hitting the pave-
ment helmet and hands first, my bike scattering across the road and
ultimately written-off as a mangled unrepairable loss by the insurance
company. In that life-threatening blink of an eye, years of quick reflexes
and martial arts training in Aikido proved its merit, protecting me from
significant shock, trauma, and, possibly, death.
This dramatic autobiographical event serves as the pretext of this
book, where I use the ‘brush with mortality’ to examine the psychos-
piritual, kinesthetic, and relational aspects of practice as it applies to daily
life. By this I suggest not just life and death situations (which a mar-
tial art such as Aikido suggests via ‘self-defence’), but rather to the sense
of being fully immersed in living. Aristotle laid the early foundation for
later phenomenological philosophy and study of ‘aliveness’ with the
Greek term aesthesis, which forms the root of his theory of aesthetics.
Jungian scholar James Hillman (1992, p. 60) is one of a succession of
modern philosophers from Nietzsche through Heidegger to revive the
Aristotelian idea of aesthesis (from Greek, meaning ‘sensation’), which
relates to the experience of aletheia (meaning ‘unconcealment’ or ‘dis-
closure’ of truth through phenomena). As educator Elliot Eisner points
out, ‘The opposite of aesthetic is anaesthetic!’ (as cited in Coghlan &
Brydon-Miller, 2014, p. 121). Thus, in terms of ontology, and prac-
tice, being alive is not simply a measure of being not dead but being
fully awakened. Speaking to this ‘aliveness,’ I take up the full kinesthetic
(e.g., embodied) aspects of my own practices toward connecting with
their generalizable and practical applications for full and joyful immer-
sion in life. In my self-study for this book, the focus on aesthesis or ‘alive
1 INTRODUCTION: PRACTICE AS TRANSFORMATIVE WHOLENESS 5
awakeness’ takes place primarily through my lifelong study of ki-energy

(Japanese: ‘life energy, vitality, life force’) and mind-body coordination
through the dynamic art of Ki Aikido, as well as my purposefully adopted
practice of shodo (Japanese calligraphy). I go on to relate this core expe-
riential ‘way’ of ki-awareness or aesthesis to the other practices in my
personal and professional life: psychotherapy, motorcycling, and teach-
ing. Though I did not incur any lasting physical injury from my motor-
cycle accident, my ‘brush with death’ was emotionally, symbolically, and
spiritually shocking and awakening. I remain an avid motorcyclist, and
as a teacher and practitioner of the art of Aikido, I draw on this direct
encounter with death when asked if I have ever had to use Aikido in real
life.
The Teleology of ‘Way’ as Self-Cultivation

Yuasa (1993), in his theory of ki, examines self-cultivation from an
Eastern philosophical tradition, a position from which he advocates for
a more ‘subjectivist’ scientific research approach. In doing so, Yuasa is
highlighting—from the East Asian philosophical worldview—an explic-
itly teleological nature to knowing and being. By contrast, as Yuasa sug-
gests, one result of the objectivist scientific paradigm that ensued after
the so-called Cartesian dichotomy of mind/matter is that ‘[t]eleology
has been expelled from modern science’ (1993, p. 148). Yuasa specifi-
cally refers to teleology via the history of pre-modern biology and traces
pre-modern biology’s roots to Aristotle’s original notion of ‘final cause’
(telos), where ‘teleology states that all phenomena exist for a certain pur-
pose’ (1993, p. 175). By this, Yuasa suggests that teleology and causality
are mutually exclusive in modern science. In causality, for example, the
lungs have a certain function in human physiology that correlate to cir-
culation, breathing, and the autonomic nervous system. Conversely, as
Yuasa informs us, Aristotle was led to telos because he was indeed famil-
iar with biology and that ‘it is possible to view the character and struc-
ture of a living organism as formed to realize a definite purpose’ (1993,
p. 175). ‘For example,’ Yuasa states, ‘the lungs are a means for the pur-
pose of breathing’ (1993, p. 175). He also conjectures that Darwin pur-
portedly used Aristotle’s theory of teleology in initially forming his theory
of the evolution of life. While it may seem subtle or semantic, the dis-
tinction is vital in that teleology connects to human meaning-making in
a way that transcends the scientific rigidity of causal relationships. What
6 M. A. GORDON
Yuasa contends, then, is that the phenomena of ki, measurable as it

may be through experimental observation as, say, electromagnetic force
both within and outside the human body (cf. discussion of ki-therapist
in scientific study in the upcoming section), suggest a ‘third way’ that
is neither scientifically measurable nor immediately registered through
conscious perception. Yuasa ascribes this ‘third way’ as ‘invisible’ within
the dualistic Cartesian paradigm and, like Jung, assigns it to the ‘uncon-
scious.’ The reason I make this immediate foray into Yuasa’s ki theory so
early in this book is to situate this study in such a teleological, meaning,
and values-based subjective manner—that is, that the practice or ‘way’ of
Aikido through ki study in the context of my own ‘brush with mortal-
ity’ and the various other practices I bring into the discussion carry with
them pronounced teleological characteristics. Simply put, as a life prac-
tice, the experiential and relational aspects of ki development as self-cul-
tivation—put forward via my own Aikido experience and reflected upon
in other practices in this study—reflects a system of cyclical and recur-
sive learning that is intentional and grounded in meaning and virtue eth-
ics. More simply put, I approach my ‘brush with mortality’ as being a
potential source of understanding and growth or personal evolution, in
the same way Yuasa (1993) defines the teleological, wherein, ‘generally
speaking, that there is purpose means that the phenomenon has a defi-
nite meaning and value for the life of an individual organism’ (1993,
p. 175).
Part I of this book forms ‘A Psychospiritual View of Self-Cultivation,’
where the ‘ground’ or conditions of one’s experience and being inform
the approach to practice, and its fruition or aspirational purpose and
outcome. If we follow Yuasa’s teleological inclination toward subjective
meaning and value then, my near-death experience forms the empiri-
cal, experiential ‘ground’ in this study. What has this got to do with a
psychospiritual and even ontological view? When I disclosed the details
shortly after the accident to two acquaintances, they independently
arrived at the same conclusion: it was not yet my time to die. Each, on
different occasions, told me I was ‘meant to be here,’ that I was spared
for a purpose. The first of these affirmations was from a psychic who
suggested that I had ‘experienced my own death’—both physically and
metaphysically—and thus had walked away ‘reborn,’ my karma trans-
formed. I wept instantly, the gravity of what happened, the thought that
either recklessly or unconsciously I almost ‘ended’ myself, compressing
me with the full bearing of grief. And yet the affirming words of these
two acquaintances—that I was not yet meant to leave this life—gave me

instantly sobering clarity: as horrifying, sudden and traumatic as this flash
with danger had been, I did not die today. Two critical questions, how-
ever, remained immediately unanswered and weave themselves through-
out the themes in this book. Firstly, what happened in this incident? What
can be learned from it in terms of skillful awareness and experience not
only from the understanding of causality, but toward meaning and pur-
posefulness. Secondly, what does it mean to fully live, to fully engage the
present without fear, withdrawal, or resignation? This question invokes a
saying from Japanese culture, one that also stems from the martial, sam-
urai ‘warriorship’ (Japanese: budo) antecedents of Aikido training: ichi go,
ichi go-e. Translated to English, this phrase means ‘one chance, one life;
one encounter.’ To begin to explore what happened in my accident from
the teleological viewpoint, as Yuasa suggests, then means going beyond
the simple correlative failures or causality—the momentary lapse of
judgment, riding skill, or impulse control, for example—that belies the
deeper forces at work that undermined my otherwise ingrained skillful
caution and attentiveness. A more meaning-rich and valuable reflection,
as we shall see, reveals the accident as a case of my being out of tune or
out-of-sync with myself that undergirded my failure of risk assessment in
leaving that stop sign with ‘stale’ red traffic lights on either side of me.
In this sense, the learning or ‘correction’ involved in the post-incident
analysis isn’t as simple as fine-tuning my motor skill or traffic judgment.
There were deeper layers that relate to the context of learning experien-
tially. I situate this contextual learning from the psychotherapeutic van-
tage point of Gestalt Therapy—that one’s experiential paradigm exists in
an ecological life-setting, a whole or gestalt.
Ontology as Gestalt
I introduce Gestalt Therapy to widen the view from the immediate
accident parameters (causality) of my accident to my overall ‘life ecol-
ogy,’ both inner and outer, and how conscious and unconscious syn-
chronization of such ‘inner/outer’ phenomena (namely, coordination
of mind-body-environment through ki-awareness) leads to my greater
reflection and integration of what happened. From this holistic, ecolog-
ical, or gestalt perspective, I contend that this study aligns with Yuasa’s
(teleological) discussion of Jung’s ‘synchronization’ (1993, p. 145), the
idea that life ruptures such as my accident can be viewed in terms of
8 M. A. GORDON
either being aligned or misaligned with the overarching meaning, value,

and purposiveness of one’s life. Yuasa (1993) uses the term synchroni-
zation to invoke Jung’s theory of synchronicity where one experiences
the phenomenon of ‘meaningful coincidences.’ Jung’s intent, Yuasa
reminds us, is not to focus on correlative causality, but on what coincides
in the outer environment, as it relates to one’s unconscious drives, goals,
or ‘shadow’ (Jung’s depth psychology term for the ‘hidden’ corners of
our psyche). In the following section, I further elaborate the practice of
Aikido, which, in this study, is meant to offer insight into the teleological
explanation for the experiential learning of cultivating one’s personal ki
in order to better harmonize with the ki of others, the natural and other-
than-human world, and universal ki. In less symbolic terms than Jung,
‘synchronicity’ in Aikido goes beyond ‘meaningful coincidence’ to actual
ontological and cosmological harmony. One might state this beyond
Yuasa’s ‘transpersonal synchronization’ (1993, p. 145) to ‘spiritual syn-
chronization’ or harmony. Aikido, after all, translates as ‘the way of har-
mony or of harmonizing ki.’
Earlier, I raised the question arising from my accident as to ‘what does
it mean to be fully alive?’ As a beginning student of the Japanese mar-
tial art of Aikido in my mid-twenties, I would ponder for years to come
upon a statement put forward by my teacher: ‘Aikido helps us overcome
not the fear of death but the fear of living.’ Fear of death I could relate
to. Even as a turbulent young man somewhat oblivious or impertinent
in the face of mortality, existential dread made sense. But what of the
fear of living? If my near-death experience prompted me that ‘it was not
yet my time to die,’ then how and who was I to be alive, and to what
purpose? In this sense, the aftermath of this near-fatal encounter was not
escaping death but facing the meaning of life, of my life, of being alive.
What is Aikido, and how did it play such a vital role in my surviv-
ing this encounter with death and reckoning with life? This is the central
question in the self-study that informs this book. Aikido is considered a
modern Japanese form of budo or ‘martial way’ realized by its founder
Morihei Ueshiba (‘O Sensei’ or ‘great teacher,’ December 14, 1883–
April 26, 1969). Known as the ‘art of peace’ within an ethos of ‘win-
ning without fighting,’ students train together in the dojo (practice hall
or ‘place of spiritual learning’) in mock attack scenarios—striking their
partners or attempting to take hold to control them. However, rather
than being reduced to a system of tactical self-defense—blocking or
counter-striking, as is commonly the case with ‘martial’ or combat
arts—Aikido teaches practitioners to respond calmly to threat through

synchronous timing, circular, centrifugal-centripetal movement, and
carrying out a spirit of blending or harmonizing with attack. This lat-
ter point has traditionally been expressed in budo (e.g., samurai warri-
orship) as aiki. Ueshiba’s spiritual mission through Aikido, however,
was to infuse aiki (or ‘harmonizing’ with the opponent) with a wider
spiritual purpose of aiki as unifying peace—as love. This, he contended,
was the true meaning of budo expressed as the ‘loving protection of all
things.’ The Aikidoist (Japanese: aikidoka) is thus training to harmo-
nize or purify her or his inner aggression—this being rooted in a deeper
spiritual, ontological, and epistemological provisional fallacy of dualism
(self-other, spirit-matter)—outwardly manifested by moving with calm
control. Such an active, self-reflective, and relational practice enables par-
ticipants to maintain a manageable, safe, and ‘respectful’ distance (ma-
ai: Japanese) in a manner that results with the attacker having to escape
protectively or be gently but powerfully subdued until the defender can
make space and withdraw safely. Aikido is thus teleological in Yuasa’s
use of the term, as both a tactical and spiritual form of non-aggression
and nonviolence. It is imbued with an abiding tactful and philosophical
spirit of mutual protection and preservation. As we shall see, however,
the dynamics of flow, non-dissention, synchronization of movement
and response through relational practice in Aikido are not reduceable to
stimulus-response dynamics, applied kinesthetics, or biomechanics. Nor
can they be idealized as merely lofty aspirational or altruistic philosoph-
ical values. Rather, core to the spiritual mission of Aikido laid out by its
founder Ueshiba, is the principle of aiki. Ki is a Japanese word with mul-
tiple interpretations and applications. Broadly put, it refers to the vital
energy in all life, universal life force, spirit or the nature of a situation or
interaction. In the context of Aikido training, ki takes on singular impor-
tance as the self-cultivation of one’s inner mind-body coordination (flow
of ki), and the harmonization of one’s ki with that of any encounter and
relationship with the natural world. In the broadest and holistic scope,
relationship refers to the entire ecology of life, or Cosmos. We shall
explore the central importance of ki and Aikido training to the self-study
that undergirds this book shortly. Meanwhile, suffice to say that ki in the
context of Aikido is interchangeable with reference to life itself. More to
the point, ki and aiki in the context of self-cultivation and Yuasa’s ‘tele-
ological intentionality’ and ‘transpersonal synchronization’ represent the
life-sustaining movement toward wholeness. Further, as Ueshiba himself
10 M. A. GORDON
stated, harmonization through aiki also transcends mere non-combative

resolution. It is the path of love. Thus, in this study, the exploration of ki
is interchangeable and synonymous with the teleological notion of ‘love’
as harmony or synchronization of life energy itself.
Again, the personal narrative about my near-death experience forms a
centerpiece in this study not simply to analyze any tactical or skills-based
failure on my part—or even to psychoanalyze the deeper implications of
having faced death per se. Rather, the story is presented here as a source
of introspection, reflection, and, to borrow a term from action research,
a vivencia or ‘lived experience’ (Coghlan & Brydon-Miller, 2014). What
I suggest is that with my accident, instead of simply escaping death, I
had been awoken to my contact with life. Where the accident reveals a
disconnection, a lack of presence and grounded awareness and atten-
tion within what was otherwise the acquired autonomic skill of riding
a motorcycle, it provides an inflection point for my own self-awareness
and self-cultivation. I contend here that my own learning from this dra-
matic, existential vivencia extends beyond my own personal survival
story, providing the basis for examining transpersonal awareness and
detecting disruption of Yuasa’s ‘transpersonal synchronization.’ In this
sense, this book follows in that line of questioning and reflection about
aesthesis as the opposite of anaesthesis, in what Maxine Greene refers to
as ‘wide-awakeness’ (Greene, 1977). This is to inquire reflexively, aes-
thetically, and psychoeducationally in the development of an individual
what it means to be fully awake to all aspects of living—of life. It is as
ecological as it is a metaphysical or transpersonal query. In my brush-
with-death, the post-traumatic affect that emerged was not delayed
shock—that again was buffered by years of Aikido training, which
teaches one to stay centered, grounded, and calm under threat, de-tun-
ing one’s conditioned or sensitized ‘set-point’ for panic response or reac-
tivity. Rather, what emerged days after the incident were the implications
of what had happened. What did this mean for my relationships—with
myself, my family, and my then lover lying beside me as I awoke in lay-
ers of sweat, dread, and guilt? My point here isn’t solely emotional or
spiritual awakening; rather it is more of how profoundly shocked I was
into relationality. By the latter, I am not simply referring to the impact
of my life-risking accident on my relationships, but rather how it awak-
ened me—violently, unpredictably—to the moment of temporal-spatial
reality. The ‘moment’ here signifies not only sudden and near-fatal col-
lision with another vehicle, or the ground, but the sharp contact with
the conditions of my life in all aspects. After all, near-death experiences
commonly lead people to reconsider their position in life. In view of

these considerations, I saw, and here reflect on, the journey forward out
of this accident as a path of healing. Again, ‘healing’ here goes beyond
my own psychophysical injuries, to the impact on my life ecology, and
my own cohesion, interactivity, and synchronicity with life. As I make
evident in the first essay Teacher as Healer: Animating the ‘Ecological Self
Through Holistic, Engaged Pedagogy to follow within Part I of the book,
the phrase ‘to heal’ is after all etymologically interchangeable with that of
‘to make whole’ (i.e., the Proto-Germanic ‘hailjan’ or Old English hale).
To heal is to move toward repair or wholeness. In the concluding
essay of this book, ‘The Way of the Classroom’ in Part III, I refer to
the idea of Buddhist ethos working with one’s painful experiences, rela-
tional struggles, and otherwise disruptive psycho-emotional patterns or
conditioning as transmutation. Indeed, in Buddhist practice, this gentle
but vigorous attention to one’s mental or emotional ‘afflictions’ through
calm abiding or ‘loving-kindness’ and compassion (e.g., through medi-
tation) is itself the source of happiness. In other words, there is a sense
of ‘stick-with-it-ness’ to one’s practice as a form of developing and culti-
vating self-compassion that stands in contrast to any drive toward exter-
nal achievement. Reaching beyond self-healing or self-compassion, the
higher ideal in Buddhism is directed toward the spiritual aim of lessening
the suffering of all beings, this being expressed through an ontological
worldview of non-dualism as ‘interpenetration’ or ‘interdependence.’
From a more Western psychological perspective, Positive Psychology
(Seligman, 2002) posits that happiness and mental well-being is not sim-
ply the process of an accounting of (a) one’s pleasurable experiences; (b)
one’s engagement; but rather: (c) the fruition of one’s life as defined
by its purposiveness. The latter is framed in the Aristotelian concept of
Eudaimonia, which is usually translated as happiness. Eudaimonia in
Aristotle’s virtue ethics however connotes a greater sense of well-being,
full purposeful human flourishing in context with phronesis or ‘practical
wisdom.’ Here again, purposiveness suggests a teleological approach to
self-cultivation.
Love as a Practice

To review so far, we have looked at how this book begins in Part I with
a psychospiritual view of (my) sample situation as ‘ground.’ We then
step back with a wider perspective in Part II to look at how an inter-
subjective view of knowing and being—from a virtue ethics, aspirational
12 M. A. GORDON
standpoint within this gestalt view—unfolds teleologically. The under-

lying theme of this book is the purposiveness of teaching and learning
as bringing to fruition purposiveness or well-being. From a virtue ethics
standpoint, this is the stated aim of any healthy relationship or commu-
nity—to aid in the well-being of others, or in the soteriological phrasing
of Buddhism to ‘lessen the suffering of other beings.’ Love, then, in an
altruistic sense, guides this teleology. In this book, I explore the virtue
ethics underlying Aikido (variously translated from Japanese as ‘the way
of harmony or peace’), namely that of budo, or ‘the way of warriorship.’
For Ueshiba, budo transcended the notion of mere combat warriorship
to encompass spiritual warriorship as ‘the loving protection of all beings’
(Ueshiba, 1985, pp. 179–180). As Erich Fromm emphasized, love is not
an entitlement; it is a practice, a skill (Fromm, 1956). Fromm conceptu-
alizes love in a platonic sense (e.g., agape or ‘higher love’), as opposed
to romantic love. This kind of transpersonal, universal, expansive, vir-
tue-based, and embodied notion of learning and practicing love is both
the spiritual and pedagogical underpinning of Aikido. Indeed, at the core
of Buddhist teaching, as we shall see, is the continued practice of self-
examination and self-cultivation toward moral virtue (i.e., loving-kind-
ness, compassion) expressed as ‘selflessness.’ Selflessness, ‘egolessness,’ and
no-self here reflect the psychospiritual practice of deconstructing the illusion
of a materially substantive and individualized fixed ego-self, rather than
negation of self. This selflessness does not signify ‘nothingness.’ Rather,
it allows one, through the fruition of continuous contemplative practice
and self-study, to break free of the concept of an individualized ‘self’ to
an experience of living through interconnectedness. In Essays 3 and 4
of the book, I explore the East Asian philosophy of (social) self which
is rooted in an intersubjective, non-dualistic view of self-cultivation and
knowing and being through a process of mind-body integration. As
a ‘way’ or practice emblematic of this non-dual East Asian philosophy
of knowing and being Aikido, as Ueshiba (1985) stated above, denotes
spiritual rather than martial training. The spiritual transformation real-
ized through training then is rooted in a twofold purposefulness or tel-
eology. First is the task of integrating one’s own mind and body (e.g.,
harmonizing one’s personal ki), which then secondly is experienced
through realizing non-resistance in character and action through rela-
tional practice (e.g., harmonizing one’s personal ki with the ki of others,
of the Universe).
In Part III of this book, I lay out this ‘relational view’ of practice in
terms of the outcome of this teleological outlook on self-cultivation and
interdependent relationality. In the Buddhist context, as in Fromm’s call
to love as a skill, and Aikido’s founder’s mission to ‘love and protect all
living beings,’ this ‘practice of love’ is laid out both methodologically
and aspirationally as ‘skillful means’ or practical wisdom. I examine love
as a pedagogical undertaking through this understanding and through
the lens of Aikido as do, michi, ‘way’ or practice. I do so not only from
a virtue ethics standpoint, but practically speaking as embodied attune-
ment. I explore—through reflections on personal and professional expe-
rience, namely: teaching, psychotherapy, Aikido, and motorcycling—an
expanded notion of practice, beyond theory and technique, to some-
thing ecological.
In review, this book is formulated from the following key themes and
components:
• autobiographical source material as ‘ground zero’ of my subjective

experience
• practice as transformational
• transformational practice as Japanese ‘way’ of self-cultivation
• Aikido, shodo, motorcycling, and psychotherapy as ‘way’
• Methodology=learning through practice, as ‘way,’ as self-cultivational.
These thematic, methodological, and theoretical elements unfold with

the following structure of essays in the manuscript:
Essay 2: Pedagogy as practice of love (healing, holistic)

Essay 3: Aikido as intersubjective practice
Essay 4: Phenomenology of motorcycling and gestalt consciousness
Essay 5: Aikido as extending into the embodied aspects of pedagogical
practice.
Ki is the Key
The underlying ‘auto-affectivity,’ as Michel Henry (2015) calls it in his
‘life phenomenology,’ or aesthesis of this self-study is considered through
embodied, interpersonal, and transpersonal ki-energy awareness. Ki both
14 M. A. GORDON
symbolizes and carries with it the self-sustaining life drive of all organ-
isms. Suffice to say here that ki is a current of life, or better yet a currency
of affective exchange, dynamic energy interplay, and the stuff or hyle
of life itself. Yuasa (1993) points out how scientific studies explore the
measurability of ki in the body as biokinetic energy, or the measurable
effect of ki as such a transferable energy between ki-therapist and clients
in what he describes as ‘transpersonal synchronization’ (p. 145). Yuasa
notes that, as in quantum particle physics, problems abound practically
and theoretically in terms of ‘observer effect’ in such experiments. In line
with Yuasa, the pertinent point regarding self-cultivation in Japanese and
other East Asian philosophical traditions (i.e., Daoism, Zen Buddhism)
is not ultimate truth, but practical outcome (in terms of harmonized
relations). As is the wu wei or ‘non-doing’ flow of Daoist thought, the
principle meaning of ki and more importantly aiki as the central tenet of
Aikido is the idea of connecting mind, body, and spirit with the intelligi-
bility of the natural world, or the ki of the universe—of being in balance.
As mentioned earlier, Yuasa refers to the dedication to one’s self-cultiva-
tion through East Asian practices, to the balancing of one’s ‘inner’ ki and
external ki (i.e., others, the world) as being informed by an unconscious
‘teleological intentionality’ (Yuasa, 1993, p. 177). Yuasa’s mind-body
theory identifies ki as an aforementioned ‘third term’ or force beyond
the Cartesian dichotomy of mind and body. In doing so, Nagatomo (in
Yuasa, 1993) points out, Yuasa mirrors the projects of Maurice Merleau-
Ponty’s ‘intentional arc’ and Henri Bergson’s body ‘motor-scheme’—the
idea that perception and experience extend from both internal mapping
and external interaction as mind-through-body vis-a-vis the phenomenal
world (Yuasa, 1993, p. xxv). This interactive modality extends beyond
mind (subjective perception) or body (physical) duality, or singular cau-
sality (Yuasa, 1993). Nagatomo (in Yuasa, 1993) points out how Yuasa
defines ‘ki-energy as a third term with a psychophysical character that can-
not be properly accommodated within the dualistic paradigm of think-
ing’ (p. xii). As Yuasa highlights, in acupuncture the ‘field’ or holographic
view of the human body as comprised of energy or ki/qi meridians for
example stands in contrast to the anatomical topography of conventional
medical science and its organ-focused locality. The ‘invisible’ psycho-
physical force of ki, says Yuasa, not only moves throughout the body,
but in ‘transpersonal synchronicity’ with other persons and is entangled
with the environment. Thus, says Nagatomo (in Yuasa, 1993), that in
his ki theory, ‘Yuasa provides the empirical basis for the old wisdom that
human being qua microcosm is correlative with the physical universe

qua macrocosm’ (in Yuasa, 1993, p. xii) and that in the eastern world-
view ‘nature is a stage upon which its original activity expresses itself
vis-à-vis ki-energy through a vessel that is the human being’ (in Yuasa,
1993, p. xiii). This brings us back to the ‘ordinary state’ of conscious-
ness or rather ki ‘refinement’ of most people, whom Yuasa contends are
in a state where their ki-flow exists in coenaesthesis or body-informed
consciousness. We can only achieve ‘body mind oneness,’ or, put differ-
ently, coordinated subconscious (body) and conscious awareness through
determined effort and practice. The natural effect of this alignment is,
in the parlance of Aikido, experienced as fuller aiki or self-cosmos har-
mony, as seamless and non-dual integration of ki. As Nagatomo further
points out via Yuasa (1993), the fruition of this “position of inseparable
mind-body oneness” (i.e., Buddhist satori or enlightenment; the Dao) is
the highest expression of “the philosophy of self-cultivation within the
Japanese intellectual tradition [which) recognizes an existential trans-
formation from provisional dualism to non-dualism” (in Yuasa, 1993,
p. xiv). This theme of self-development as transformation through prac-
tice or way is echoed throughout this manuscript in the work of Davey
(2002), Nakagawa (2000), and, of course, Yuasa (1987, 1993). Davey
(2002), for example, elaborates on how the Japanese ‘way’ (do or michi
in Japanese) represents the path of transcending individual self-mastery
through skillfulness toward the Zen and Taoist principle of mushin or
no-self. In line with Buddhist practice, mushin aims to lead the individual
to ‘practical wisdom’ through sustained practice (keiko: Japanese) or aus-
tere/rigorous spiritual training (shugyo in Japanese). Thus, the do of the
many Japanese ‘ways,’ Davey (2002) explains, are unified in the spiritual
aim and self-cultivation toward seishin tanren: seishin translated as ‘spirit’
and tanren as ‘forging’ (Davey, 2002, p. 137). This ‘forging of one’s
spirit’ thus inherently implies a spiritual undertaking in the sense that
one’s mind-body oneness is expressed through their practice. As Davey
comments: ‘When asked exactly how a Do form functions as a Way,’
says Davey (2002), ‘as opposed to simply a mechanical skill, I frequently
explain that the body reflects the mind, and so any art can function as a
visible representation of our spiritual condition’ (Davey, 2002, p. 93).
To review then, the organization of this manuscript and its essays
move from a psychospiritual view in Part I, to an intersubjective view
in Part II, and finally to the notion of relational ‘practical wisdom’
and the dissolution of the conceptualized singular egoic self through
16 M. A. GORDON
practice—this process as achieved mastery or ‘enlightenment’—as

the fruition of self-cultivation. This cycle of experiential and reflective
self-transformation from the egoic self toward mushin or ‘no self’ in the
non-dual sense then continues in a cyclic fashion. The entire cycle con-
tains the three stages of self-development within a holistic, cosmological,
and spiritual ontology of non-dual reality. In the later methodology sec-
tion laid out in this introductory essay, the entire book is situated within
this holistic ‘three-fold’ system (see Table 1.6).
I illustrate this holistic model of three-stage spiritual transformation
in this book through my own decades-long study in Ki Aikido. The lat-
ter name is the invention of the founder Ueshiba’s protégé and chief
instructor (and later, interim successor), Koichi Tohei, whose Ki Aikido
figures predominantly throughout this book. Tohei remarked that,
despite their best efforts and the efforts of Ueshiba himself, most of his
students were incapable of reproducing his effortless power—his kokyu
or breath power, for example—and aiki through simple mimesis. After
studying with Tempu Nakamura Sensei, who developed Japanese yoga
through his own Shin Shin Toitsu Do training in ‘mind and body coor-
dination,’ Tohei adapted the principles Tempu had developed to enable
his students to study ‘ki development’ both with and without engaging
in Aikido training. Tempu’s theory was based on a traditional under-
standing of integrating the ‘upper and lower’ (or, coarse and refined) ki
in the body, centered on the hara or ‘one point’ toward students devel-
oping natural coordination, balance, relaxation, and calmness in body
and mind—without skillful, conscious effort. In other words, with con-
scious (upper) mind and unconscious (lower) body synchronized, one
exhibits what Davey points to as the common principle in the michi or
‘ways’ of do as ‘active meditation’ or ‘do chu no sei (sei, “calmness”; chu,
“during”; and do, movement)’, which can be translated as ‘stillness in
motion’ or ‘calmness in the midst of action’ (Davey, 2002, p. 119).
True to Ki Aikido’s underpinnings in Tempu’s Shin Shin Toitsu Do
(‘way of mind-body coordination’) and as observable through the do of
the many Japanese arts or michi, Davey comments: ‘Nakamura Sensei
viewed the mind as an invisible aspect of the body and the body as a visi-
ble aspect of the mind’ (2002, p. 95). Applying these principles of mind-
body coordination through do back to my accident, we begin to see the
missing ‘calmness in the midst of action’ that led to my error in timing.
This very principle, we shall see next, applies itself directly through shodo
(Japanese calligraphy, which I took up as a self-study practice for this

book) and Aikido.1
Self-Study Through Shodo: Japanese Calligraphy

I took up the art of Japanese calligraphy or shodo with the purpose of
forming an active self-study through embodied learning specific to this
book. I chose shodo as not merely an aesthetic but a kinesthetic prac-
tice—the core principle of the calligraphy brushwork being that one does
the brushwork with not just one’s hand or arm, but the entire body.
Select brushwork illustrations from my own practice are placed in the-
matic sequence throughout the book, representing a ‘developmental arc’
not only in my brushwork but also in my self-reflections. This arc has
been shaped by my daily attunement with all the ‘upwelling’ of life as
experienced through the complexity of psychobiological sensitivities that
Henry (2008, 2015) refers to as the ‘auto-affectivity of life’ in his ‘life
phenomenology.’ In keeping with Davey (2002), the practice of shodo
undertaken here is presented not merely as a new skill but a ‘way,’ as in
Aikido, to cultivate virtue and self-examination in daily life. This embod-
ied approach to learning is presented in this book as a recursive2 pro-
cess of practice, reflection and integration of meaning, interpretation
and skillfulness with daily living. We shall see, moving forward through
these essays, how Yuasa’s (1993) ‘teleological intentionality’ through
‘transpersonal synchronization’ forms this recursive cycle—from the
‘auto-affectivity’ of self-cultivation practice or way, through relational
and transpersonal (better yet, transhuman) attunement.
Shodo and Aikido
The two featured experiential practice ‘ways’ that form the self-study
of this book, shodo and Aikido, serve as a microcosm of Yuasa’s ‘teleo-
logical intentionality.’ There is also a vital historical link between them.
Seiseki Abe achieved a historically unique level of mastery in both prac-
tices: He received 10th Dan (black belt) in Aikido and also taught callig-
raphy to Aikido’s founder Ueshiba. In an interview3 published in 2013,
Abe elaborates on the connection between commitment to one’s prac-
tice(s) and self-cultivation of ki. He speaks about the concentration (of
18 M. A. GORDON
ki) that is required the moment one puts the brush tip to the calligraphy
paper—the smaller the point, the greater the concentration. He goes on:
After you make a point on the paper, you begin to form lines. In aikido, if
someone grasps your hand, it is like the brush touching the surface to form
a point. When you move your hand, you are now forming a line. The dif-
ference between shodo and Aikido is that in shodo, when you form lines,
they are visible on paper. The aikido lines are invisible and disappear from
moment to moment.
Abe’s latter point here gets to two integral points in this book. First,
that self-cultivation through ki development (cf. Davey, 2002; Yuasa,
1993) is about being present, engaged, and synchronized. This inten-
tional commitment through ‘way’ both enhances and informs the prac-
titioner through moment-to-moment ‘auto-affectivity,’ the sensitivity to
which falls somewhere between a strictly somatic perception or cognitive
(or especially, intellectual) awareness. This very psychosomatic ‘between-
ness’ is akin to how Yuasa (1993) designates ki as a ‘third term’ of mind-
body consciousness. Secondly, as I intend to show, the Japanese ‘ways’
in a sense cannot be limited to skill development in an egological way, as
(in line with ‘teleological intentionality) they are embedded in life itself.
Shodo master Abe goes on to explain that Aikido founder Ueshiba’s
commitment to study shodo was driven by the desire to try and ‘cap-
ture’ and leave a lasting impression of his powerful ki, which otherwise
disappeared moment-to-moment. “He wanted to put his ki on paper,”
says Abe, exclaiming in the interview how, decades after Ueshiba’s death,
one can still see and feel the founder’s powerful ki through his shodo.
Another way to express this phenomenon of the vitality or ki-energy
of shodo is through the dynamics of ‘flow.’ Csikszentmihalyi (2008)
describes flow experience as complete immersion, presence, engagement,
merging of action and awareness, and exhibiting ‘autotelic personal-
ity’—that is, being driven by intrinsic reward or motivation rather than
by external goals. Davey (2002) relates how Tempu Nakamura Sensei, in
conceiving of his Japanese yoga system of mind-body coordination (Shin
Shin Toitsu Do), expressed the experience of merging or blending into
one’s practice, the ensuing effortless mind-body unity, and the falling
away of the perceptual boundaries of the egological ‘self’ as muga ichi-
nen: ‘no self, one thought’ (Davey, 2002, p. 164).
We begin to see then a continuity in the Japanese ‘ways’—two of which

form the basis of my own self-study experiential reflection for this book—
of self-cultivation of ki as auto-affective, interrelational, flow-centric,
immersive, kinesthetic, and otherwise ‘embodied.’ The ongoing develop-
mental process of reflection, attunement, adjustment and fluidity or flu-
ency through this dedication to ‘transpersonal synchronization’ expands
beyond egological or ‘self’ mastery, with the ‘teleological intentionality’
toward ‘teleological synchronization.’ Yuasa (1993) adapted Jung’s the-
ory of synchronicity as ‘meaningful coincidences’ to connote purpose-
ful harmonization of one’s inner ki with ecological ki, or the ki of the
Cosmos. This, as Nakamura’s (in Davey, 2002, p. 164) muga ichi-nen
(‘no self, one thought’) suggests, goes beyond ‘singular’ conscious-
ness-through-action toward non-dual awareness.
Ki Development Vignette: One

A student stands relaxed, hands at her sides, her feet shoulder-width
apart. She is instructed to just observe what happens without struggling
to maintain her posture. Standing astride and facing in the same direc-
tion, her training partner tells her ‘think of the top of her head’ with his
index finger lightly applying pressure at the spot. He then lightly draws
his fingers back toward her adjacent shoulder, simulating the feeling of a
branch unexpectantly brushing her body. Realizing she has been affected
by this subtle action, the student lets her body stumble lightly off-pos-
ture. The ‘testing’ student then repeats the test, this time telling her
to ‘think of her one point,’ a spot in her lower abdomen where, when
one places one’s mind there in their center, one becomes naturally sta-
ble. Now, when the tester brushes the feeling back on her shoulder, she
remains stable, and her ‘tester’ realizes he would have to apply physical
force to try to destabilize her. In the next ‘test,’ a third training partner
stands facing the pair and is instructed to think very positively directly
toward the person being tested. Now, when the light ‘brushing’ comes
onto her shoulder, when the student should retain her stable posture
by thinking of her ‘one point,’ the student once again loses her stabil-
ity, allowing herself to stumble slightly back. What has happened? The ki
(Japanese: ‘vital life force’; ‘spirit’), dynamic presence and intentionality
of the third student has ‘moved her subconscious mind’ and she loses
her coordination. When asked, the student remarks: ‘I felt I should have
20 M. A. GORDON
remained stable. I felt stable. But as soon as the test came on, with the
other person’s ki in front of me, I felt this…ripple, in my mind and body.
I couldn’t resist it or deny it, so I let it happen.’
I have included this vignette of a ki development exercise from a recent
Ki Aikido class in my private dojo in Gibsons, British Columbia, to con-
vey an experiential sense of Yuasa’s theory of ki as a ‘third way’ (Yuasa,
1993) of bio-energy affectivity. ‘Ki Aikido,’ as explained earlier, evolved
out of Aikido ex-Chief Instructor Koichi Tohei’s observations about
how most students could not embody the same effortless ki-flow exhib-
ited by Aikido’s founder Ueshiba. Following Ueshiba’s death in 1969,
and having studied Nakamura’s (Davey, 2013) Shin Shin Toitsu Do of
mind-body coordinated Japanese yoga, Tohei incorporated the same
principles into Aikido—enabling him to teach mind-body coordination
without students having to do rigorous Aikido training, and similarly,
allowing Aikido students to start with a connection to ki development
rather than spend years on the mat doing rigorous Aikido training to cul-
tivate relaxation and move without effort. One of these mind-body prin-
ciples involves putting one’s concentration on their lower abdomen or
‘one point’ (hara). Doing so, while not fixating on the physicality of the
spot but rather simply concentrating our attention to our center shifts a
person into a natural state of balance and stability. All of these principles
lead to a similar state of equilibrium, which is attributed to harmoniza-
tion of the subconscious and conscious mind-body into equilibrium or
flow (Csikszentmihalyi, 2008). In Aikido’s spiritual pedagogy, the mind-
body calmness and cosmological non-duality are one-in-the-same.
As a Ki Aikido teacher, I elaborate how this kind of extended pres-
ence and awareness helps us sensitize ourselves to oncoming disturbances
and naturally expands and incrementally increases our ki outward. In this
sense, ki operates as the kind of current I describe earlier in this intro-
ductory essay, akin to a flow of electricity, or subconscious bioenergetic,
telepathic resonance or a kind of ‘whole somatic intention.’ Tohei’s
vision of introducing ki principles into Aikido training not only enables
practitioners to enjoy greater stability and calm in their daily life, but to
provide an empirical, embodied, and enjoyable practice through which
to bring to fruition Ueshiba’s grander vision for non-dual awareness and
aiki—harmonization with the universe, or love.
Theory as Practice in the ‘Here-and-Now’

This book is an assemblage of four scholarly essays, two of which are
published elsewhere as book chapters, and all of which have been pre-
sented at international peer-reviewed academic conferences. This work
is the culmination of 30 years of my own experience in mental health,
social justice, community organizing, and personal development work
as an educator, counselor and 25 years of being an Aikido teacher and
practitioner. This study draws on philosophical inquiry, autoethnogra-
phy, and a reflexive investigation of various practices that make up my
life and work—what shapes me, my meaning, my world. It is in this
spirit that I have adopted use of the term gestalt from Gestalt Therapy
(Perls, Hefferline, & Goodman, 1951), as it entails a hermeneutic and
open-ended approach to psychological insight. I refer to the term her-
meneutic in this self-study then, not in the strictest historical, philosoph-
ical or methodological use of the term, but leaning in the direction of
the psychotherapeutic approach of interpreting meaning from self-
understanding in the context of one’s life experience. In their discussion
of hermeneutics and psychotherapy, Martin and Thompson (2003) com-
ment that Woolfolk (cited in Martin & Thompson, 2003) distinguishes
psychotherapeutic self-understanding from the classical Aristotelian
notion of self-understanding (e.g., as ‘practical wisdom’) in that the
psychotherapeutic hermeneutic approach is “[i]diographic, reflexive,
narrative, evaluative, and concerned with establishing the limits of our
control and freedom” (Martin & Thompson, 2003, p. 5). They con-
tinue, regarding Woolfolk’s view on hermeneutic psychotherapy, that:
“Self-understanding is fundamentally about determining one’s capaci-
ties and worth. Moreover, the psychotherapeutic fostering of self-under-
standing does not consist of an application of psychological science, but
of a practical dialogical engagement with respect to one’s everyday being
and understanding” (Martin & Thompson, 2003, p. 5).
Humanistic psychologist Carl Rogers (1961) exemplified this dia-
logical and interpretive approach to self-understanding in his approach
to psychotherapy. Rogers referred to the in-the-moment experien-
tial shifts and eruptions that occur in therapy work as ‘movement’
(Rogers, 1961). Existential psychotherapist Irvin Yalom (2013) refers
to working with ‘the here-and-now’ of one’s therapeutic process in
22 M. A. GORDON
contrast to the ‘there-and-then’ of past issues. Along with theoretical

and practical reflection on my decades of teaching and learning experi-
ences in the aforementioned practices of therapy, teaching and Aikido,
the shodo brushwork included as illustrations throughout this manu-
script reflect my ongoing process of self-reflection and convey a tactile
‘here-and-now’ visual representation of my embodied pedagogical and
aesthetic experience and progress. As a 6th Dan in Aikido I expected
some transferability of skill and aptitude to shodo. While I have devel-
oped and applied graphic design skills throughout my various careers as
a professional musician, magazine editor, and business owner, I never
considered myself a skilled or talented freehand artist. Nor, as it bears
emphatically stating, do I speak or write Japanese beyond a bare min-
imum! What then accounts for any transferability in skill or sensibil-
ity from Aikido to shodo? Certainly, as I have laid out vis-à-vis Davey
(2002) and Yuasa (1993), the Japanese ‘ways’ are characterized by a
commitment to self-cultivation through ki development and this aspect
of Ki Aikido training for daily life comes through in terms of ‘transper-
sonal synchronization.’ In other words, the ‘fruition’ of the mind-body
coordination of my relaxed, mindful, and ki-extended movement from
years of Ki Aikido practice and teaching soon became evident in my
ability, as a novice, to transfer this ki-extension and ‘transpersonal syn-
chronization’ through the tip of the brush and the ink on the paper. As
Seiseki Abe comments in the previous interview, there is a recursive qual-
ity between the fluidity of movement and relationship with one’s self and
the brush-ink-paper as there is with the Aikido training partner grabbing
our wrist. Through kokyu or ‘breath power,’ ki-extension, moving with
the whole body (‘one point’) and a non-dual ‘teleological intentional-
ity’ with the ‘opponent,’ both the attacker and defender experience the
flow of non-resistance. At the spiritual heart of these practices is one’s
self-cultivation of continual integration with all of life. Again, in Aikido
this principle or aim of aiki or harmonization is expressed as love. The
heart of this study is to draw from my own practice reflections and the
rich psychospiritual of Japanese ‘ways’ to identify and strengthen paral-
lels of ‘pedagogy as a practice of love’ that can be broadly applied both
within and without educational settings.
I shall now offer an overview or conceptual paradigm of this book.
This study reflects my personal ontological and spiritual view of holis-
tic cosmology—that is, that our beingness is co-constituted phenome-
nologically and ontologically with an interdependent reality or universe.
As we shall see, this view of ontological wholeness is rooted in Buddhist

cosmology, in the Shinto underpinnings of Aikido, and in my own
worldview. To state this more simply, the psychodevelopmental view
here is that the individual is a microcosm of, and inseparable from, the
Universal. Again, this book and its five essays are themselves situated
within this holistic developmental and cyclical model of self-transfor-
mation (see Table 1.6). As is mentioned throughout these essays, the
notion of non-dual awareness as enlightenment is indeed accounted
for in the epiphany of the founder of Aikido who, in recognizing his
own inseparability from all existence, and thus his unlimited ki-power,
exclaimed ‘I AM the universe!’ (Ueshiba in Stevens, 1987). As for the
cultivation of ‘self,’ the ‘mind-as-body’ and ‘body-as-mind’ approach I
present here through my practice reflections and from classical East Asian
philosophy is consistent with the model of psychosocial development
theory of Japanese scholars such as Yuasa (1987, 1993) and Nakagawa
(2000). As Odin (1995) states, this philosophical approach sees one’s
personal development, education, and social interaction (or ‘sociality’) as
intersubjective, and inseparable from aspirational virtue ethics. This inter-
subjective psychosocial self is also extant in the progression of philosoph-
ical anthropology (‘study of self’) from Mead’s ‘betwixt and between,’
to Buber’s das Zwischen and ‘I-thou,’ to the work of Kitaro Nishida,
Kimura Bin, and Tetsuro Watsuji’s aidagara or ‘betweenness’ (Odin,
1995, p. 435). This intersubjective, social, and psychosomatic ‘self’ is
both recognized and actively cultivated in practices that foster integra-
tion within (mind-body) and between (self-other interdependence).
While the paradox of what constitutes consciousness remains the ‘hard
problem’ in various academic discourses (e.g., ‘mind’ versus ‘brain’), the
‘self’ presented here reflects the extended, embodied, enactive model
of ‘cognitive ecology’ (Varela, Thompson, & Rosch, 1991). This mind-
body view holds that consciousness is not simply the result of either
upwards causation (i.e., epiphenomenal or materialist view) or down-
wards causation (e.g., qualia)—but as philosopher Andy Clark states it
is a function of both upwards and downwards correlated activity (Clark,
2011). Further, consciousness is not only intrapsychic as mind-body,
but ecological. In this book, I take the view that this recursive relation-
ship within-and-between self and world situates practice in the context
not simply as specific relational skillfulness, but as what is called ‘practical
wisdom’ in Buddhism. As we shall see, this is what constitutes practice as
‘way’ or michi (Japanese). In this sense, the way in which we engage our
24 M. A. GORDON
learning-in-relationship is emphasized over the what we are doing. Using

Aikido as an observational lens this distinction is expressed as studying
the principles of synchronized embodied attunement and temporal-spatial
movement rather than simple biomechanical technique.
Toward Full Awareness: Working with the Source

Material of One’s Life Eruptions
In the following section, I situate myself as a scholar-practitioner within
the field of research on intersubjectivity, somaticity, embodiment and
related topics, and how my professional practices inform my research
and vice versa. I currently hold the rank of 6th Dan in Aikido, with
close to 30 years’ experience as a teacher and practitioner. My informal
teaching experiences include meditation with female prison inmates and
workshops on trauma and mindfulness. This book draws on my cumu-
lative experience as an educator and scholar-practitioner in these areas
as a study into somaticity, relationality, and transpersonal psychology in
terms of enhancing ‘embodied attunement’ toward our more harmo-
nized ‘place within the whole.’ I am also a psychotherapist in private
practice, specializing in Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing
(EMDR) therapy—a highly successful modality used predominantly with
major trauma cases. EMDR targets the client’s ‘associative network’—
how each person ‘metabolizes’ or internalizes trauma or overwhelm-
ing experience in their memory channels and then how those traumata
morph into more generalized negative associations: somatically, emotion-
ally, cognitively, and sensorially. By safely invoking traumatic episodes,
clinicians stimulate clients’ eye movement similar to REM (rapid eye
movement) by getting the client to track the practitioner’s hand move-
ment in side-to-side passes, thus stimulating cross-hemispheric activity in
the brain (unlike during active trauma exposure, where this processing
‘freezes’ while we enter a fight-flight-freeze ‘limbic’ brain state), when
the brain and nervous system is properly processing, disturbing affects
can neutralize. In effect, it is as if waking from a bad dream only to ‘nor-
malize’ being in the safe present.
EMDR’s ‘state-based’ approach shares a great deal with Ki Aikido,
which focuses on calm and relaxed responsiveness through mind-body
coordination training. Ki Aikido training, with its emphasis on ki devel-
opment (e.g., developing a continuous state of calm relaxation), allows
for the conducting of safe but incrementally increasing ‘tests’ of one’s
ability to naturally withstand attempted provocation or stressors—what

is effectively the partner’s attempt to ‘move’ the subjects subconscious
mind or body by prompting a reaction. This ‘mind-body state’ testing
then translates into the Aikido exercises, where partners take hold, strike,
and otherwise simulate ‘attacks’ in a similar way of testing the practi-
tioner’s newfound natural relaxation and calm responsiveness. In effect,
this kind of training requires one to examine their own inner responses,
mirrored in their ability to stay stable and non-reactive without effort
or relying on technique. While students are providing a challenge to
one another, there is a kind of somatic, psychological, social, and emo-
tional ‘witnessing’ to this training—students are co-involved with each
other’s self-cultivation of mind-body coordination through the ki prin-
ciples and Aikido exercises, within an atmosphere of support and sin-
cerity. Some prominent EMDR clinicians (Parnell, 1996) hold that the
EMDR modality—which stimulates the ‘reorganizing’ and re-integrat-
ing of somatic, emotional, physical, and sensorial disturbances or trau-
mata in one’s memory system and personal history—supports it being
a transpersonal psychotherapeutic approach. By this, Parnell (1996) and
others suggest that the ‘witnessing’ aspect of the clinician, in conjunction
with the saccadic eye movements that stimulate full processing of the dis-
turbance, assists clients in ‘letting go’ and recontextualizing past events.
In effect, they can transition from a ‘frozen’ state of terror, shame, and
other psychosomatic states, to feeling seen, heard, valued and having a
‘place’ beyond the previously limiting definitions or distortions to which
they felt or been succumbed.
These two practices of (EMDR) psychotherapy (in which I began
clinical training in 2007, after 20 or more years of my own psychother-
apy treatment and clinical practice) and Aikido (again, over a similar
20-year period at that point) figure prominently within the narrative of
my near-death accident in 2010. At the time of the NDE described in
the beginning of this introductory essay my life was rife with tensions—a
tumultuous domestic relationship challenging me to assess my desire and
willingness to continue being with my partner; a full-time psychother-
apy practice leading me to feel that I was slipping away from my lifelong
passion as a creative artist and musician into the footsteps of my father,
a family physician who’s own stifled creativity and frustrations as a fam-
ily doctor for 30 years inevitably led him to early retirement and sub-
sequent pursuit of professional film/tv acting, and what I experienced
as one of many inexorable factors in my parents’ own marital strife and
26 M. A. GORDON
divorce when I was ten years old. In my own years of psychotherapy to

follow, I could see the event of my parents’ divorce, along with concur-
rent trauma in the family (early, tragic deaths of relatives, grandparents,
mental illness/suicide), having been a kind of ‘ground zero’ for my own
psycho-emotional makeup, attachment wounds, and relationship strug-
gles. Years later now, in 2010, the motorcycle accident became another
‘ground zero.’ It was a seismic event that prompted me to pack up my
home, my therapy practice, end my relationship and, without any dis-
closure to my extended family, pack my dog and my musical gear into a
40-foot converted 1960 GMC city transit bus on a road trip to Nashville
for almost a year.4
Gestalt as Wholeness and Context

In the context of this book, the major seismic life events described here
operated as what Perls et al. (1951) describe as a gestalt—the awareness
of ‘figure/ground’ contact of one’s environment with the interiorized
or internalized meanings of lived experience, altogether considered as
wholes. In Gestalt Therapy terms, the violent shock of the accident thrust
me into contact with both the interior-exterior schemas, patterns, mean-
ing-structures of my world—the field or background within which our
personality and self-concept develops—in a most profound and—in ref-
erence to Jung’s term for our hidden unconscious issues—shadow-like
way. While the purpose of this book is neither to solely psychoanalyze
nor pathologize the impact of these profound life events, I lay them
open here for the purpose of reflective and purposeful understanding of
the arc of my life and my place in the world. My life events are high-
lighted in this gestalt manner by way of extrapolating a larger context
of learning and healing. In other words, my primary awareness of heal-
ing and learning from the most recent crisis manifest at the time of my
accident was my relationship with myself and (my) lived world. The lat-
ter is a crucial element in this book, namely that transformation occurs
through self-inquiry, reflection, and learning. Gestalt Therapy is included
in the conceptual design of this book as a change modality, a practice,
or process by which one can identify, engage, and transmute the other-
wise mysterious, vexing, or otherwise polarized notions of either ‘all in
me’ (intrapsychic) or all ‘out there’ (interpsychic) forces. In this sense,
it aligns with the other modalities presented here in mapping one’s
transpersonal place in the world.
In contrast to Freud’s psychoanalytic theories and diagnostic psychia-

try, the Gestalt Therapy of Perls et al. (1951) sees the symptoms of one’s
otherwise described pathologies or neurosis as ‘creative possibilities.’
This approach allows us, in their words:
to take the dynamic structure of experience not as a clue to some uncon-

scious unknown or a symptom, but as the important thing itself. This is to
psychologize without prejudgment of normal or abnormal, and from this
point of view psychotherapy is a method not of correction but of growth.
(1951, p. 29)
As Perls et al. (1951) explain, psychology and therapy then are a pro-
cess of ‘creative adjustment’ of not the ‘what happens’ but the ‘how,’
and in what way it is interiorized, metabolized in relation to the experi-
ence at the ‘contact-boundary’ between the subject and their ‘field’—the
space between them and others, their tactile and experiential ecology and
so forth. As they continue: ‘the achievement of a strong gestalt is itself
the cure, for the figure of contact is not a sign of, but is itself the crea-
tive integration of experience’ (Perls et al., 1951, p. 26). In the course
of researching, reflecting, and writing this book, what has become a
profoundly influential book landed in my lap, one that has helped me
contextualize, process, and find ongoing meaning and even value in the
events of 2010 in a gestalt-like way. Hollis’ book The Middle Passage:
From Misery to Meaning in Midlife (Hollis, 1993) gave me a Jungian
therapeutic understanding that the shadow-work of coming-of-age out
of my lifelong struggles and crises made sense in what he describes as
the ‘second adulthood’ individuation often not-embraced or known by
those entering middle life. As Jung laid out, our ‘first adulthood’ occurs
after adolescence, when we establish autonomous lives as adults. Later
in life, however, free as we may be of the dependencies of our childhood
in material terms or freedom, we have yet another process of individu-
ation—the sloughing off of our internalized dependencies from our
parental relationships and dynamics. Hollis explains that many people,
seemingly struggling with the ‘misery’ of aging into midlife, are missing
this vital piece of inner work that otherwise eases and enrichens the pro-
cess of ongoing maturation and self-knowledge.
In the barest of terms, Hollis’ explication made evident that the work
I had embarked on in my own healing and healing of/through others
through Aikido and psychotherapy was exactly the psychospiritual calling
28 M. A. GORDON
of Ueshiba’s Aikido—battling one’s own psychic demons, developing vir-

tue through self-purification. Ueshiba’s expressed this virtue as ‘true vic-
tory is self-victory’ (Ueshiba, 2002, p. 109) through the Japanese phrase
masakatsu agatsu. Self-victory in this spiritual context means victory
as overcoming or purifying one’s aggression. The work of my healing
through Aikido was gestalt process—the contact between the internalized
relationships, or one’s schema, patterns, psychosocial conditioning, and
their ability to not remain separate from others but rather ‘becoming one
with the situation’ (Philippson, 2009, p. 121). As Hillman (in Roszak,
Gomes, & Kanner, 1995, p. xviii) writes—and is later discussed in Essay 2
of this book—psychology is ‘the study or order (logos) of the soul (psy-
che).’ However, the idea that this is simply an internal or intrapsychic
process falls short of recognizing that we live in an interconnected exist-
ence—that the world is, as Hillman says, ‘ensouled’ (Hillman & Moore,
1990, p. 99). Once again, this ‘ecological’ orientation is a recurrent
theme throughout this book—that is, that our experience is relational,
contextual, intersubjective and entangled with the ‘soul of the world’ or
anima mundi. This ontological view reflects the Buddhist outlook that
the universe and our existence are based on interdependence. As we shall
see, this extends the scope of understanding of practice through Aikido—
and its application to teaching, learning, and relationships—beyond the
notion of intersubjectivity to an ecological orientation.
In review, in this book I explore teaching and learning from this rela-
tional, contextual, and interdependent ontological viewpoint. Through
the lens of my own study, integration and teaching of the art of Aikido—
both on and off the mat, in daily life—I explore the practical and theo-
retical implications of commitment to this kind of virtue ethics approach
to education as self-cultivation (Nakagawa, 2000; Yuasa, 1987, 1993).
This notion is rooted in broader East Asian philosophy and practice
(i.e., Buddhism, Confucianism, Daoism), and in the Japanese context,
it is explored here through Aikido and shodo as michi—‘path’ or ‘way’
(Davey, 2002). The gritty real-life realizations of my brush with mortal-
ity form the elemental and experiential ‘ground’ of this study. To use the
metaphor of calligraphy, the raw experience of my motorcycle accident
and the deeper reflections I draw from it are the ink from which I dip
the brush tip and make the accompanying strokes, giving form to prac-
tice-as-healing study. The movement and flow of these strokes make up
the ‘figure/ground’ relationship between teaching, learning, and praxis
of relationship. The resulting picture mirrors a study of and through
‘Practicing Love: Embodied Attunement Through the Lens of Aikido.’
Why Is Relationship Central to Holistic Education?

From within this model of psychosocial development as virtue-based,
attuned, and embodied—as ecological—how might we frame an approach
to teaching and learning relationships and, most importantly, practice?
Pedagogy refers to the leading of children, to guiding one’s psychosocial
development. Thus, ‘higher education’ would logically seem to suggest
extended, elevated, or enhanced guidance. However, as Grace stresses
(2013) lifelong learning under the rubric of modern neoliberal society
tends to be focus on vocation skills instead of inner development. Much
like the psychopathological emphasis of medical model-influenced psy-
chotherapy stigmatizes what might otherwise be embraced as the life-
long process of self-actualization—to invoke Maslow’s term—rather
than seeing it as a continuation of one’s path of self-discovery, Grace
underlines how education-as-schooling has led to an instrumental model
that sanctions learning only as determined by economic survival or job
placement. If we take a deeper look at educational practices, particu-
larly the early rearing of children, it is apparent we operate from some
underlying flawed epistemology regarding relationship that is repro-
duced in the mass-schooling model. Research in the emergent field of
‘interpersonal neurobiology’ addresses what psychotherapist Bonnie
Badenoch (Badenoch & Cox, 2010) calls the ‘myth of self-regulation’
in early human development—the idea that a mother’s consistent, pre-
dictable bond in early infant attachment facilitates the child’s ongoing
inchoate adaptability to neurohormonally and emotionally ‘self-regu-
late.’ The myth then—in psychotherapy practice (or, as is commented on
later in this book, as problematic in the ‘mindfulness’ education trend
in schools), is that such a partial understanding presents an incomplete
model of early childhood attachment such that the role of the caregiver
(mother) is to condition a child to the expectation of an individualized
notion of self-reliance and stress tolerance. Rather, says Badenoch and
Cox (2010), healthy infant attachment is dependent upon co-regulation
between the mother and child. It is a bidirectional, integrative, and holis-
tic intertwining of psychobiological attunement. The implication is that
the work of repairing such attachment wounds identified in adult life
through psychotherapy is not similarly marked by an ‘epistemological
error’ that sees the role of therapist as temporarily bridging the client to
‘self’-regulation. Instead, the corrective is to engage in a dyadic, co-reg-
ulating therapeutic alliance that builds capacity for forming relational
bonds, intimacy, and extended empathy. In essence, my central claim in
30 M. A. GORDON
this book is that all relationships—particularly pedagogical ones—are

co-developmental, co-participatory, co-creating, and emergent of pro-
cesses grounded so. Transcending intersubjective relationship means to
recognize that all relationship instantiations and processes are emergent
and interdependent. We call each other into being.
At this point, I would be remiss in not acknowledging the already rich
and diverse field of holistic education, one which has laid the foundations
for discourse on ‘pedagogy as love’ and similar such themes explored in
this book. Dr. John P. Miller, in particular, has led the way in pioneering
contemplative, holistic educational theory and practice, beginning with
his groundbreaking book The Holistic Curriculum (1988). The recently
published International Handbook of Holistic Education (Miller, Nigh,
Binder, Novak, & Crowell, 2018) is a comprehensive compendium of
incisive essays and commentaries spanning the vast and emerging field of
holistic education from grades K-12 through to higher education appli-
cations. As fulsome and engaging as this spectrum of work on holistic
education may be, I have deliberately kept a tight focus on the practi-
tioner-scholar nature of my heuristic research in this book—namely, the
exploration of Aikido as an embodied and intersubjective ontology of
attunement in relationship, representing education as self-cultivation—
rather than delve into a greater literature review of the field of holistic
and contemplative education itself.
At the same time, a portion of this book (Gordon, 2019) is situated
within the field of holistic and contemplative education (alongside aca-
demic contributions from a number of fellow Simon Fraser University
scholars, including: Dr. Heesoon Bai and Dr. Charles Scott) as a chap-
ter in the upcoming third and ‘practice’ volume of SUNY Press’ The
Intersubjective Turn series, in Catalyzing the Field: Second-Person
Approaches to Contemplative Learning and Inquiry (2019); and that
of SFU alumnus Dr. Tom Culham, co-editor of the upcoming book
Contemplative Pedagogies for Effective and Profound Transformation in
Teaching Learning and Being (2019).
Aikido and Shodo: Embodied Practice as Skillful ‘Way’

With a strong orientation to East Asian philosophy and pedagogy as
self-development, this study looks at various traditional Japanese arts
and expresses an ethos of ‘self-cultivation,’ of seeking spiritual perfec-
tion through steadfast commitment to aesthetic (calligraphy, flower
arrangement, dance) or martial arts training (Davey, 2002). One way of

considering this, certainly as regards martial arts, is as a modern notion
of bushido—the ethic of the traditional Japanese samurai warrior class,
toward seeking spiritual perfection in all manner of being and doing
(cf. Haroun, 2015). This approach connotes these arts as ‘way’ (do or
michi).5 Morihei Ueshiba (O Sensei)’s Aikido, according to his son and
first successor, Kisshomaru Ueshiba (1985), can be summarized as: ‘the
unification of the fundamental creative principle, ki, permeating the uni-
verse, and the individual ki, inseparable from breath-power, of each per-
son’ (Ueshiba, 1985, p. 15). He continues: ‘Through constant training
of mind and body, the individual ki harmonizes with the universal ki
and this unity appears as the dynamic, flowing movement of ki-power
which is free and fluid, indestructible and indivisible’ (Ueshiba, 1985,
p. 15). Ueshiba explains that the final incarnation of his Aikido is the
culmination of his training and spiritual development through all of the
Japanese budoshin or martial arts. In particular, he describes how he took
an existing centuries-old principle of aiki or ‘blending’ with an opponent
in martial terms into a fuller expression of budo that goes beyond ‘war-
riorship’ to fulfill a more spiritually realized purpose. ‘As ai (harmony)
is common with ai (love), I decided to name my unique budo: Aikido,’
(Ueshiba, 1985, p. 177). He continues: ‘True budo is a work of love,’
and that Aikido ‘is the loving protection of all beings with a spirit of rec-
onciliation’ (Ueshiba, 1985, p. 179).
As expressed throughout this book, Aikido is presented here through
(my) firsthand experience, and practitioner-reflection as means by which
one can cultivate the virtues of nonviolence, mindfulness, and compas-
sion in an embodied ‘way.’ The central goal of this book (culminating in
Essay 5: The Way of the Classroom) then is, through the lens of Aikido,
to extrapolate from this virtue-based approach a view of pedagogy that
values the relational, the interpersonal process, the developmental path
of the individual learner and educator as reciprocal and co-creative, or
interdependent. To consider such teaching and learning relationships as
interdependent with the greater ecology of life as a whole is not only
wholistic, but also grounded in an commitment to collective well-be-
ing—to altruism, or love.
As we shall see in Parts II and III of this manuscript, Aikido is a mod-
ern form of budo or ‘warriorship,’ a relational practice through which
one, instead of seeking advancement through competition or intellec-
tual superiority, endeavors through self-transformation of their own
32 M. A. GORDON
aggressiveness and illusory separateness to be in harmony with the

Cosmos. As Ueshiba stated:
True budo means to win over yourself and eliminate the fighting heart of
the enemy… it is a way to absolute self-perfection in which the very enemy
is eliminated. The technique of aiki is ascetic training and a way through
which you reach a state of unification of body and spirit by the realization
of the principles of Heaven. (Ueshiba, 1957, pp. 198–219)
Again, skillfulness, in the conceptual model of this book, is the ‘fruition’

or applied wisdom emanating from a ‘ground’ of virtue ethics and ded-
icated practice. This process of self-cultivation through spiritual train-
ing (shugyo) is ongoing and recursive. It is, as stated elsewhere in this
introductory piece, evident in the founder’s progression of various erst-
while ‘combat-oriented’ nomenclature from bu-jutsu to aiki-jutsu, to
aiki-budo, leading eventually to ‘Aiki do’ (Ueshiba, 1985). As is criti-
cal in this book, the spiritual ‘birth’ of Aikido represents a larger point,
which is that the ongoing psychospiritual and ethical view of one’s devel-
opment through self-cultivation is not about acquiring skill. It is about
cultivating spiritual skillfulness. Psychotherapist Amy Mindell (Mindell,
1995) makes a similar link in her work on the ‘meta-skills’ of therapy,
these being which she puts forward as transcending conventional, instru-
mental application of psychoanalytic theory as intervention, and instead
as ones that are more emergent and spiritually attuned to the client or
moment at hand. Indeed, when one is pedagogically or psychoeduca-
tionally dependent on theory, they are effectively out-of-sync with the
student, client, the moment—the gestalt. Yalom (2013) highlights this
approach as working with the ‘here-and-now’ versus the ‘there-and-then’
of patient narratives, disclosure and emotional intimacy (Yalom, 2013).
This point is underscored in this book as regards my motorcycle accident
and motorcycling skillfulness as attunement, as full mind-body awareness
and presence with each moment passing. Essay 4, ‘Moto-morphosis,’
bridges the example of riding skillfulness with Aikido training, and as an
extended metaphor, to one’s ‘inner’ emotional life and interpersonal or
ecological gestalt.
Regarding Japanese path or ‘way,’ as Stevens (1997) confirms, keiko
(regular practice) is ‘the use of traditional wisdom to illuminate our
present practice.’ Further, as Stevens emphasizes (1997, p. 112) one’s
attitude toward keiko is more important than the contents of training,
referring to the four virtues of keiko taught by Morihei Ueshiba: bravery,

wisdom, love, and empathy. Further, Ueshiba’s Aikido focuses on keiko
not as harsh (e.g., ‘martial’) asceticism, rather as misogi or (‘purifica-
tion of self’), as a ‘means to restore our link to the universe,’ and that
Morihei ‘likened keiko to standing on the “Floating Bridge of Heaven”
that links the inner and outer worlds’ (Stevens, 1997, p. 112). Rather
than the repetition of technique through keiko then, one approaches
Aikido training as a lifelong dedication to walking the path, known as
shugyō or more rigorous, intensive training (toward self-transformation).
Mindell (1995) makes a parallel point regarding practice as self-trans-
formation in psychotherapeutic settings, where clinicians can develop
‘meta-skills’ toward psychotherapy being a ‘spiritual art,’ in the same
spirit invoked by Aikido as shugyō or dedicated meta-training in the art
of spiritual consciousness and relational transformation. The ethos of
Aikido is perhaps most notably expressed in the invocation Morihei used
often in his teaching, quoted earlier: Masagatsu Agatsu Katsuhayabi,
‘true victory is victory over the self. Day of swift victory!’ (Ueshiba, cited
in Stevens, 1997, p. 104)
The Practice of Love Through Embodied Attunement

The overall theme of holistic education in this book is rooted in the ety-
mology of the word ‘whole,’ which in Middle English stems from hool,
and from German heil, both meaning ‘health.’ Similarly, as mentioned
previously, the word ‘heal’ has its etymology from ‘to make whole.’ To
extend this idea further is to address that wholeness reflects recognition
of relationship—within one’s own psyche, interpersonally, transhuman-
istically—and, as we shall see, transegoically, or one could say cosmolog-
ically. Throughout this book, I explore O Sensei’s vital and significant
assertion that ‘bu is love’ (Saotome, 1993, p. vii). This reinterpretation
of bu or ‘warriorship’ stands in contrast to the widely interpreted core
meaning of the Japanese word bu (i.e., meaning ‘martial’ or ‘military.’
Thus, when combined with do, budo connotes ‘martial way’). In the con-
clusion, I invoke the call to love as skillfulness, as a practice, as advocated
by Fromm (1956). Fromm differentiates romantic love—as the fulfill-
ment of self-worth through object acquisition (e.g., I get your love, and
thus am completed or acceptable)—from loving. The latter is the skillful-
ness in committing one’s practice to extending and generating empathic
love beyond narcissistic fulfillment, a kind of loving that suggests agape,
34 M. A. GORDON
or ‘higher love.’ We can say then that through the wavelength or ‘cur-
rent’ of ki development practices (i.e., shodo, Aikido) a practitioner is
committing herself to attuning to the ruptures or healing of interper-
sonal, relational, and transpersonal (e.g., ecological) flow.
In the next section, I discuss the methodology of this book and the
model by which the transegological practices laid out in this introduc-
tion can be seen as a wholistic cycle of learning toward non-dual interde-
pendence. For the moment, situated in the personal narrative that opens
this book, suffice to say that my own near-death experience (NDE) was
an awakening to my own mortality, grappling with the meaning of my
life’s journey and meaning—my gestalt—as a radical reflection on my
self-relationship, my self-love. One could say this violent contract with
my Jungian shadow-self and mortality was a test of my raison d’être, my
own existential reckoning. In the context of my Aikido training—which
saved my life in this motorcycle accident—it was a dramatic call for me
to examine my spiritual values in the context of budo, which as expressed
by O Sensei means ‘learning how to live,’ instead of ‘learning how to
die’ (as cited in Haroun, 2015, p. 87). In the arch of this work, I extend
the notion of ‘learning to live’ toward ‘learning to love.’ To illustrate the
phenomenological aspect of ki-awareness as embodied skill development
toward enhanced relational attunement, I include a second vignette as
follows.
Ki Development Vignette: Two
Experiential Training in ‘Teleological Intentionality’ or Love

An adult student stands alone in the center of the mat. Surrounding him
are approximately 15 people who are told to move slowly but directly
towards and around him—unless they sense any internal signal or instinct
to stop. The entire group converges within a foot of the student in the
middle. The group resets. A woman perhaps seven months pregnant and
belly fully extended now takes the place of the male student in the mid-
dle. She is instructed to think very positively of the protective love she
feels for her unborn child, and her sole intention of safely holding her/
their ground. Again, the group of 15 people slowly encroaches upon
her, and are told to stop when they feel it is no longer safe to approach.
Now the groups stop in staggered spacing, the closest of which only get
within five feet or so of the woman in the center. ‘Why did you stop?’
they are asked during a debrief after the exercise. ‘It was a completely
different feeling’ said the students. ‘I don’t know, it was just a gut feel-
ing in my body that I didn’t want to get any closer. It wasn’t fear, just a
very powerful feeling she was emanating that made my body slow down
and hesitate.’ The group resets again. Next, the male student who began
in the middle originally is asked to stand behind the pregnant woman.
After the group does their ‘approach,’ again slowing down and feeling
the strong protective feeling from the pregnant woman, the male student
is asked what he felt as he stood behind her. ‘Very calm and protected’
he remarked. Resetting one final time, the male student now stands in
front of the pregnant woman, focusing on a strong feeling of protective
love and care for her and her unborn child. Now the approaching line
stops even further away…
The preceding vignette of a Ki Aikido demonstration conveys some
of the experiential, felt vital energy registering of ki as it relates to the Ki
Aikido principles of mind-body coordination. A group of approximately
15 visitors had come to do a trial class in my Vancouver, BC dojo. After
a brief explanation of ki development, its spiritual and transpersonal sig-
nificance and relationship to Aikido training, I conducted the exercise or
‘experiment.’
I highlight this vignette here as a means of reinforcing early on in this
study how Yuasa’s (1993) ‘teleological intentionality’ manifests itself via
somatic, emotional, cognitive, and otherwise intra/interpsychic regis-
ters through ki and Aikido training. By embodying and thus projecting
a feeling of loving protection and centeredness, both the participant and
he experiment group in this vignette display the affect and effect of a
powerful vital energy that supersedes conscious effort or application of
conscious technique. Thus, rather than technique or skill manifesting
the principle (e.g., ki), it is the principle which informs the exercises and
informs the embodied learning and awareness.
Methodology: Listening for the Question

As I reflect on my life’s journey—my relationships, my intellectual, emo-
tional, psychological struggles and pursuits—I can see that my path,
while often crooked and unpredictable, has led me to a fuller under-
standing of my inner process. Something has been making or trying to
make itself known to me—often as it does, in subtle, subconscious or
‘bodily’ ways (e.g., psyche, emotions); a riddle demanding to be solved.
36 M. A. GORDON
During a trip to Ireland years ago, an elder woman—a ‘seer’—eyes milky

and blinded with cataracts, told me on the street in Galway in 2001,
while reading the ‘lifelines’ in my palm: ‘You have much karma to work
out in relationships, my son.’ In hindsight, it seems quite trackable that
my actual lifeline guided me in my own psychotherapeutic healing to
Aikido, and to the heuristic and hermeneutic process of my graduate
research. Through the phenomenological research of my Master’s the-
sis into the psychospiritual phenomenon of duende (i.e., daemon, fate,
destiny, spirit, soul, drive) in the life paths of artists and creatives, inter-
woven with my own challenging career as a professional recording and
performing artist and, in the past decade or more, as a professional psy-
chotherapist myself, it has become irrefutable that the question seeks us,
and thus it is incumbent upon us to make space within to listen. It seems
natural, then, that I would choose to employ Moustakas’ (1990) ‘heuris-
tic’ model and methodology of qualitative research in my master’s thesis.
I continue along a similar self-inquiry process in this work, based on the
arising of a ‘burning question’ and extrapolating from my own experi-
ence in this doctoral book, albeit as a scholar-practitioner in psychother-
apy and aikido.
In attending to these ‘burning questions’ as methodology Moustakas
(1990) proposes qualitative research process as an ‘heuristic quest:’
All heuristic inquiry begins with the internal search to discover, with an
encompassing puzzlement, a passionate desire to know, a devotion and
commitment to pursue a question that is strongly connected to one’s own
identity and selfhood. The awakening of such a question comes through
an inward clearing, and an intentional readiness and determination to dis-
cover a fundamental truth regarding the meaning and essence of one’s
own experience and that of others. (Moustakas, 1990, p. 40)
Moustakas, unsatisfied with the prevailing scientific model of hypothe-

sis-deduction research, agrees with Polanyi (Moustakas, 1990) that:
‘All true scientific research starts with hitting on a deep and promising
problem, and this is half the discovery’ (Polanyi, in Moustakas, 1990,
p. 118). Moustakas further quotes Polanyi that ‘[t]o see a problem is to
see something hidden that may yet be accessible. … It is an engrossing
possession of incipient knowledge which passionately strives to validate
itself. Such is the heuristic power of a problem’ (Polanyi, in Moustakas,
1990, pp. 131–132).
I cite Moustakas’ (1990) previous quotation regarding ‘incipient

knowledge which passionately strives to validate itself,’ and which erupts
showing ‘the heuristic power of a problem,’ as it speaks to my own near-
death experience. Early on in my own psychological healing journey,
before this NDE, I came across the work of psychotherapist Terrence
Real. In I Don’t Want to Talk About It (Real, 1998), Real frames the
underlying socialized male emotional suppression-eruption experience
which traps men in lifelong covert depression, only to emerge as overt
depression via a catastrophic life crisis. Real’s work, among other key
figures, such as German psychiatrist Alice Miller and American Jungian
psychoanalyst James Hillman, has become a key model for understand-
ing my healing process through therapy, Aikido, and my own work as a
psychotherapist. While Real’s is a powerful model of understanding psy-
chopathology and the psychosocial struggles influenced by gender social-
ization, childhood trauma, internalization of worthlessness, and so on,
in my master’s thesis research I found myself aligning with Moustakas’
critical view of rigid qualitative research, and drawn to Moustakas’ heu-
ristic, self-narrative approach. My ‘theory of change’ is grounded in the
transpersonal psychology approach.6 This post-humanist ‘fourth wave’
of psychology is distinguished by its concern with psychospiritual expe-
rience—that is, what is transegoic rather than intra-interpersonal. Early
figures associated with the transpersonal field include Stanislav and
Christina Grof, who introduced the terms ‘spiritual emergence’ and
‘spiritual emergency’—the former to describe the gradual awakening of
spiritual awareness without significant disruption; the latter representing
the upwelling of intense psychospiritual experience such that it creates an
untenable spiritual ‘crisis’ (Grof & Grof, 1989).
Theory, Design, and Methodology Within Aikido’s

Triangle-Circle-Square
In the following section, I outline Aikido founder (O Sensei) Morihei
Ueshiba’s cosmological model of transformation, represented through
sacred geometry (Gleason, 1995) In this model, triangle, circle, and
square (see Fig. 1.1) are both movement and structure, all integrated
within themselves. Again, this tri-fold model not only represents the the-
oretical model of this book regarding learning and pedagogy as trans-
formational self-cultivation, it also serves as the design for the book
38 M. A. GORDON
Fig. 1.1 Triangle, Circle, Square: Sangen. Brushwork, Zen Master Sengai

Gibon (1750–1837) Spiritual Roots of Aikido
itself. In other words, the holarchic motif of Aikido’s spiritual and cos-
mological self-purification model of sacred geometry (triangle within
circle within square) is applied as both methodology and design in this
book. In Aikido cosmology, Triangle represents one’s ‘ready posture’ or
open awareness. This is manifest as calm, stable mind, and body posture.
From this readiness, one is prompted by contact, challenge, or rupture
and moves into circle, which represents circular movement, containment,
joining, blending, and balance. Again, as Phillipson (2009, p. 121) is
quoted earlier in this introductory essay, this aspect of calm engagement
predicates ‘becoming one with the situation.’ Finally, the square repre-
sents applied control, skillful technique, and resolution. As the triangle
moves into the circle, and is finally all contained within the square, the
‘all-in-one’ integration represents the spiritual blending of the three
‘sangen’ or realms: the hidden, the manifest, and the divine. This ful-
fills Aikido’s spiritual aim of bridging ‘heaven and earth’ or (absolute)
cosmos and (relative) mortal human existence (Stevens, 1997, p. 77).
This ready (triangle), enter (circle), and structure (square) process reso-
nates strongly with my process of reflective inquiry. Going even further,
I have come to an even deeper pedagogical understanding of the cycle
of reflection, feedback, revision and collaboration involved in how this

book has taken shape, through and within the (often challenging) dia-
logic process with my doctoral committee.
Methodology and Conceptual Model: ‘Three-Fold’

Logic and Self-Development Within Holistic Cosmology
The broad philosophical themes explored in these essays as self-healing
cultivated through practice or way (namely: Aikido, Shodo, psycho-
therapy, motorcycling) are organized within a wider theoretical frame-
work or gestalt—as we shall see next, by means of the ‘three-fold logic’
of Mahayana Buddhism. I situate this study in a holistic and holarchic
framework as a way of showing parallels between these practices, and
more importantly to show how each self-healing or self-cultivational
modality forms a theory-as-practice or practice-based approach. Overall,
this process of practice, reflection, and relational and life interactivity
‘folds’ back into itself in a cycle of psychospiritual learning and integra-
tion. I contend here that this circular, integrative learning reflects Yuasa’s
(1993) concept of ‘teleological intentionality’ or moving toward whole-
ness or healing (cf. non-dual awareness), through these practices that
foster full ecological awareness through ‘transpersonal synchronization.’
In the third part of this study, I reflect how motorcycling can be seen as
yet another practice that fosters this experiential ‘here-and-now’ cyclical
learning and life interactivity. In sum, this cyclical and holarchic model of
learning as self-cultivation is put forward in this study as a model that is
generalizable to other pedagogical practices and relationships.
Threefold Buddhist Model of Transformation

In 1996, while living in Toronto, Canada, a friend brought me to a
meditation session at the local Shambhala center. Shambhala, a world-
wide organization rooted in secular meditation practice toward building
‘enlightened society,’ was the vision of its founder, Chogyam Trungpa,
a respected teacher or ‘Rinpoche’ in the Tibetan Kagyu and Nyingma
lineages. The Shambhala teachings are based on connecting individuals
with their ‘basic goodness’ (e.g., bodhicitta or Buddha nature) through
mindfulness meditation. I discovered the foundational teachings of the
Buddha: the Four Noble Truths7 and Eightfold Noble Path, the latter
of which is often divided into what is called the ‘three-fold’ divisions or
40 M. A. GORDON
Table 1.1 The eightfold path and its three divisions
Division Eightfold path aspect
Moral virtue (Sanskrit: śīla, Pāli: sīla) 3. Right speech

4. Right action
5. Right livelihood
Meditation (Sanskrit and Pāli: Samadhi) 6. Right effort
7. Right mindfulness
8. Right meditation
Insight, wisdom (Sanskrit: prajñā, Pāli: paññā) 1. Right view
2. Right resolve
See Prebish (2000) and Keown (2006). Prebish notes, quoting Keown (1992), that traditional Buddhist
soteriology sees moral virtue (sīla) as a goal for laity, while for those in the monastic tradition it is seen as
a prerequisite in preparation for Samadhi (meditation). The later interpretation in Buddhism, also reflect-
ing recent scholarship, is the view is that sīla isn’t progressively (e.g., transcendentally) attained resulting
in wisdom (prajñā).
practice, represented in Table 1.1, through Chogyam Trungpa’s books

and related Buddhist study.
As regards the ‘three-fold logic’ of Tibetan Mahayana discourse, in
significant contrast to the previous table, the starting point is ‘empti-
ness’ rather than the early or traditional Buddhist principle of moral vir-
tue. In Mahayana Buddhism (the ‘middle way’), the three divisions are
expressed thusly (see Table 1.2): ground (emptiness or sunyata); path
(mindful awareness practice), and fruition (egolessness, discriminat-
ing wisdom or prajna, compassion or karuna) (Trungpa, 2013). Ray
(2002) explains that in Tibetan Buddhism, ground-path-fruition is also
described as: view, practice, and result (Ray, 2002).
In teaching materials from its 2008 seminary class, the Berkeley
Shambhala Center presents two ways to look at threefold practice. First is
a conditional view:
Ground is the situation as we find it, the conditions inherited from some
previous activity or situation; path is effort that we apply to those conditions;
and Fruition is the outcome which would not have occurred without our
effort. (2008 Seminary Transcripts Class, Berkeley Shambhala Center, n.d.)
Table 1.2 Ground, path, fruition (conditional view)
Ground Revulsion for our confusion Or fertile soil

Path Shamata (basic mindfulness awareness) meditation Farmer/gardener
Fruition Practice developing stability, clarity, strength Food
The Berkeley Shambhala Center syllabus cites the following example,

here in a grid.
The second is an unconditional view, followed by its appropriate
example, represented in Table 1.3.
Focusing less on our relative experience of life and more on the absolute
nature of reality: Ground is the way things are in absolute reality, Path is
awareness developed through meditation, and Fruition is an awakened
mindfully present. (2008 Seminary Transcripts Class, Berkeley Shambhala
Center, n.d.)
Key to understanding the uniqueness of the philosophy of Buddhist

teachings from its Four Noble Truths and Eightfold Noble Path is that
it views moral virtue and ethics as an achievable aspiration through prac-
tice. This distinguishes Buddhist philosophy as a soteriological—or,
as Yuasa (1993) states, a teleological—approach. This ‘middle way’ of
Mahayana Buddhism represents an ethical and pragmatic focus on the
achievability by individuals of cultivating awareness, and of transcending
self-other dualism in favor of interdependent relationships rather than
proving any ultimate epistemological or ontological truths (Kasulis,
Ames, & Dissanayake, 1993; Yuasa, 1987). This might be most readily
recognized in the ‘two truths’ theory of ‘middle- way’ of Madhyamika
Buddhism of second century BC Indian philosopher Nagarjuna, which
posits a dialectical tension between relative and absolute truth (in rela-
tion to the elusive empirical—or imperial—truth of Western rationalism)
(Kapstein, 2007).
Sangen as the Foundation of the Universe: Triangle, Circle, Square

Known as ‘O Sensei’ (‘Great Teacher’), Ueshiba studied over 30 martial
arts (Ueshiba, 2002, p. 80) to arrive at his own realization of Aikido. O
Sensei was profoundly influenced by his meeting and involvement with
Reverend Onisaburo Deguchi. Onisaburo’s neo-Shintoist sect Omoto-
Kyo (trans: ‘The Great Origin’) which ‘bases its doctrine on the energetic
Table 1.3 Ground, path, fruition (unconditional view)
Ground Buddha nature obscured by confusion Emptiness or shunyata

Path Meditative insight removing confusion Uncovering habitual patterns
Fruition Buddha nature fully present Or bodhicitta
42 M. A. GORDON
principle of the Great Triad of humans, nature, and supernature’

(Haroun, 2015, p. 105). Omoto-Kyo is based on kototama, one transla-
tion of which is ‘word souls’ (Gleason, 1995, p. 107), placing Omoto-
Kyo as ‘a science of sound and mind that arrived in Japan more than a
thousand years ago under the name of Shingon, or “true sound”’ (1995,
p. 107). Thus, as Haroun (2015) emphasizes, Omoto-kyo combines
aspects of Shinto, Shingon Buddhism, and kototama. This combined
influence of Omoto-kyo through Aikido is rooted in the concepts of ‘One
Spirit, Three Origins, Four Souls and Eight Powers.’ In Shinto tradition,
Sangen is the threefold representation or model of the structure of the
universe (Haroun, 2015, p. 105). In Aikido, O’Sensei used the ancient
symbols of triangle, circle, and square to represent not only Aikido
techniques, but the unification of the One Spirit, Four Souls and Eight
Powers, which are representative of all existence. As Gleason (1995)
explains, Aikido is a means through which kotodama (the sound-sylla-
bles of creation) is manifest in one’s physical movements and spiritual
integration—their harmony with the universe itself in what is known as
naobi or ‘direct and connective spirit’ (Gleason, 1995, p. 189). O Sensei
expressed it thus, referring to Takemusubi Aiki, an early description of
Aikido, connoting ‘the creative energy of the universe’ (1995, p. 193) in
harmonic activity:
Takemusubi Aiki is the living embodiment and form of the dynamic work-
ing of One Spirit, Four Souls, Three Origins, and Eight Powers residing
within Taka Ama Hara, the High Heavenly Plain. It is the life force of
the continually unfolding creative energy of universal law. It is you your-
self! Man bridges the gap of spirit, mind, and body: the divine, astral and
physical realms. He contains them all. It is his responsibility to protect and
nurture them. (Gleason, 1995, p. 73)
While open to broad interpretation, in Aikido these symbols are known

to represent the integration of heaven (circle), humankind (triangle), and
earth (square). The triplicity concept and geographical shapes are from
the Shinto cosmology theory of ‘Gogyo Gogen’ and refer to the trans-
mutability and interdependence of the core elements of gas, liquid, and
solid, or as the Shinto High Priest Rev. Dr. Yukitaka Yamamoto (1999)
states, the elements of all existence, in its multiple states and forms. As
Stevens (1997, p. 77) explains, in Aikido the sangen of triangle, circle,
and square are represented thusly:
A triangle with its point ascending symbolizes fire and the cosmic linga….
The three sides of the triangle represent various trinities: heaven, earth and
humankind; mind, body, and spirit; past, present, and future. A triangle
signifies the dimension of ki-flow.
A circle is a universal emblem for infinity, perfection, and eternity.
Nature expresses itself in circles, circuits, and spirals. A circle is zero, the
emptiness that fulfills all things. It represents the liquid dimension.
A square is stable, orderly, and material. It is the base of the physical
world, composed of earth, water, fire, and air. The square signifies the solid
dimension.
Morihei’s own explanation of the geometrical shapes as they relate to

Aikido is as follows:
The body should be triangular, the mind circular. The triangle represents
the generation of energy and is the most stable physical posture. The cir-
cle symbolizes serenity and perfection, the source of unlimited techniques.
The square stands for solidity, the basis of applied control. (Ueshiba, 2002,
p. 80)
A New Gestalt: Pedagogy as Transformational

and Holistic
The overall conceptual design of this book functions from the previ-
ously seen ‘three-fold logic’ of Buddhism. I am proposing here that four
‘modalities’ are included in this tri-fold conceptual model:
1. Ground, Path Fruition (Mahayana Buddhism)

2. Ai-Ki-Do
3. Triangle, Circle, Square (Shinto, Aikido)
4. Contact, Growth, Stability (Gestalt Therapy).
These four systems are represented in Table 1.4.
A Holistic and Integral Model of Self-Development

Key to understanding the threefold developmental model of practice,
Buddhist ground-path-fruition, and sangen of triangle-circle-square in
Aikido presented here is that the respective factors within each modality
44 M. A. GORDON
are integral within a cycle of learning. From appearance, it might easily

be misunderstood that the steps are sequential and progressive, more of a
transcendence model. As mentioned earlier, later and recent discourse on
Buddhism (Keown, 1992, 2006; Prebish, 2000) suggests that the devel-
opmental model moves circularly: virtue, meditation/practice, and wis-
dom all being integrally linked within a whole. Gethin (2010) explains
that the eightfold path represents ‘significant dimensions of one’s behav-
iour—mental, spoken, and bodily—that are regarded as operating in
dependence on one another and as defining a complete way (marga/
magga) of living’ (Gethin, 2010, p. 82). Furthermore, Gethin states the
following:
The practice of the path is not simply linear; in one’s progress along the
path it is not that one first exclusively practices good conduct and then,
when one has perfected that, moves on to meditative concentration and
finally wisdom. Rather the three aspects of the practice of the path exist,
operate, and are developed in a mutually dependent and reciprocal rela-
tionship. In other words, without some nascent sense of suffering and
what conduces to its cessation one would not and could not even begin
the practice of the path. (Gethin, 2010, p. 84)
This is particularly important with the assertion here that the idiomatic
characters (kanji) for ai-ki-do line up in an ordered, matched sequential
way in reference to ‘ground-path-fruition.’ However, it is important to
note a disclaimer that this assertion is not evident anywhere in the schol-
arship or traditional presentation of the system of Aikido philosophy and
practice that I have encountered in my research. Aiki is a word O Sensei
reinterpreted from its basic meaning from ancient martial arts prac-
tices: ‘to blend with an opponent’s movements.’ When combined with
do (‘way’ or path), O Sensei gave it a core philosophical significance as
spiritual purpose8 (Saotome, 1993, p. vii). However, Aikido is variously
described also as Aikido. The distinction is not trivial. Returning to the
conceptual framework of Table 1.4, seeing each movement through the
threefold logic process, the factors ‘join up’ to complete the whole. This
is certainly the case of the geometric sangen in Aikido, which combines
to represent the totality and structure of the universe (Stevens, 1997).
This holistic, cyclical model is expressed in Table 1.5.
Table 1.4 Ground, path, fruition via Aikido and Gestalt Therapy
Three divisions (inclu- Aikido Aikido and Sangen Gestalt Therapy

sive of Eightfold Noble (‘Three origins’)
Path)
GROUND 合 Sankaku Contact

(‘View’) Ai Entering With field, Gestalt
Theory principle (‘Love; harmony’) Generating Vulnerability
Hunger/need Withness
Openness Witness
Resourcing
Attention
Readiness
Stable posture
Sensing
PATH 気 Maru Growth
(‘Practice’) Ki Movement Elasticity
action (‘spirit; life force’) Cauldron/crucible
Heuristic awareness Cooking Alchemy Engaging
Intention/attention Meeting with world
Confluence Dialogue
Containment
Expansion
Spiral yin/yang
Balance
Harmonization
Blending/‘Musubi’
‘AiKi’
FRUITION 道 Shikakushikaku Wholeness
(‘Result’) Do Stability
Praxis (‘Continued way’)
Fulfillment Nourishment
Realization
Attainment
Practical wisdom
Applied control
46 M. A. GORDON
Table 1.5 The cycle is the whole: learning as ontology
Three divisions Aikido Aikido and Sangen Gestalt Therapy

(‘Three origins’)
GROUND (‘View’) 合 CONTACT

Ai (‘Love;
harmony’)
GROUND-PATH 気 CONTACT-
(‘Practice from AIKI (‘Blending of GROWTH
View’) spirit; life force’)
PATH-FRUITION 道 CONTACT-
(‘Result of Insightful AIKIDO GROWTH-
Practice’) (‘Continued way WHOLENESS
of harmonization
of Ki’)
Theoretical Design: Threefold Integral

Using the framework of the above table from this point, and through
to the final essay, we move from ‘View,’ to ‘Practice from View,’ and to
‘Result of Insightful Practice.’ We can align these developmental frames
of reference with the anecdotal and theoretical exploration in each essay.
This book takes us through a developmental arc. If we track this arc
through the essays as statements, we could say we start with the (1) aspi-
rational aspect (intention, ground, Love, empathy, understanding) to (2)
the practical aspect (engagement, intersubjectivity, contact, ecology), and
further to (3) the fruition (practical wisdom, insight, applicability, rele-
vance to the field of education and beyond) (Table 1.6).
Table 1.6 Layout of essays
Three divisions Aikido Aikido and Sangen (‘Three origins’) Gestalt Therapy Essays
GROUND 合 CONTACT 1. Teacher as Healer: Animating the

(‘View’) Ai ‘Ecological Self Through Holistic,
(‘Love; Engaged Pedagogy
harmony’)
GROUND- 気 CONTACT- 2. Awakening to Wholeness:

PATH (‘Practice AIKI GROWTH Aikido as an Embodied Praxis of
from View’) (‘Blending Intersubjectivity
of spirit; life 3. Moto-Morphosis: The Gestalt of
force’) Aikido and Psychotherapy, and
Motorcycling as ‘Way’
PATH- 道 CONTACT- 4. The Way of the Classroom:

FRUITION AIKIDO GROWTH- Aikido as Transformative, Embodied
(‘Result of (‘Continued WHOLENESS Pedagogy Through Self-Cultivation
Insightful way of har-
Practice’) monization of
Ki’)
1 INTRODUCTION: PRACTICE AS TRANSFORMATIVE WHOLENESS
47
48 M. A. GORDON
It is worth underscoring, in particular, that the final essay ‘The Way of

the Classroom: Aikido as Transformative, Embodied Pedagogy Through
Self-Cultivation’ represents the theoretical arc of this book in that Aikido
is a lens of understanding rather than a case study or model for relational
pedagogy. What is meant here is that, to avoid the pitfall of succumbing
to my own overall criticism, Aikido is not being reductively put forward
as an idealized or prescriptive practice. Rather, it is the ethic of altruism,
the embodied and practical discipline of applying oneself wholeheartedly
through relationship in all aspects of daily life that highlights Aikido as a
paradigm of empathic attunement with a broader applicability of value
and learning across disciplines.
Summary of Essays
This work is organized into three thematic parts: Part I: A Psychospiritual
View; Part II: An Intersubjective View; Part III: A Relational
View. These parts are comprised of four peer-reviewed essays that have
been published, are pending publication, have been submitted for publi-
cation, or have been presented at peer-review international conferences.
The book’s parts and essays are organized within an overall conceptual
‘architecture.’ As stated previously, the book design is based on Buddhist
‘three-fold logic,’ with parallel holistic structure based on Aikido cosmol-
ogy (Triangle, Circle, Square), and Gestalt Therapy process. This model
is presented as a theory-as-methodology or praxis approach—that there
is a cycle of reflective learning and practice that fulfills the aspirational
virtue ethics underpinning its stated purpose. The essays are listed by
their sequence in the Table of Contents, with the first essay serving as an
expanded introduction.
2.
Teacher as Healer: Animating the ‘Ecological Self Through
Holistic, Engaged Pedagogy.
Presented in panel discussion ‘Investigating Inner Space:
Consciousness, Pedagogy, and Myth,’ Simon Fraser University
2016 Graduate Critical Studies Conference ‘Dialectics of Space:
Enclosure and Resistance,’ Vancouver. BC. Presented and included
in conference proceedings, 17th Annual Hawaii International
Conference on Education, January 2017, Honolulu, Hawaii.
3.
Awakening to Wholeness: Aikido as an Embodied Praxis of
Intersubjectivity.
Gordon, M. A. (2019). Awakening to Wholeness: Aikido as

Embodied Praxis of Intersubjectivity. In O. Gunnlaugson, C.
Scott, E. Sarath, & H. Bai (Eds.), Catalyzing the Field: Second
Person Approaches to Contemplative Learning (pp. 87–106). New
York, NY: State University of New York Press.
4. Moto-Morphosis: The Gestalt of Aikido and Psychotherapy, and
Motorcycling as ‘Way’.
Presented at the 8th International Journal of Motorcycle Studies
(IJMS) Conference, July 26–28, Chaffey College, Rancho
Cucamonga, CA. Submitted for publication in IJMS.
5. The Way of the Classroom: Aikido as Transformative, Embodied
Pedagogy Through Self-Cultivation.
Forthcoming chapter (2019) in J. Lin, B. Kirby, S. Edwards, &
T. Culham (Eds.), Contemplative Pedagogies for Effective and
Profound Transformation in Teaching, Learning and Being.
Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing.
Synopsis of Part I
In Part I, I take a psychospiritual view of self-cultivation. This view con-
stitutes ‘ground’ in the conceptual and design framework of this work:
ground, path, fruition. To take a psychospiritual view is to study both
the nature and fact of being (e.g., ontology) from the situational—the
contextual. This view is the ‘whatness’ of the situation, which in the
‘three-fold’ logic of this book constitutes the ground, the starting point,
the ‘here-and-now’ as Yalom (2013) calls it, and specifically the autobi-
ographical narrative that informs this self-study. In the first essay of this
manuscript, Teacher as Healer: Animating the ‘Ecological Self Through
Holistic, Engaged Pedagogy, I draw out to a wider psychosocial view
through the work of Jungian scholar and psychologist James Hillman to
examine the scope of such a transpersonal gaze of the world that implies
more holistic, cosmological knowing and being. Specifically, I write
about Hillman’s (1992) position that the two predominant theoretical
orientations of psychotherapy are polarities, and thus leave the suffering
human subject in a void, which doesn’t facilitate full healing, or whole-
ness. The first of these ‘poles’ is the psychoanalytic model, which attrib-
utes psychological disruption to intrapsychic phenomena. Thus, argues
Hillman, it decontextualizes the person’s situatedness in the broader
context of existence and meaning (e.g., Cosmos; spirituality; ontology).
50 M. A. GORDON
The second pole, which Hillman identifies as a limitation of Marxist psy-

chiatry, is more sociological and locates the source of human suffering
solely within the matrix of social inequality, class hierarchy, means of
production, state control, and so on. To do so, he says, relegates under-
standing of our psychospiritual experience to interpsychic phenomena.
Providing a more accurate and holistic context, Hillman says we need
only to recognize that psychology’s roots lay in that term’s very etymol-
ogy: ‘psyche’ meaning ‘soul,’ and ‘logos’ as study or order. Essentially, in
invoking the notion of the anima mundi—the ‘soul of the world’—Hill-
man urges us to see the two aforementioned psychological polarities as
intertwined phenomena. In We’ve Had a Hundred Years Psychotherapy
and Things Are Getting Worse, Hillman in fact says that our tendency
to psychopathologize human-centeredness is in fact manifest in the
suffering of the world: the planet, the ecosystem, all forms of life thus
animate. As he says in the book: ‘The sickness is out there’ (as cited in
Hillman & Ventura, 1993, p. 4).
Bateson (1987) addresses this subject-object split of seeing human
experience and consciousness as a separable, interiorized subjective expe-
rience isolated from a world ‘out there’ as an ‘epistemological error’ that
gives rise to its own cascade of psychospiritual and social problems—
notably, addictive behaviors. ‘We are most of us,’ says Bateson, ‘gov-
erned by epistemologies that we know to be wrong’ (1987, p. 491).
Subsequent empirical research after Bateson into social isolation and
addiction, specifically that of Simon Fraser University emeritus profes-
sor Alexander’s ‘rat park’ experiments and its implications for human
beings (Alexander, 2010), points to what Bateson early on noted as ‘the
intangible nature of epistemological error and the difficulty of chang-
ing epistemological habit’ (Alexander, 2010. p. 485). Indeed, the latter
statement might stand as the framing theoretical statement for this book.
We shall see, then, that this book functions as a comparative exploration
of experiential, reflective, heuristic, and hermeneutic aspects of Western
and Eastern psychology, philosophy, phenomenology, and ontology. This
takes place primarily through the moral, spiritual, and self-developmental
lens of Aikido.
Synopsis of Part II
In Part II of the book, I take ‘An Intersubjective View of Knowing and
Being,’ rooted in a Japanese philosophical notion of the social self. This
view examines the ‘how’ of the situation—the experiential, empirical,

vivifying, and relational elements of my self-study from a mind-body
viewpoint. Part II comprises the path aspect of the ‘three-fold logic’ of
the book design. Path here denotes moving into the aforementioned
‘auto-affective’ (e.g., kinesthetic), embodied and intersubjective dynam-
ics of relationality, which allows the ground to become material that is
workable and reflexive. In the third essay of this manuscript, Awakening
to Wholeness: Aikido as an Embodied Praxis of Intersubjectivity, I explore
the idea that Aikido, as an inherently relational practice, goes beyond
the limited notion of ‘first person’ practice (e.g., meditation) toward
an understanding that is based in ‘second-person’ relationality and
what Buddhist teacher Thich Nhat Hanh calls ‘interbeing’ (Hanh and
Eppsteiner, 1998). In the fourth of the five essays of this book, Moto-
Morphosis: The Gestalt of Aikido and Psychotherapy, and Motorcycling as
‘Way’, I explore the kinesthetic, phenomenological, and spiritual aspects
of motorcycling, Aikido, and Japanese brush calligraphy (shodo) as a fur-
ther reflection on the ontological interdependence evident in Buddhist
philosophy. Here, these practices are reflected upon in consideration of
the ‘internal paradox’ that Merleau-Ponty refers (2012, p. 11) to in his
theory of the (inter)subjective experience of the ‘structure of the flesh’
and ‘the intertwining, the chiasm’—that paradox arising for us as beings
that are both ‘sensible and sensing’—and are re-examined through the
‘both/and’ logic represented in Buddhist (e.g., non-dualistic) phenom-
enology. This ‘both/and’ or entangled, interdependent view is extended
to the self-other dichotomy, which is expressed here as a liminal
‘betweenness’ that reflects a philosophical anthropology stream of theory
extending from G. H. Mead (‘betwixt and between’), Buber (‘I-Thou’)
through Japanese philosophers including Kitaro Nishida and Tetsuro
Watsuji.
Synopsis of Part III

In Part III of the book, I move into the fruition aspect of the three-
fold Buddhist logic framework on which this self-study is scaffolded. In
‘A Relational View of Practice,’ I move from the progressive exploration
of ground and path in the previous parts into fuller reflective awareness
and integration of the ‘what’ and ‘how,’ into the ‘why’—the purposeful,
practical, and moral application of self-cultivation to relationship-mak-
ing. I continue to examine this idea of relationality through practice in
52 M. A. GORDON
Essay 5, The Way of The Classroom: Aikido as Transformative, Embodied

Pedagogy Through Self-Cultivation, in which I explore the aspirational,
non-dualistic, and relational aspects of Aikido as a model of self-trans-
formation and an ‘embodied habitus’ of moral virtue (altruism) and
interconnectedness. This essay begins with British psychiatrist Ian
McGilchrist’s (2009) stirring notion that our over-rationalistic epistemo-
logical worldview has actually negatively altered our cognition through
neuroplasticity. In other words, our skewed, dualistic, acquisitive, tar-
get-focused view has become our practice, resulting in a world that
reflects the ‘epistemological error’ of our separateness from nature. The
approach of Aikido teaching and learning as a pedagogy as self-and-other
transformation is explored here in ways that are aimed at being transfera-
ble and generalizable to many educational contexts.
Notes
1. The word Aikido in this book refers to my training in Ki Aikido, reflecting
Tohei’s vision for Aikido not just as martial skillfulness but for ‘daily life.’
2. Embodied learning here invokes the neurophenomological view that
Varela et al. (1991) describe as circularity, as it denotes their theory of
‘enactive consciousness.’
3. https://blackbeltmag.com/arts/japanese-arts/the-master-who-taught-
calligraphy-to-aikido-founder-morihei-ueshiba-and-actor-steven-seagal-
part-1.
4. As a professional singer-songwriter and recording artist with some traction,
I had secured a very high level ‘O1’ visa into the USA for a period of three
years.
5. As further explored in Introduction of this book, and introduced here in
the Prologue, the deeper Shinto foundations of O Sensei’s Aikido are based
on the spiritual ethos of kannagara no michi—‘the continuous path of the
Gods’ (Saotome, 1993).
6. Known as the ‘fourth wave’ (analytical, behavioral, humanistic being the
initial three) in psychology, the transpersonal approach has its roots in
depth psychology (Carl Jung, William James), humanistic (Abraham
Maslow, Carl Rogers) while incorporating the ‘transegoic’ or spiritual psy-
chology of human experience. The ‘human potential’ movement evolved
in the early period of this field, with figures such as Roberto Assagioli,
Stanislav and Christina Grof, Ken Wilber, John Welwood among influen-
tial contributors who brought eastern psycho-philosophical awareness to
the study of human experience and psychotherapeutic practice.
7. [1] The truth of suffering; [2] the origin of suffering (clinging or iden-
tification with experience—seeking pleasure; averting discomfort); [3] the
truth of the cessation of suffering (through meditation); [4] the truth of
the path or eightfold noble path (Ray, 2002).
8. Haroun (2015, p. 89) notes that: ‘Between 1922 and 1942, the names
of the art transformed from daito-ryu, to aiki-ryu, to aikijujutsu, to
aiki-budo, and finally to be known as aikido (Kiyoshi Nakakura, in Pranin,
1995, p. 253) after the beginning of World War II in 1942 (Ueshiba,
2008, p. 39).’ The latter occurred when Ueshiba’s art, along with most
martial arts, were centralized under the Greater Japan Martial Virtue
Society (Dai Nippon Butoku Kai). As Haroun (2015) highlights, O Sensei
had an important influence in the transformation of bushido to what later
became known as budo. As O Sensei said: ‘The heart of Japanese Budô is
simply harmony and love’ (Ueshiba, 1984, cited in Wagner, 2015, p. 86),
also more directly proclaiming that ‘bu is love.’
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CHAPTER 2
Teacher as Healer: Animating

the ‘Ecological Self ’ Through Holistic,
Engaged Pedagogy
See Illustration 2.1.
Illustration 2.1 Ai ‘harmony’ or ‘love’

58 M. A. GORDON
Introduction
The following essay takes a ‘micro-macro’ view of the development of
‘self’ and identity as it pertains to relationality in pedagogy with an eye
to moving toward an ecological consciousness. On the macro-level, the
ecopsychological view of Shepard (1998), Roszak, Gomes, and Kanner
(1995), Hillman (1992, 1998), and others may compel us to see beyond
our intrapsychic drives, our dualistic notion of self and ‘other’ or self
and ‘world’ as reflecting a Cartesian subject-object split, to ‘identify,’ as
Naess (2008) suggests, with a self that is sensitized, unified, and separa-
ble from the extended ecology of life and the natural world. To do oth-
erwise leads us to continue in disrepair and disconnection through what
Bateson (1987) calls the ‘epistemological error’ of this dualistic world-
view. Hillman refers to this inseparability of self and ecology through
the psychoanalytical lens, inviting us to see that our erstwhile psycho-
pathological problems reside neither in strictly intrapsychic nor interpsy-
chic terms or causalities. Rather, Hillman suggests, healing occurs in the
context of seeing psychology as the study of ‘soul,’ meaning and our
capacity for engaging the complexity of life within an understanding of
the anima mundi—the living cosmos or world. Shepard (1998) takes
an even more macro view, suggesting that the epochal developmental
stages of human civilization symbolize a kind of arrested development
that coincides with moving away from smaller-scale, tribal, and familiar
social units of organization (e.g., hunter-gatherer) into more hierarchi-
cal, undemocratic, and resource-exploitative social organization. Shepard
points out that early-stage relational dependency (neoteny) supports
healthy social attachment and bonding, the process of which facilitates
later-stage individuation and social locality (ontogeny). What Shepard
emphasizes here however is that the early process of social attachment
that supports neoteny is limited not only to social relationships but also to
our bonding with nature. Hence, the movement away from smaller-scale
social organization that supports both tribal and ecological attachment
has manifested in a distorted ontogeny seen in civilizational epochs that
are ruptured or antagonistic in their ecological relationship with the nat-
ural world.
On the ‘micro’-level of psychosocial development, the following essay
draws on critical pedagogy theorists including hooks (1994) and Freire
(2000) with their emphasis on fostering an attuned, locally situated, dia-
logical, and love-as-praxis model of teaching and learning relationships.
2 TEACHER AS HEALER: ANIMATING THE ‘ECOLOGICAL SELF’ … 59
Zajonc (2006a, 2006b) and Palmer (1993) refer to this overall intention
toward dialogue, inclusivity, and well-being—as well as being ecosophi-
cal and ecopsychological in approach—as an ‘epistemology of love.’ I also
briefly explore Taylor’s (1992) consideration of the ethics of ‘authen-
ticity’ as it relates to one’s psychospiritual development and impact on
others. Taylor suggests that rather than falling into narcissistic cynicism
(e.g., ‘only about me’) or a kind of collectivized enforcement of altru-
ism (e.g., ‘I must sublimate my truth for the good of the many’), there
is a middle ground that allows for authentic self-discovery with a valu-
ation of a ‘horizon of significance’ as it pertains to social and ecolog-
ical consequence of one’s actions. Drawing on critical theory I make
brief mention, in line with Taylor’s (1992) ‘ethics of authenticity’ the-
sis, of Foucault’s (1996) revival of the Aristotelian practice of ‘care of
the self.’ Foucault’s contention here is that authentic development of the
self is critical to an engaged, informed, self-aware and free society, and
based on an understanding that such multilateral and pluralistic practice
of ‘care of the self’ enables the further Aristotelian notion of parrhesia
or mutual ‘speaking truth to power.’ Making space for such authentic,
multifaceted, multifarious, and diverse experiences is what hooks (1994)
refers to in her critical pedagogical approach as the ‘practice of freedom,’
and what Freire emphatically states as the actual praxis of love, which is
dialogic, inclusive, and auto-generative from situated communities.
A significant number of other scholar-practitioners have written else-
where extensively about ‘pedagogy of love,’ contemplative practice, and
contemplative education and, while not cited here formally, are worthy
of mention, including: John P. Miller, Ron Miller, Sharon Salzberg, Jon
Kabat-Zinn, Ram Dass, Jack Kornfield, George Leonard, Mirabai Bush,
Daniel P. Barbezat, Judith Simmer-Brown, and Richard Brown.
Lastly, Bowlby’s (1969) attachment theory forms a ‘hinge’ for
the micro-macro approach in this essay. Bowlby’s studies of children
who exhibited psychological and emotional instability due to ‘insecure
attachment’ with parental figures have implications that transcend fam-
ily relations or one’s ability to form secure relational attachments. As
child psychologist Donald Winnicott (1960) already established in his
elaboration of object relations theory, infant-parent attachment bond-
ing not only secures the child to the emotional and physical safety
of the family, but also forms the basis for which the child feels existen-
tially secured and attached. Certainly, attachment eruptions are linked
to psycho-emotional disturbances or relational deficits in individuals.
60 M. A. GORDON
However, as Butler (1997) and other critical theorists suggest, as with

Shepard (1998), Foucault (1996) and Bauman (2000), our sociopolitical
(read: oppressive) forms of state control exhibit a dysfunctional attach-
ment relationship at play with its subjects. In Foucauldian terms, this is
the ‘subjectivized’ self, in Bauman’s (2000) view as the ‘liquid’ or decen-
tralized self-adrift in modernity, and as Butler’s (1997) ‘inscribed upon,’
subjectivized identity. In sum then, the role for an ecosophical, ecolog-
ical, and holistic education is to bring forth the ‘practices of freedom’
through an ‘epistemology of love’ and wholeness. To do so requires the
psychospiritual approaches and practices of self-cultivation through ped-
agogy that encompasses the ecological view from an intention of heal-
ing and a ‘horizon of significance’ that extends beyond the individualized
notion of self.
Our world is in ecological crisis; the effects of climate change are
present everywhere we look. So profound are these climactic shifts that
new phrases such as ‘climate refugees’ are now in our collective lexicon,
a term denoting those whom have been displaced by rising ocean lev-
els, drought, and other catastrophic environmental events. While some
within a minority opinion suggest that these climate shifts are the pro-
cess of natural and historical cycles, the broad scientific consensus leaves
no doubt that the cause of environmental collapse has been significantly
if not overwhelmingly driven by human industrial civilization on a mass
scale (e.g., overpopulation, overconsumption, over-intensive large-scale
agriculture). This idea of human-caused degradation is otherwise called
anthrogenic—a notion which has led to scientists to make the dramatic
move of designating the modern industrial epoch the ‘Anthropocene
Era,’ further reflecting the impact of human-centered or anthropocentric
ways on the planet itself.
As educators how do we address this crisis? Specifically, how do we
begin to approach the various layers of individual and collective roles we
play in society, influences that shape our values and decisions, and our
responsibility to mitigate or even question the consequences of our deci-
sions as regards the impact on the planet? This essay explores the notion
that it is incumbent upon educators, whom are tasked with facilitating
the mental, physical, and social-emotional development of their stu-
dents, to approach the problem and possibilities for change from a holis-
tic perspective and practice. This position is rooted in the view that our
ecological crisis is a symptom of a greater ill—that our ecological crisis
vis-à-vis our anthrocentric civilization bespeaks a human disconnect from
the natural world. It is suggested here that this disconnect stems from
a ‘cognitive dissonance’ between the fact that on the one hand we are
biological beings whom are (inter)dependent with our environment, and
on the other that we pursue a path of unchecked growth that dooms
that very interdependence and survival. This dissonance or juxtaposition,
it is suggested here, constitutes a kind of ‘epistemological paradox,’ a
contradiction in our ways of knowing and making meaning in the world
between what is evident (human need for survival) and what is done
(ecologically harming ways that undermine our survival). As Palmer
(1993, p. 9) so eloquently states: ‘The failure of modern knowledge is
not primarily a failure in our ethics, in the application of what we know.
Rather, it is the failing of our knowing itself…to allow love to inform the
relations that our knowledge creates.’
In this essay, I suggest that the imperative role for teachers is to
restore a more holistic understanding of this human interdependence
with the other-than-human, or with what is classically referred to as the
anima mundi—the living world. This view brings an urgency in the call
for education and pedagogy to restore an awareness and moral agency
of the ‘ecological self.’ I suggested that since the root of this ecological
crisis lies in what Bateson (1987) calls an ‘epistemological error’ (e.g.,
the notion that we as cognizing humans are distinct or separate from
nature), the way forward requires a ‘healing’ or a move to seeing our
relationship with life itself from wholeness or interdependence. There is
a plethora of research, for example, addressing the ill-effects of separa-
tion from nature in urban settings (e.g., Kuo, 2001; Mitchell & Popham,
2008) as well as those that demonstrate the link between positive mental
health and connection with natural environment (e.g., Berman, Jonides,
& Kaplan, 2008; Bowler, Buyung-Ali, Knight, & Pullin, 2010; Cervinka,
Röderer, & Hefler, 2012). My purpose here is not to examine these det-
rimental and reconstitutive factors in and of themselves, but rather to
look at them in a more meta-theoretical application to shed some light
on the role of pedagogy as having a restorative social and psychological
effect on learners and educators.
This approach thus goes beyond theoretical concerns and requires
of educators to bring it down to practice. At the teacher-student level,
hooks (1994) advocates for what she calls ‘engaged pedagogy’ as a
‘practice of freedom,’ restoring wholeness in relationship and ecological
thinking and acting. She differentiates between ‘education as the practice
of freedom and education that merely strives to reinforce domination’
62 M. A. GORDON
(hooks, 1994, p. 4). Moreover, she emphasizes that the teacher’s own
awareness and practice of their well-being is vital in fostering that eco-
logical view, and that self-care and self-actualization are critical to engen-
dering awareness in the classroom. Taking further Freire’s (2000) notion
of creating ‘conscientization’ within classrooms through an emphasis
on praxis—‘action and reflection upon the world in order to change it’
(p. 14) hooks draws influence from the ‘engaged Buddhism’ of Thich
Nhat Hanh, whom she says, ‘In his work…always speaks of the teacher
as a healer’ (hooks, 1994, p. 14). As hooks says:
Whereas Freire was primarily concerned with the mind, Thich Nhat Hanh
offered a way of thinking about pedagogy which emphasized wholeness, a
union of mind, body, and spirit. His focus on a holistic approach to learn-
ing and spiritual practice enabled me to overcome years of socialization
that had taught me to believe a classroom was diminished if students and
professors regarded one another as ‘‘whole” human striving not just for
knowledge of books, but knowledge of how to live in the world. (hooks,
1994, p. 15)
It is in this spirit that this essay considers the role for ‘teacher as
healer’ in the sense of leading toward wholeness through a holistic view
of interdependence, inclusivity, and an ethic and practice of ecological
awareness and care. To explore the practical possibilities for the role of
‘teacher as healer,’ this essay briefly considers Jardine’s (2012) herme-
neutic approach toward a ‘pedagogy left in peace,’ Zajonc’s (2006b)
‘epistemology of love’ and call for contemplative pedagogy, Van Manen’s
(2013) emphasis on pedagogy as a ‘call to contact’ (Van Manen, 2013)
and embodied presence.
Collective Cognitive Dissonance

The question arises as to what system of thought and values—or per-
haps even willful ignorance—would drive human beings to continue to
destroy their own habitat and sustenance? To ask such a question how-
ever presupposes that there is a general agency or free will on the part
of the general populace in acting in such a self-destructive manner.
To the extent that this continued ‘crime of omission’1 in allowing our
planet’s forests, oceans, and atmosphere to degrade by our own collec-
tive hand is either willful, or simply the collateral effect of transnational
capitalism’s drive to unlimited growth—and thus out of our individual

hands—is certainly a subject for political science and sociology. The focus
of this essay, however, is to examine the deeper epistemological roots of
this collateral effect of ecocide. As indigenous peoples across the planet
whom have been on the front lines of deforestation, habitat destruction,
resource extraction, and erosion of historical political and cultural sover-
eignty continue to make clear—many vehemently advocating and putting
their lives on the line to protect their traditional territories and ways of
life—this is a crisis of values, of worldview. As I put forward in this essay,
it is an epistemological, and ultimately, a spiritual crisis. In other words,
how we see, know, and engage the natural world (or life itself) begets
our relationship to it. The argument here is that this ecological crisis isn’t
simply a question of better policy. It is, rather, a clarion call to the field of
education at large, and more specifically a challenge—in the face of eco-
logical crisis—to rethink pedagogic values and practice in terms of rela-
tionship with the animate (and inanimate) world, to balance, holism, to
ecological living and being.
This essay approaches the epistemological, values-driven, or worldview
schism underpinning modern industrial society, and how it enables this
slide into ecological collapse. I suggest here that ecological collapse is a
symptom of an epistemological paradox: that is, that while we endeavor
to live as full and prosperous lives as possible, we conduct ourselves in a
way (e.g., environmentally irresponsible) that undermines our very basic
well-being and security. Surely, this is irrational. Moreover, it suggests a
relational deficit—we are alarmingly out of sync with the natural world
that creates and sustains life. How is this deep state of denial possible?
In this essay, I explore how this paradox represents a kind of cognitive
dissonance, one which is in part underscored by the vestiges of the philo-
sophical dualism traceable to René Descartes (March 31, 1596–February
11, 1650), a proposition which so influentially posited a schism between
mind and physical nature or world (including the body, as a separate sub-
strate), and which has been further distorted through scientific rational-
ism into an anthropocentric and dissociated view of nature.
What are the deeper implications for this dissonance from life itself—
that is, the biological, phenomenological, psychospiritual, and erotic
source of being? The ‘cognitive dissonance’ referred to here is a psy-
chological term denoting asynchrony between what we define as goals
or desires for ourselves, and what we in reality do (or perhaps, allow to
happen). Is this ecological dissonance between ourselves as biologically
64 M. A. GORDON
dependent beings and the natural world a psychological problem? If we

see this conundrum as an existential dissonance then, as an ontological
problem about our place in nature as biological beings, and therefore how
we live in relationship with the natural world and all life (ecology), we have
a problem rooted in meaning, in the soul of being. As Jungian psycholo-
gist James Hillman reminds us in his foreword to Ecopsychology: Restoring
the Earth, Healing The Mind (Roszak, Gomes, & Kanner, 1995), psychol-
ogy is: ‘the study or order (logos) of the soul (psyche). This implies that
all psychology is by definition a depth psychology, first because it assumes
an inside intimacy to behaviour (moods, reflections, fantasies, feelings,
images, thoughts) and second because the soul, ever since Heraclitus
twenty-five hundred years ago, has been defined as immeasurably deep
and unlocatable’ (in Roszak et al., 1995, p. xviii). Hillman continues: ‘I
therefore see all psychologies as ultimately therapies by definition because
of their involvement with the soul’ (in Roszak et al., 1995, p. xviii).
What then, does this mean for educators as agents of change and
inquiry, as regards engendering critical awareness to global ecology?
What potential, if not responsibility exists for educators to help shift this
dissonance or dissociative state, in the development of emergent and
lifelong learners? Pedagogy, indeed critical pedagogy, suggests a kind
of leadership; one root meaning of the word ‘education’ emerges from
educere (L.): ‘to lead out’ (Gordon, 2016). From the point of view of an
ecopsychological engagement with the world not as an exploitable mate-
rial resource but rather anima mundi, as Hillman (1990) phrases it, this
requires educators to focus on and moreover, to model, a healing of the
Cartesian rift from ecology—from life itself.
In this essay, I explore the notion of ‘teacher as healer’—that is, not
as clinical practitioner or metaphysical interventionist—as embedding
educational praxis and learning settings within an ontology of whole-
ness and interdependence: an ‘ecology of care.’ As hooks (1994) suggests,
pedagogy is a call to action as a ‘practice of freedom’ (to echo and ful-
fill Foucault’s neo-Aristotelian notion), one that can guide teachers in
their own ‘soulfulness’ toward mentoring students to find, she says quot-
ing Thomas Merton, their ‘ground of being.’ As hooks (1994) says,
‘Education as the practice of freedom is not just about liberatory knowl-
edge, it’s about a liberatory practice in the classroom’ (hooks, 1994,
p. 147). This ‘liberatory practice’ references the practice of freedom as
one where both students and educators are empowered and involved in
the process of reflection and learning, where hooks’ ‘engaged pedagogy’
immerses educators in multilateral learning process that is humanizing.

The ecological attunement and healing (or, wholeness) put forward in
this essay is echoed in this cry to humanize education.
Three themes arise in the context of this essay: deep ecology, depth
psychology, and what is suggested as ‘depth pedagogy.’ As a way of crit-
ically understanding the link between these three themes, I examine the
idea of dependence in the relational and developmental sense, as regards
Bowlby’s attachment theory (1969). Bowlby’s research unveiled a taxon-
omy for children who become either ‘securely’ or ‘insecurely’ attached to
their primary caregiver (based on the presence or absence of ruptures in
the attachment relationship, dependability, predictability, consistency of
care and attention).
Expanding the scope from immediate caregiver relationships and
dependency (micro) to the social subject (macro), this essay departs
from the perspective that the neoliberal social, political, and economic
forces that form and shape the apparatus of postmodern state and soci-
ety functions as a neglectful or traumatizing attachment figure to which
the social subject is caught in what Bateson (1987) calls a double bind.
This double bind is another manifestation of the epistemological paradox
mentioned in the introduction, in which one is faced with neither fully
participating in a society that is destructive, nor full authentic self-actu-
alization. The parallel in insecure attachment with children is that the
child lacks the full social-emotional facility or autonomy to be truly inde-
pendent, yet neither is she able to safely depend on the attachment figure
whom might be destructive, absent, or otherwise narcissistically preoccu-
pied. In the classroom, where children are carrying these kinds of (often
hidden) unresolved emotional adaptations that hooks suggests engaged
pedagogy intervenes as a practice of freedom, an act of self-care and
focus on well-being both as a model to learners and as a collaborative
and liberatory practice.
Taking this holistic model of care further out of (micro) attachment
relationships into the broader (macro) view—and, counter to the dou-
ble-bound modern self, caught in the epistemological paradox of a
self-destructive society—is the notion of the ‘deepened and widened’
empathic ecological self, a term coined by Arne Naess, who spurned the
field of ecosophy. This self stands in contrast to the alienated neoliberal
subject and can engage in a non-anthropocentric imagining of what
Hillman refers to in the classic regard of the anima mundi or living
world as ‘the world soul of Platonism, which means nothing less than
66 M. A. GORDON
the world ensouled’ (Hillman, 1990, p. 99). Thirdly, how can education
reimagine itself within Hillman’s anima mundi. This leads us to explore
critical pedagogy as a loving, even spiritual act (Palmer, 1993), one that
calls for an ‘engaged pedagogy’ (hooks, 1994). This reimagining and
reengagement with interdependent life itself is critical to the survival of
the biosphere on which all life forms depend. It portends, one hopes, the
next great epochal shift to what Berry (Swimme & Berry, 1992) called
the Ecozoic Era, and Macy (1996) suggests as ‘The Great Turning.’ The
intent here, to continue the latter metaphor of ‘turning,’ is to highlight
and examine the interdependent relationship between self (micro) and
World (macro), such that one’s psychodevelopment can be seen as circu-
lar engagement and interrelational to life itself (Shepard, 1998). Rather
than look to Macy’s (1996) Great Turning, Naess suggests, we simply
need to consciously engage the Great Spiral that already informs and viv-
ifies the human life process, and that of life itself.
The Disengaged ‘Rational’ and ‘Liquid’ Self

Before talking about the teacher as healer, we must first look to the ‘sick-
ness’ we are addressing. Here, the gaze of the teacher-as-healer is neither
solely on the human agent (learner), nor as teacher-as-activist (world,
nature, ecology). Rather, the broken relationship between self and ecol-
ogy demands our repair (and certainly, how this undermines the project
of meaningful education). This is true to the etymology of the word
‘trauma,’ from which we can derive ‘wound.’ This wound, though psy-
chic and socioeconomic to human form, is overall a ‘trauma’ in as much
as it speaks this kind of ‘woundedness’—the lack of ‘sound’ wholeness—
that pervades the dominant economic and political forces globally today
and indeed threatens the survival of life on Earth. As many others have
suggested, in the contemporary frame, we shall address these destruc-
tive forces under the rubric of ‘neoliberalism.’ The history of Western
rationalist, objectivist thought—the so-called Cartesian rift as epistemo-
logical, philosophical and social meme—has left an indelible mark not
only on social structures and the entire field of natural and social scien-
tific inquiry, but as a lasting imprint on the human psyche itself. Merchant
(1980) comments how Cartesian dualism marked a rationalization of
the world into a mechanistic model of inanimate objects to be manip-
ulated and exploited, thus enabling the rationale for unchecked modern
transnational industrial expansion and resource depletion to this day.
To frame this in psychopathology, our society at large is suffering from a

critical dissociative disorder as regards human and non-human life in the
shared ecosphere of planet Earth.
In fact, to the extent that Cartesianism effectively led to the separation
between religion and science, it was not left without a rationalist (or at
least, anthropocentric) imprint. Taylor (1989) makes the point that the
historical schism between science and religion during the Enlightenment
does not bear out so distinctively as such. That is to say that, despite
tensions between deism and Enlightenment rationalism, what remains—
starting with Descartes, through Locke (individualism) and later Kant—
is the identity of the ‘disengaged subject of rational control’ (1989,
p. 315). This, he says, ‘is accompanied, even powered by, a sense of our
dignity as rational agent…[which] becomes itself a moral source’ (1989,
p. 315). This, he says, leads to a ‘non-theistic’ morality (as regards the
hitherto ‘God-given’ powers of human reason) as the ‘sources now lie
within us.’ Such is the legacy of anthropocentric, objectivist hubris.
The Cartesian paradigm underwrites the vast expansion of Eurocentric
rationalism in the name of science and ‘civilization’ and its ventures into
colonial conquest. By one very large measure, Merchant (1980, 2006)
put an early ‘ecofeminist’ lens on the relationship between science and
the subjugation of the feminine in nature, coincident with the oppression
of women. ‘The subjugation of nature as female…[was] integral to the
scientific method as power over nature,’ she writes (2006), quoting her
book The Death of Nature (1980) about the ‘sexual politics’ employed
by Bacon: ‘As woman’s womb had symbolically yielded to the forceps,
so nature’s womb harbored secrets that through technology could be
wrested from her grasp for use in the improvement of the human condi-
tion’ (2006, p. 179).
The Ethical Self

If it stands to reason that the dominant objectivist view of nature is
one that ‘subjectivizes’ (to use a Foucauldian term) ecology to human
purpose (Macy, 1996; Merchant, 1980), exploitation and neglect then
does this necessarily polarize ethically to an altruistic view that idealizes
nature, and thus minimizes human society or individualist aims? While
such ethical considerations are not the focus of this essay, it is instructive
to examine how a civilization at odds with its own ecology represents
a kind of inherent moral quandary. As we shall see later in this essay,
68 M. A. GORDON
such a ‘juvenile’-like, even narcissistic disregard for consequence or

impact on one’s environment suggests a kind of stunted psychosocial
development at work. To draw both this micro (individual-social) and
macro view (societal-epochal) into sharper focus, we return to Taylor
(1992) for a moment to examine ethics via ‘authenticity.’ Is the ethical
question of ecological crisis really one that pits individual moral values
(self) vs. altruistic concern (the world)?2 Taylor (1992) suggests a way
out of the untenable dichotomy between, on the one hand, a rejection
of authenticity (altruism), and on the other, blindly idealizing it (nar-
cissism). Rather, says Taylor, the ethics of authenticity are supported
when it is situated within a ‘horizon of significance’ (1992, p. 39).
Notably, this means consideration of one’s actions within a context of
greater rights, responsibility, and ethical consequence. Circling back
to the topic at hand, what this suggests is the possibility of balancing
truth-telling (‘parrhesia’) and otherwise ‘authentic’ care and the trans-
figuring of the erstwhile subjectivized Foucauldian self as a ‘practice of
freedom’ (Foucault 1996; Lotringer, Milchman, & Rosenburg, 2011).
Moreover, what this suggests in the context of this essay, harkening to
both Foucault and Taylor, is the possibility of balancing concern for indi-
vidual fulfillment against a ‘horizon of significance,’—one that is not par-
simonious. In other words, what would it mean to establish a ‘horizon of
significance’ that encompasses the entire ecology of lebenswelt (however
here, this refers not only to phenomenological ‘life’ but biological life
itself)? Is this even a necessary concern? Cannot individuals pursue their
education without preoccupation to a ‘horizon of significance,’ without
an overriding ecological worldview?
Again, in this essay I present the view that our ecological crisis is a
symptom of the ‘epistemological error’ that sees any agency, activity, will
or action outside of context, of an ecological system. In other words, the
ecology entails what Koestler (1989) called a ‘holarchy’ in which individ-
ual holons are simultaneously the whole and the part. Thus, the symptom
addressed here is the presumption, denial or outright opposition—from
rationalist or positivist scientific ‘paradigms’ as Kuhn (1996) identified
them—that the holarchy exists at all. Hence, as stated in the introduction
and throughout here, the agonism-antagonism dynamic of ecological crisis
is one of worldview rather than simply strategy. It is an epistemological and
ontological clash of paradigms, between the post-enlightenment rationalist-
materialist, and the cosmological-ecological of ancient and indigenous
traditions3. The problem here with the concept of postmodern self is

precisely thus: It remains an atomized, individualized self. This has not
only been resoundingly challenged on ontological and scientific grounds
both pre- and post-Cartesian era (Buddhist interdependence; non-locality
in quantum physics, to mention two strands of inquiry), it also sets up a
fundamentally anthropocentric and indeed disengaged (i.e., scientifically
distanciated) approach to ecology, let alone ecological crisis (Evernden,
1978). Ironically, this myopic self-containment threatens not only our soul-
ful engagement with the world, to invoke Plato via Hillman, it dulls the
alarm of the natural world to our collective poisoning, habitat destruction,
and social decline—pathological indeed, in both senses. As Hillman says,
this delusion of self-containment cannot be contained. It is not simply a
matter for psychology to address these matters as intrapsychic pathology.
As he warns, ‘the sickness is out there’ (Hillman & Ventura, 1993, p. 4).
Hillman (1992) identifies the bifurcation of self and world within
the field of psychology itself. On the one hand, the prevalence toward
psychopathology in psychology locates the origins of suffering and
responsibility—certainly psychoanalysis—within the individual. What is
wrong ‘out in the world’ in this view is directly reversible to some psy-
chic or metaphorical projection of the individual upon the world—oth-
erwise known as intrapsychic forces. On the other hand, the shift to
social psychology, even ‘Marxist psychiatry,’ turns the analytical gaze
upon the conditions of the world itself. The implication is that focus-
ing on changes within one’s social relations, socioeconomic position or
addressing greater political and economic conditions at large is the route
to affecting change within. This is, in contrast, an interpsychic approach.
For Hillman however, this dichotomy is both false and misleading. The
problem here, Hillman says, is that ‘these societal determinants remain
external conditions, economic, cultural or social; they are not themselves
psychic or subjective. The external may cause suffering,’ he says, ‘but it
does not itself suffer’ (p. 94).
Hillman (1992) goes on:
Having divided psychic reality from hard or external reality…[ ] means

that psychic reality is conceived to be neither public, objective nor physical,
while external reality, the sum of existing material objects and conditions,
is conceived to be utterly devoid of soul. As the soul is without world, the
world is without soul. (p. 95).
70 M. A. GORDON
The great danger here, Hillman (1992) warns, is that external, mate-
rial conditions themselves—the very world—if not addressed either intra-
psychically or interpsychically, ‘lie outside the soul’ (1992, p. 95). What
lies outside the soul, by definition then, lies outside awareness, care, con-
cern and connection: outside Taylor’s ‘horizon of significance.’ Hillman
writes:
For all the while that psychotherapy has succeeded in raising the con-
sciousness of human subjectivity, the world in which all subjectivities are
set has fallen apart …. We cannot inoculate the soul nor isolate it against
the illness in the soul of the world. (1992, p. 96)
What Hillman is pointing to here is essentially a hermeneutic problem,

in the sense that one is hermetically contained in the illusion of separate-
ness from a greater ecology. Rather, he invites:
Let us imagine the anima mundi neither above the world encircling it as
a divine and remote emanation of spirit, a world of powers, archetypes,
and principles transcendent to things, nor within the material world as its
unifying panpsychic life principle. Rather, let us imagine the anima mundi
as that particular soul spark, that seminal image, which offers itself through
each thing in its visible form. Then, anima mundi indicates the animated
possibilities presented by each event as it is, its sensuous presentation as a
face bespeaking its interior image—in short, its availability to imagination,
its presence to a psychic reality. (1992, p. 101)
Hillman (1990) suggests a renewed awareness to the urgencies of life

and nature, one that cannot fully emerge without new ways of engaging
the world. ‘The great wound in the red earth, whether in my dream or
my neighbourhood,’ he says, ‘is still a site of wrenching upheaval, appeal-
ing for an aesthetic as much as a hermeneutic response’ (1990, p. 101).
Detachment from Nature as Attachment Wound:

The Double Bind of Modernity
What Hillman outlines, beyond an unworkable binary within the field
of psychology, is a sense that ‘what happens to the world, happens to
me,’ an intertwining of the self and the world ‘en-souled’ (Hillman,
1998). This section brings us to a psychodynamic understanding of
this ecological rift—these apparent epistemological and psychological
intrapsychic-interpsychic binaries Hillman critiques in psychology—by

looking at our ecological dislocation as an attachment disorder. In psy-
chology, ‘attachment’ speaks to the critical stage of infant-carer bond-
ing, a psycho-emotional process that strongly determines an individual’s
healthy personality development. Attachment is also inextricably linked
to ‘object relations theory,’ which is the process of self-realization and
identification of one’s psyche in their environment in early stage devel-
opment (e.g., that there’s a ‘not me’ in contrast with the initial singu-
lar identification of child-mother fusion). To proceed then into the next
section, I also situate the hyper-individualized psychological (really,
‘soul-dislocating’) effects Hillman alludes to within a critical read of neo-
liberalism, in the context of object relations. Primarily, what is relevant
here is to situate neoliberalism, ecology, and dislocated self within the
concepts of Bowlby’s attachment theory (Bowlby, 1969) and Bateson’s
‘double-bind’ equation (Bateson, 1987). In simpler terms, object rela-
tions theory is understood here as the primary developmental process of
beginning to know the world. To do so in a way that is fragmented or
seen as individualized or independent of nature, it is argued here, creates
a kind of ‘ecological neurosis’ or distortion that ruptures our attachment
to the ‘ground of being,’ to the anima mundi. Jordan (2009) explores
psychodynamic theory to understand how early love relationships, object
relations, formation of self-relate to our dependence on the natural
world, and ‘how “splits” have formed between self and nature as a pro-
tection against vulnerability’ (2009, p. 26). He goes on to say that, while
there is a danger that psychodynamic theory used in this way becomes
anthropomorphic—in engaging ‘human relatedness’ as the ‘central con-
cern’ in the ecological crisis—nonetheless:
there has to be a movement between the intrapsychic understanding of

the development of self and then how this self goes about forming object
relation-ships, particularly with the environment. It is not nature itself that
needs therapy, rather the humans who inhabit it. (Jordan, 2009, p. 26)
Bowlby (1907–1990) was a psychoanalyst whose studies of infants

were based on ethological observations about imprinting in young ani-
mal offspring as an adaptive trait for safety and survival (Bowlby, 1969).
Bowlby linked early childhood disruption of attachment (maternal)
bonding with mental and behavioral problems in adult life, primarily
based on the idea that human infants come pre-wired with an innate
72 M. A. GORDON
need for continuous attachment with a primary attachment figure for the
first two years of life. In empirical studies observing separation tolerance
from the primary attachment figure, Bowlby established several ‘styles’
of insecure attachment, leading to ongoing deficits in ego stability and
relational capacity in adult life, to name but the most basic consequence.
Winnicott, the British child psychologist and object relations theorist,
outlines how children enter into the developmental stage of differentia-
tion through ‘transitional objects,’—a process that allows them to move
through the ambiguous identification of ‘me and not-me’ (Winnicott,
1971). Barrows (1995) calls this ‘shadowy area of experience’ a ‘dynamic
interpenetration between the self and something in the world’ (1995,
p. 106). However, Barrows goes on to echo Bateson’s (1987) ‘epistemo-
logical error’ critique, noting that the conceptual formation of a world
of ‘outside’ and ‘not me’ and in contrast with the interiorized notion
of a bounded self is a product of Western dualistic thought (cf. Barry,
Roszak et al., 1995; op cit.). In what she cites as a ‘new paradigm’
Barrows suggests that Winnicott’s transitional phenomena serve as a
‘permeable membrane that suggests or delineates but does not divide
us from the medium in which we exist’ (1995, pp. 106–107). It is in
this blending of subjective and objective experience and meaning-con-
struction that Barrows says ‘intersubjectivity is possible’ (Barrows, 1995,
pp. 106–107). This non-dualistic sense of an ecological self, says
Barrows, is in line with Thich Nhat Hanh’s (1995) concept of ‘interbe-
ing.’ One practical observation Barrows (1995) makes is that in psycho-
therapeutic settings, a child who has developed with this ‘ecological self’
formation is more open to considering her or his situation, psychody-
namic material, and otherwise ‘ebb and flow’ of his or her psycho-emo-
tional and relational life in an expanded (or transpersonal, transegoic)
sense of self. Barrows’ comments regarding Winnicott provide solid
ground on which to discuss Naess’ (2008) concept of the ‘ecological
self’ as a new kind of identification. First, however, a look at Bateson’s
‘double-bind’ theory will prove instructive here toward reimagining the
role of education in fostering a more ecological, relational self within this
world of psychic and ecological ‘splits’ as Jordan (2009) puts it.
Bateson’s (1987) double-bind theory places the child in a ‘no-win’
scenario. Here, the child’s instinctive attachment drive is pitted against
the overt, indifferent, or negligent (narcissistic) dominance of the paren-
tal figure. If the child is given a direct instruction (‘do what I tell you!’),
the corollary follows as such: (1) if the child complies, they have no
autonomy; (2) if the child disobeys, they are seen as disobedient,
non-compliant, and defiant. Either way, both are in deference and
dependence to the original command. Worse still, in the case of abuse
from the caregiver or guardian, the child’s instinct to seek comfort and
security through attachment overrides any rational discernment—of
which they are developmentally and socially incapable—that the caregiver
or attachment figure is the source of the abuse. As Holmes (2009) lays
out: ‘The potentially psychotic adolescent is given an approach-avoid-
ance message from his or her “schizophrenogenic” parent, thereby
triggering a psychotic response as the only possible escape from an intol-
erable demand’ (2009, p. 505). Holmes goes on to describe the ‘positive
feedback loop’ in which the child’s ‘attachment behaviours are acti-
vated, and the more he or she seeks out a secure base, the more the child
feels threatened, and so on’ (2009, p. 505). He continues to describe
the ‘bizarre dissociative manifestations of disorganized attachment’ that
result (2009, p. 505).
That this double-bind effect is reflected in our current dissociated
state of consciousness as humanity is no understatement. Rejoining
Hillman’s admonition that ‘the sickness is out there,’ we see the urgency
with which he addresses the ‘bizarre dissociative manifestations of dis-
organized attachment’ prevalent in our world: fixation on technology,
narcissistic social media addiction, unchecked growth, global wars, poi-
soning of our air, water, and soil. Indeed, neoliberalism or liquid moder-
nity places us in the gravest of double binds: that which juxtaposes our
soulful engagement with the ecology of life against our daily material
survival and competitive mode in a highly urbanized, polycentralized
distributed-self world. In relevance to family systems theory and ther-
apy, Dell (1985) comments on Bateson’s emphasis on ‘epistemological
errors’ as attempts at social control gone haywire, and which violate the
ecological holism. Specifically, says Dell (1985, p. 4):
Bateson was especially bothered by the use of power. He insisted that the
use of power to enforce control was a particularly dangerous, anti-ecologi-
cal form of “epistemological lunacy” (Bateson, 1972i, p. 487): “there is no
area in which false premises regarding the nature of the self and its relation
to others can be so surely productive of destruction and ugliness as this
area of ideas about control. (Bateson, 1972h, p. 267)
74 M. A. GORDON
The Bigger Picture: Political Subject as the ‘Child’

of the Destructive Attachment Figure
Duschinsky, Greco, and Solomon (2014) examine the influence and

problematization of attachment through Butler’s (1997) ethical lens, par-
ticularly as Butler examines the formation and manipulation of the child-
adult political subject in terms of her ‘depiction of the infant attached to
an abusive caregiver as a foundation and parallel to the position of the
adult citizen subjected to punitive cultural norms and political institutions’
(Butler, 2004, p. 224), which ‘through the lens of Foucault’s notion of
‘disciplinary power’…[ ] pins an individual to her or his identity and sets
up pressures and punishments so that they will regulate and normalize
themselves.’ With the adult citizen either compliantly fulfilling expec-
tations within a neoliberal society, or parents ‘failing’ to raise securely
attached children who thus all require intervention and further depend-
ence on the welfare state, the double bind is ever-present. As Butler sug-
gests (1997), both the child and the adult subject are ‘damned if they
do, and damned if they don’t’ in this double bind. Butler writes (2004):
‘Doubtless it seems better at that point to be enthralled with what is
impoverished or abusive than not to be enthralled at all and so to lose the
condition of one’s being and becoming’ (Butler, 2004, pp. 45–46).
To which parental figure do we turn in this double bind if the choice
is non-attachment (non-existence) or impoverished attachment (neglect,
abuse, violence)? To which corner of the planet do we evade these dis-
ciplinary self-regulating relations of power to find some practice of free-
dom? As we draw out further afield, we see too that the ‘self’ is not only
politically and socially alienated, but that the dislocated self is internally
and ecologically isolated and adrift. Simon Fraser University emer-
itus professor Bruce Alexander (2001) studied the ‘roots of addiction’
in this regard in his infamous ‘rat park’ experiment correlating deficits
in socialization with drug dependency and found that social and eco-
logical isolation was the most predictable and potent driver of addic-
tive behavior, and thus in its reversal, in healing addiction. If we look
at the catastrophic existential threats of the twentieth century—world
wars, globalization, nuclear proliferation—we see the collateral trau-
matic effects of social and psychic isolation and fragmentation. Thus,
as we move from the ‘micro’ of the classroom to the ‘macro’ of global
issues, we see an interrelation between the social and psychological
effects of the ‘epistemological errors’ and ‘lunacy’ of power corruption

to which Bateson raises the alarm—the maladaptation away from ecolog-
ical wholeness to vicious hierarchy. Truly, as Hillman (1992) suggests,
the ‘sickness is out there’—the ‘out there’ being in how these ‘anti-eco-
logical’ institutions and processes of power-over manifest from the
military-industrial complex to the culture of our classrooms. Despair, dis-
empowerment and a dismal outlook pervade the micro and macro. As
Macy (1996) warns, this may be the first time in general, given the threat
of ecocide, nuclear proliferation and so on, when ‘the loss of certainty
that there will be a future is the pivotal psychological reality of our time’
(1996, p. 174).
Healing and the Ecological Self

What, following Bateson, might we turn to as a new epistemology and
more ecological orientation, specifically in pedagogical practice? Bateson,
as Rollo May points out in Brockman (1977), lays out how each of us
‘make’ our world contextually—that is, through the preconceptions,
biases, premises, and interpretations of our own interpretations, selec-
tively avoiding or blocking those that are distressing. As May comments,
this for Bateson is the very heart of one’s contextual experience:
What must always be considered is the surrounding world, the gestalt, the
environment; this for Bateson is crucial to the understanding of the devel-
opment and behavior of the organism. Survival for the organism consists in
meeting the challenges set by the world in which it finds itself. (Brockman,
1977, p. 84)
The ‘ecological self’ itself is a term, along with ‘deep ecology’ attrib-
uted to philosopher Arne Naess. As Bragg (1996) lays out, Naess’ defi-
nition of the ecological self is transpersonal, which as Maslow defines it
is ‘a sense of self that extends beyond one’s egoic, biographic, or per-
sonal sense of self’ (Maslow, cited in Bragg, 1996, p. 95). Naess outlines
the problem of identification of the ‘I’ (ego) with our inhabited physical
body, preferring to say that one can instead identify with the ‘ecological
self,’ defining ‘identification’ as ‘a spontaneous, non-rational…process
through which the interest or interests of another being are reacted to as
our own interest or interests’ (as cited in Bragg, 1996, p. 95).
76 M. A. GORDON
From ‘Ecological Self’ to an ‘Epistemology of Love’

Rather than a discursion into social theory alone or a vision of ecopsy-
chology as Naess’ ecosophy, the matter at hand is how to envision the
educator’s role and benefit as a healer in a ‘soul-ensnared,’ anima mundi
world. In line with Naess, Freire (2000), although much more motivated
by social and political liberation, approaches a revolutionary pedagogy as
one that is entirely relational in its ‘identification’ with praxis (and prac-
titioner). Freire’s logic here is that all engagement is predicated on word
(dialogue) from which one must proceed in action (critical awareness
and reflection) and an inherently relational ethic (love).
No matter where the oppressed are found, the act of love is com-
mitment to their cause—the cause of liberation. And this commitment,
because it is loving, is dialogical. As an act of bravery, love cannot be sen-
timental; as an act of freedom, it must not serve as a pretext for manipu-
lation. It must generate other acts of freedom; otherwise, it is not love.
Only by abolishing the situation of oppression is it possible to restore the
love which that situation made impossible. If I do not love the world—if
I do not love life—if I do not love people—I cannot enter into dialogue.
(Freire, 2000, p. 90)
In the broader mission of pedagogy at large, Zajonc (2006b) calls for an
‘epistemology of love,’ ‘which emphasizes a form of inquiry that supports
close engagement and leads to student transformation and insight’ (2006a,
p. 1742). Zajonc contends that ‘our search for individual identity has the
accompanying downside that we deidentify with other people, groups, and
nature’ (p. 1745). Later, conjecturing that educational pursuits that foster
an individual path of (over) intellectualization further ‘deidentifies’ us, and
that: ‘In a world beset with conflicts, internal and external, isn’t it of equal
if not greater importance to balance the sharpening of our intellects with
the systematic cultivation of our hearts?’ (2006a, p. 1744).
Palmer in Zajonc (2006b) notes that ‘every way of knowing becomes
a way of living, every epistemology becomes an ethic’ in Zajonc (2006b,
p. 1744), adding that ‘current epistemology has spawned an associated
ethic of violence.’ In contrast, Zajonc (2006b) advocates ‘contemplative
pedagogies’ as a restorative antidote to such violence, in that: ‘contempla-
tive practice can become contemplative inquiry, which is the practice of an
epistemology of love’ (2006b, p. 1744). Among the numerous principles
he lays out for such a contemplative epistemology/practice (vulnerabil-
ity, transformation, respect, gentleness, intimacy, participation, insight),
Zajonc highlights ‘education as formation.’ This is not simply ‘education

as formation’ unto the individualized self, but again, as a contemplative,
socially engaged self, which in this dissertation is situated not only within
a ‘horizon of significance,’ but as Shaner (1985) calls it from an East
Asian ontological view, the ‘horizon in toto.’ (Shaner, 1985, p. 48)
Bauman (2000) and Hillman (1990) share a similar psychological cri-
tique of what Bauman (2000) calls ‘liquid modernity,’ advanced capital-
ism and consumer society, and the technological age, respectively—that
is, that education has a vital role in returning a more natural ontogenic
process through interrelatedness. For Bauman (2000), this is evident
in the ‘primitive accumulation’ rampant in free market consumer soci-
ety. Regarding a new hermeneutic approach to living, however, it is
Hillman’s call to anima mundi through aesthesis, Eros, and imagina-
tion (versus infantile fantasy) that speaks most directly to the project of
rejoining the world.
The Aesthetic of Ecology

Hillman’s regard for the anima mundi should not be mistaken as lim-
ited to what is exclusively ‘natural world.’ Rather, he quite eloquently
addresses the relationship with the world in all its presentation, includ-
ing cityscapes, and through aesthetics—that is, how beauty makes itself
known to mythical Psyche’s4 arising from the chaos from which Eros
initially presents itself. This is Hillman’s recounting of the ‘tortur-
ous’ relationship of mythical Psyche and Eros (1990). Why is this rele-
vant here? Apart from the Neoplatonist influences on depth psychology,
Hillman links psychotherapy and teaching with the shared task of help-
ing reconcile the very relationship between Eros and Psyche, between
the chaos of the world, and the variants of separateness in the formation
of self and one’s way of moving through the world. ‘Eros is tortured
by its own principle, fire,’ he writes (1990, p. 269). ‘It burns others;
and it burns alone when cut off from psyche, that is, when it is with-
out hope or energy, loveless, inconsolable. Their separation is the split
we experience: while Eros burns, psyche figures out, does its duties,
depressed.’ Their reconciliation, Hillman says, is possible through psy-
choanalytic dream work, which speaks to a kind of imaginal love extant
in the psychoanalytic relationship There is, he says, ‘a feeling of being
loved by the images’ (1990, p. 282) in dream work, and asks of therapy,
‘Is this Platonic love?’ (1990, p. 282). Because of its ability to temper the
78 M. A. GORDON
tension between Eros and Psyche, Hillman says, ‘Therefore, therapy is

love of soul. The teaching and healing therapist—if we use the Socratic-
Platonic model of philosopher who teaches and heals—is on the same
plane as being the lover; both take their origins from the same primordial
impulse behind their seeking (Phaedrus, 248D)’ (p. 282).
Through a ‘creative intelligence,’ Hillman says, ‘[l]ove not only finds
a way, it also leads the way as psychopompos5 and is, inherently, the
“way” itself. Seeking psychological connections by means of Eros is the
way of therapy as soul-making’ (1990, p. 282). While this is Hillman’s
passionate description of dream work analysis, it equally applies in teach-
ing-as-healing. That is, teachers can model this kind of Platonic love to
help reconcile Eros and psyche in the becoming-self, of students.
Looking back over this essay, it might seem logical—even appealing—
to locate our psychological woundedness, and thus the woundedness of
the world-soul as rooted in psychopathology. In other words, given the
right secure attachment environment and path to healthy psychodevelop-
ment, it would seem human beings would preternaturally have a more
harmonious relationship to the (natural) world. But as Hillman (1992)
argues, this falls flat, as does a merely ‘politicized’ reading of ecological
breakdown. Rather, as Hillman and Bateson’s (1987) work suggests, the
problem is rooted in a psychoideological (or ontological) rift.
Freud’s (1922) deterministic theory suggested that the infant drives
of Eros (seeking unlimited satisfaction of want via the pleasure princi-
ple) and Thanatos (the permanent relief of the need to seek pleasure;
the nirvana principle) are innate. Regardless, one could argue that the
psycho-ontological pathology seen in the disconnection from the entire
ecology of life represents an existentially rooted crisis. As Winnicott sug-
gests (1960), critical to the ‘holding’ phase of infant-parent attachment
is the inchoate psychobiological sense of being protected from the fear
that ‘not being held’ means to ‘fall forever’ or, if making impact to shat-
ter completely. This is the early infant recognition of safety experienced
through limits. At the same time, as the child evolves out of narcissis-
tic dependency through individuation, it is imperative that its newfound
sense of autonomous personality is balanced with a sense of intercon-
nectedness. Hillman (1990) emphasizes that this stage transitions the
child from omnipotence fantasy—to imagination: ‘To the imagination,
the world itself is a mother, a great mother. We are nestled in its lan-
guage, held by its institutions, nourished by its things’ (1990, p. 169).
A psychopath, he continues, never emerges from the narcissistic stage,

and ‘cannot imagine the other’ (1990, p. 170). They are, he says:
far less able to imagine the other beyond a fantasy of usefulness, the other
as a true interiority with his or her needs, intentions or feelings. “An edu-
cation that in any ways neglects imagination is an education into psychopa-
thy. It is an education that results in a sociopathic society of manipulations.
(1990, p. 171)
This notion of existential ‘limits’ ripples throughout philosophy as

it regards human psyche and civilization. Though he has been strongly
criticized for oversimplifying animal consciousness, Freire (2000) sug-
gests that ‘[h]umans…because they are aware of themselves and thus
of the world—because they are conscious beings—exist in a dialectical
relationship between the determination of limits and their own free-
dom’ (2000, p. 99). From the existential, phenomenological point of
view, Heidegger (2010) prioritized human finitude or finite-limited
consciousness in terms of the inevitable horizon of death, and ‘being-
until-death.’ Marcuse (1970), commenting on Freud’s Civilization and
Its Discontents, writes that: ‘The conflict between Eros and the death
instinct belongs to the innermost essence of the development of civili-
zation, as long as it occurs in forms that “depend upon the past.” ’ (1970,
p. 26). This is to say that the dominance of the ‘archaic powers’ of his-
tory is a ‘return of the repressed’ occurring at ‘fearful turning points
of history’ (Marcuse, 1970). Marcuse (1987) goes on to propose that
Freud’s theorization of Eros echoes Plato’s original concept, in that
Eros isn’t polarized against Thanatos or death instinct merely as the
drive for pleasure, but as the drive toward life itself or the ‘essence of
being’ (1987, p. 125). Marcuse warns that: ‘Eros is being absorbed into
Logos, and Logos is reason which subdues the instincts’ (1987, p. 126).
Marcuse here signals for a reclaiming of the deeper sense of Eros, where
‘[t]he insights contained in the metaphysical notion of Eros were driven
underground’ (1987, p. 126). Marcuse further comments: ‘They sur-
vived, in eschatological distortion, in many heretic movements, in the
hedonistic philosophy. Their history has still to be written - as has the
history of the transformation of Eros in Agape’ (1987, p. 126).
As a protégé of Freire and his radical notion of love-as-dialogue,
hooks (1994) invokes the inculcation of Eros in education. hooks
80 M. A. GORDON
embraces Buddhist monk and teacher Thich Nhat Hanh’s idea of

‘teacher as healer,’ where pedagogy serves in the wholeness of mind,
body, spirit ‘striving not just for knowledge in books, but knowledge
about how to live in the world’ (1994, p. 14). ‘Engaged pedagogy’
for hooks starts with the self-care and self-actualization of the teacher,
‘if they are to teach in a manner that empowers students.’ Here, hooks
calls for a ‘vision of liberatory education that connects the will to know
with the will to become’ (1994, pp. 18–19). Learning, as such, must be
rooted in passion, to which hooks invokes the classical notion of Eros as a
‘motivating force’ in the classroom (1994, pp. 18–19).
Speaking to the ‘hidden curriculum’ of education (Illich, 1971),
Palmer (1993) concurs with Hillman that the schism between the ‘inner’
and ‘outer’ reality leads to psychopathology. ‘Conventional education
aims not to locate and understand the self in the world, but to get it out
of the way’ (Palmer, 1993, p. 35). Rather, he says, ‘Truth requires the
knower to become interdependent with the known…We find truth by
pledging our troth, and knowing becomes a union of separated beings
whose primary bond is not of logic but of love’ (Palmer, 1993, p. 32).
How, then, do we begin to put this into practice, to as it were embody
this ‘epistemology of love,’ as Zajonc calls it? Van Manen (2013) sug-
gests that pedagogy itself requires the experience of contact, that there
can be no distinction between what one intends in teaching and what
students truly experience in the ecology of the classroom. ‘Sometimes,
teachers say one thing but do another,’ writes Van Manen, and ‘It is one
thing to know that every student needs to feel respected, but what if
the body language, the tone of voice, or the eyes of the teacher do not
express such willingness to respect?’ (2013, p. 15). His central point is
this: ‘The teacher touches the student with his or her voice, eyes, ges-
tures, and presence. To say it more pointedly: a real teacher touches the
students with his or her being and mind’ (2013, p. 22).
A ‘Depth Pedagogy’: the ‘Dreaming’ Learner

Thus, we see through Freire (2000), Zajonc (2006a, 2006b), Palmer
(1993), and hooks (1994) a theme that might be best summarized as the
primary bond between teachers and learners, nurtured in the held free space
of education as co-development, to explore the soulfulness of the world in a
loving and interdependent way. If we return for a moment to Hillman’s
conjecture in the introduction regarding depth psychology, it is possible
to substitute pedagogy in its place:
[A]ll pedagogy is by definition a depth pedagogy, first because it assumes

an inside intimacy to learning (moods, reflections, fantasies, feelings,
images, thoughts) and second, because the soul, ever since Heraclitus
twenty-five hundred years ago, has been defined as immeasurably deep and
unlocatable. (Roszak et al., 1995, p. xviii)
Hillman’s (1998) emphasis on the psychoanalytic relationship as a

place of ‘Platonic love’ for the imaginal process of dream work not only
has parallels for pedagogy, it also has its roots in learning. Phillips (1998)
explores the relationship between dream work and learning, pointing
out that Winnicott (cited in Phillips, 1998) presents two stages of learn-
ing for students in psychology: First, they learn ‘what is being taught’
about psychology; which Phillips says in the Freudian sense may be called
identification with the subject, or in Winnicott’s terms, compliance; sec-
ondly, they ‘begin to wonder’ about whether what is being taught is real
or true for them. Here, says Winnicott, ‘teaching begins to separate out
from the other as something that just can’t be learnt. It has to be felt as
real, or else it is irritating, or even maddening’ (cited in Phillips, 1998, p.
409). As Phillips generalizes from this:
One implication is that people can learn but they can’t be taught; or at
least, they can’t be taught anything of real significance. And that is partly
because people can never know beforehand, neither can their teachers,
exactly what is of personal significance—that is, what each will find signifi-
cant. (1998, p. 409)
Essentially, Phillips points to Freud’s notion that learning begins

through natural sexual curiosity in children, for which they foray into
learning outside the classroom and through their bodily explorations.
One could almost say, their curiosity IS their sexuality. And yet it is,
in Freud’s view, their very curiosity about sex that creates a fundamen-
tal conflict with what he calls the ‘ideals of education.’ Both what the
children want to know, and how they go about learning it, puts them at
odds with the adult world (Phillips, 1998, p. 411).
Another double bind indeed. Coming back to the macro implica-
tions within this essay, I call my reader’s attention to Phillips’ linking
of Freud’s admitted oversimplification about the ‘repressiveness’ of the
adult world to the bigger picture of education in life. From this, he sug-
gests the idea of nurturing the ‘dreaming self’ in the process of ‘com-
ing into oneself’ (returning again to psychodynamic or object relations
theory):
82 M. A. GORDON
Children dream, but adults want to teach them; children know what inter-
ests them, but adults want them educated.
This demonization of the adult world as exclusively repressive is, of

course, an oversimplification. But by dramatizing in this way a war
between curiosity and education Freud is describing his version of
Romanticism, of what he will much later call civilization and its discon-
tents. And by doing it in this way—by taking seriously the child’s unoffi-
cial education of sexual research—Freud can get us to ask an interesting
question: What would education look like if we took dreaming and chil-
dren’s sexual curiosity as the model for teaching and learning? What
would our interest in things and people be like if we thought of our
adult selves as more like dreamers and children, as Freud describes them?
(Phillips, 1998, p. 411).
Final Thoughts: Multiplicity of Learning Selves

in the Anima Mundi
This dreaming self then, in a sense, situates the ‘liquid’ self of moder-
nity as the ‘fluid self,’ the ‘self-becoming,’ and the self within the ‘world
soul-ensnared.’ The ‘ecological self,’ as defined by Naess (2008), takes
on greater import as the ‘widened and deepened’ self that connects, as
Palmer says, interdependently, with nature itself. Naess too references
connection through Eros—though here as:
the immense variety of sources of joy…where part of the joy stems from
the consciousness of our intimate relation to something bigger than our
ego, something that has endured through millions of years and is worth of
continued life for millions of years. The requisite care flows naturally if the
self is widened and deepened so that protection of free nature is felt and
conceived as protection of ourselves. (2008, p. 93)
Naess (2008) wisely remarks, in contrast with hardcore political activ-

ism, that:
we more easily change through encouragement and through a deepened

perception of reality and our own self. That is, deepened realism…It is
more a question of community therapy than community science: healing
our relations to the widest community, that of all living beings. (2008,
p. 93)
The call for an ‘epistemology’ of love requires no less than a reawak-

ening of our erotic, life-affirming, and ontologically whole relationship
with the anima mundi. Naess’ statement above about ‘community ther-
apy’ suggests that pedagogy has a fundamental role in healing our false
epistemological split from nature, and that the repair is embedded in
heightened attunement to interdependence in all relationships.
Notes
1. This references the crimes against humanity articulated in the decisions of
the Nuremberg and Tokyo International Military Tribunals in World War
II, differentiating between a ‘crime of commission’ (e.g., perpetration) and
a ‘crime of omission’ (passively allowing a crime to occur).
2. This continually arises in public discourse as the false dichotomy of ‘jobs vs
the environment,’ where it is suggested economics are somehow antitheti-
cal to ecological balance.
3. Shepard’s (1998) brilliant treatise on this, Nature and Madness, explores
this move from tribal, hunter-gatherer small-scale ecologies to mass
agrarianism and modern industrial society as epochal shifts. Shepard dis-
tinguishes these epochal shifts as representing an overarching arrested
development, in terms of our maladaptation away from nature as our pri-
mary figure of attachment and social organization.
4. Here, Psyche and Eros are referenced in classical Platonic form
5. A ‘conductor of souls’ to the afterworld, from myths of Hermes to Anubis.
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PART II
An Intersubjective View of Knowing

and Being
Illustration II.1 Ki, “universe; life force”

CHAPTER 3
Awakening to Wholeness:
Aikido as an Embodied Praxis
of Intersubjectivity
Introduction
This essay looks at intersubjectivity by way of a distinction between ‘first
person’ contemplative practice (e.g., mindfulness meditation) and ‘second
person’ practice (in this case, the Japanese defensive art of Aikido). The
essay examines a paradoxical aspect of intersubjectivity and relational
practices such that a dualistic epistemological view of subject-object pre-
sents a ‘double-bind’ regarding the aspirational aim of Buddhist practice
as fostering a worldview and relationality as interdependence. This essay
draws on the author’s lifetime experience in Aikido, a unique ‘mind-body’
art that teaches practitioners to ‘blend’ and ‘harmonize’ their movement
and ki (‘life force’) with the ki of their attacker. Aikido is rooted in a
nondual worldview, cultivating interdependence through the taking up
embodied ‘second-person’ practice for daily life. Through this embod-
ied attunement, Aikido practitioners experientially develop a somatic
and spiritual understanding that their own ki and that of universal ki
(Cosmos) are inseparable.
A version of this chapter is published elsewhere as: Gordon, Michael A. (2019).

Awakening to wholeness: Aikido as embodied praxis of intersubjectivity.
In H. Bai, O. Gunnlaugson, E. Sarath, & C. Scott (Eds.), The intersubjective
turn: Practical approaches to contemplative learning and inquiry across disciplines.
New York, NY: State University of New York Press.

90 M. A. GORDON
In April 1993, as a spiritual seeker in my mid-twenties, I joined an

Aikido club in the east end of Vancouver, Canada—a decision that
would radically reshape the course of my life. Aikido, known as the ‘Art
of Peace’ (ai = harmony; ki = universe, spirit, love; do = path or way), is
known as a defensive art that originated in Japan. Aikido teaches one to
blend with an attacker’s movements, specifically the attacker’s ki (‘life
force’ or ‘energy’). The class I found and joined was in the teaching style
of Ki Aikido. Ki Aikido has as its specific study focus the cultivation of
ki through mind-body unification, an approach which distinguishes itself
from the mainstream of Aikido curriculum and pedagogy. In focusing
on developing increased ki-sensitivity and ki-extension or power as the
foundation of training, Ki Aikido has students integrate this heightened,
experiential, kinesthetic and bioenergetic ki development into the tradi-
tional Aikido exercises, aiming at generalizing these ‘principles of mind-
body coordination’ throughout daily life.
Having spent a lifetime in Aikido, I have found this so-called ‘art of
peace’ to be complex and even paradoxical at its core—one that reflects
the double bind of intersubjectivity. This double bind may be expressed
thus: how can dualistic consciousness of subject-object dichotomy apply
itself to resolving human conflicts while inherently operating from a
position of dualism that creates such conflict in the first place? Put yet
another way, if one inhabits a dualistic consciousness, then by the logic
of such consciousness, one cannot be intersubjective, and hence, one
cannot practice blending or harmonizing with the ki of another being.
This paradox dissolves when we understand Aikido as a practice of free-
dom,1 one that transforms subjectivity from that of the dualistic mind-
heart (mind-heart = kokoro in Japanese) to that of nondual kokoro.
Through such practice of freedom, we can shift consciousness and thus
our habitual interactions toward peaceful dialogic interconnectedness,
which is true intersubjectivity. This essay explores this pedagogical trans-
formative process of Aikido in depth, wherein the nature of contempla-
tive intersubjectivity is illuminated. Through a series of vignettes and
explication, I will present Aikido as a contemplative way of being and
living that demands an intersubjective, second-person model of engage-
ment. This model is based on the view of cosmos as interdependent
relationality.
The fluid motional engagement in intersubjectivity that Aikido
develops is rooted in the kind of localized learning and ‘tensional and
3 AWAKENING TO WHOLENESS: AIKIDO … 91
ethical’ praxis put forward by Stewart and Zediker (2000). Addressing

the broadened use of the term ‘dialogic’ and the risk of the term being
weakened by encompassing ‘all human meaning-making,’ Stewart and
Zediker (2000) offer a distinction between the descriptive approach to
dialogue and ‘a prescriptive understanding of dialogue as tensional, sit-
uationally accomplished, and inherently ethical’ (p. 224). As an aside,
Stewart and Zediker’s prescriptive model of dialogic practice is based on
an Aristotelian distinction between poesis and praxis. In this sense, Aikido
can be seen similarly as a prescriptive kind of intersubjectivity—one
rooted in what is situationally and relationally present (Gordon, 2016).2
As I will show in the course of this essay, Aikido shifts the practitioner
not only into a mind-body unity of nondual consciousness, but also into
the realm of full temporal-spatial and global interdependence, whereby
one may realize and manifest through the self the nature of the cosmos
as interdependent relationality (Illustration 3.1).
Illustration 3.1 Senshin, “purify heart-mind; reform one’s self”

92 M. A. GORDON
Intersubjectivity Through Aikido

Aikido is a Japanese defensive art developed by founder Morihei Ueshiba
(b. 1883, d. 1969). From its Shinto spiritual underpinnings, Aikido
integrates many other martial forms, such as jiujutsu, kenjutsu (sword),
comprising a modern form of budo or warriorship. However, in its most
popularized and widely adapted form, Aikido represents the culmination
of spiritual awakening of the founder through his epiphany about non-
dual existence, non-resistance, and the realization of inseparability from
the cosmos.
The word aikido is self-revealing and descriptive. AI can be translated
as ‘harmony’ or ‘to blend’; KI represents life force, the Universe itself,
or ‘universal love;’ DO means ‘way’ or ‘path.’ Thus, the art represents a
way of harmonizing one’s self with all of creation; the cultivation/purifica-
tion of oneself so as to live in non-resistant interdependence with all living
beings. Much like satori or enlightenment achieved in Zen meditation,
where one’s ‘bare attention’ leads to the ‘pure experience’ that Nishida
describes (Yusa, 1997), Aikido involves a kind of ‘stripping away’ of self-
other separation, of self-defence, and provides a spiritual approach that
suffuses the partner training with an ethos of mutual liberation, inter-
dependence, and flowing intersubjectivity. Beyond any anachronistic set-
ting in budo and samurai culture, Aikido is a thoroughly modern art that
emerged in its full form after the devastation Japan suffered in WWII.
Designated when the founder described it as the ‘Art of Peace,’ Aikido
itself was born of founder Morihei Ueshiba’s spiritual epiphany through
not only mind-body unification but also mind-cosmos unification: ‘I am
the Universe!’3
Aikido, while conventionally regarded as an art of tactical self-defence,
is a dynamic, relational, and experiential model of contemplative aware-
ness-in-action. It offers practitioners across all walks of life a practical,
nuanced, and adaptive approach to cultivating self-actualization in daily
life through an embodied practice of non-resistance to conflict, devel-
oped reflexively and progressively through emergent and nonreactive
human responsiveness. As such, the proposal here is that Aikido repre-
sents a second-person model for interrelationality, intersubjectivity, con-
templative education, and daily life.4
As regards second-person of intersubjectivity, which presents an
‘inter-space’ between first-person (the constructed self) or third person
(the constructed other), Yuasa (1987), commenting on Tetsuro, asks:
“What does it mean to exist in betweenness (aidagara)?”5 What Yuasa is

addressing here is not merely a phenomenological problem but a method-
ological, even an ethical, one; in an increasingly complex and competitive
world, we need relational, collaborative, and dialogic approaches in order
to move beyond mindfulness-based practices that risk abetting socially
constructed patterns of materialism, exploitation, privilege or narcissistic
self-absorption.6 Cultivation of ‘inner’ traits of introspection, emotional
labelling and self-regulation, and stress reduction—while highly benefi-
cial as interventions against self-harm or one’s own outward reactivity—
doesn’t necessarily engage the relational aspect of conflict or imbalances
of power that permeate the human world and runs the risk of reinforcing
a subjectivist first-person interiority.
What takes contemplative practice from an independent to an interde-
pendent worldview is groundedness in intersubjectivity. In Buddhism, for
example, meditation is an experiential method of self-inquiry in which
one observes the illusory ego-construct of separateness, with the ultimate
aim of releasing one’s self from this illusion. Yet, meditators engaged in
introspection of sitting meditation often end up reinforcing the very illu-
sion the meditator is trying to overcome. Aikido as an intersubjective and
moving contemplative art has a distinctive advantage in achieving the
transcendence of illusion of the singular self.
Though deeply rooted in metaphysical underpinnings, namely, the
animism of Shinto, or kannagara no michi, ‘the continuous way of the
gods,’ Aikido is Morihei Ueshiba’s (1883–1969) expression of budo
principles (historically, Samurai warriorship codes). In Ueshiba’s words,
‘True budo is the loving protection of all beings with a spirit of reconcil-
iation. Reconciliation means to allow the completion of everyone’s mis-
sion’ (Ueshiba, 1992, pp. 179–180). Thus, much like the prescription of
mindfulness meditation in Buddhism as a means to embracing principles
of interdependence through empathy, Aikido can be seen as the transfor-
mation of self, through purification (misogi) and training (shugyo), from
inner aggression (victory over one’s ‘own’ aggression) toward an embod-
ied spirit of interdependence and compassion. As such, it holds much
in common with enlightened conduct and ‘right living’ through the
Eightfold Noble Path laid out in Siddhartha Gautama Buddha’s initial
teachings. The Eightfold Noble Path is the ‘fruition’ component of the
so-called threefold logic of Buddhism (ground, path, fruition), and fol-
lows forth from the Buddha’s fundamental precepts of The Four Noble
Truths. The logic in both of these foundational Buddhist teachings is
94 M. A. GORDON
that: (a) suffering is universal and is caused by the clinging to pleasure

and aversion of pain (ground); (b) that there is a way out, and that way is
through the practice of meditation (path); and (c) that through ‘rightful’
thought, action, speech, and ethical conduct, one participates in the lib-
eration of all beings from further suffering (path).
How, though, does the above constitute a contemplative aware-
ness-in-action related to intersubjectivity? Notwithstanding the deeply
rooted spiritual or metaphysical essence of Ueshiba’s teachings of the
‘way’ of Aikido, Aikido can be seen as a transegoic or transpersonal praxis
situated in both the intrapsychic and interpsychic, that is, in the face of
real or perceived threat when we encounter the other. In the context of
Buddhist contemplative practice of mindful meditation, this encounter
can be understood as meta-awareness of one’s reactivity, leading to nat-
urally arising wisdom (prajna) or ‘discriminating awareness’ and ‘skilful
means’ (upaya) (Wallace, 2001). In Aikido, with its partner practice of
simulated combat encounter, one’s self-awareness is actively usurped
from resting in a first-person orientation and reaches out toward and
engages with another’s subjectivity through what can be described as
ki-joining. (I illustrate this concept of ki-joining in a vignette below.)
However, Aikido demonstrates at an experiential level that intersub-
jectivity still connotes a dualistic view, a separateness of being between
two subjective cognizers. The resolution of conflict through the join-
ing of ki and the harmonization of this dualistic notion is at the heart of
Aikido, wherein the subjects-entering-subjectivity are reunited within a
continuous ontical and phenomenal field of conscious awareness. It is in
this field of consciousness that self/Other and inner/outer dichotomy—
and indeed conceptualization of such—is dissolved into liminality and
becomes integrated into wholeness. This ontical ground and the ‘action’
of this harmonization in Aikido is love (Ueshiba, 1992). Below, I give a
phenomenological illustration of the aforementioned principles.
Vignette #1: Harmonizing with The Universe
“Think here,” my practice partner instructs, touching the top of my
hand near my thumb; my arm is poised confidently outward as if gestur-
ing a handshake. With steady movement upwards from below my wrist,
and light backpressure with his other hand atop my elbow crease, my
partner unhesitatingly and easily folds my arm and outstretched hand up
toward my shoulder.
“Now,” he instructs, ‘extend your mind, out your fingertips.’ Without

effort, as he tests toward my shoulder, my outstretched arm—with light,
natural and relaxed posture—remains unchanged. I have not exerted any
greater effort, apart from directing my mind/body to extend out in an
unbroken connection to the entire universe.
This exercise, somewhat misleadingly named ‘unbendable arm,’
is more aptly a demonstration of the principle of ‘immovable mind’
(fudoshin, in Japanese) that results from the joining of self with univer-
sal ki. Students of Aikido experience, by connecting their mind/body
in an unbroken way with the infinitude of universal ki, that they are in
fact ‘immovable.’ As we shall explore later, the systematic pedagogy of
Ki Aikido provides multiple ways for students to experientially embody
these principles for daily life.
By learning to calm one’s self and to time a seamless blending of
one’s movement with an oncoming attacker, the power, intent, and ulti-
mate completion of the aggression are neutralized in a spirit of protec-
tion for both nage (defender) and uke (attacker). This harmonization
of opposites is expressed in Aikido terms as musubi, de-ai, and ma-ai
(Saotome, 1993). These terms warrant explication and much closer
exploration.
Musubi
To paraphrase Aikido master teacher, Mitsugi Saotome, musubi princi-
ple is at the ‘heart of aikido.’ It is translated into English as ‘unity’ or
‘harmonious interaction,’ and essentially refers to the attuned commu-
nication and connection between one and one’s partner in and through
Aikido training (Saotome, 1989). As Saotome (1989) explains:
In practice, musubi means the ability to blend, both physically and men-
tally, with the movement and energy of your partner. Musubi is the
study of good communication. In any interaction between people, com-
munication exists, whether acknowledged or not. It is up to the partici-
pants in the interaction to determine whether the communication will
be productive or useless, friendly or hostile, true or inaccurate. Musubi,
as it is refined, can mean the ability to control and alter interaction,
changing a hostile approach to a healthy encounter or an attack into a
handshake. (p. 9)
96 M. A. GORDON
Saotome elaborates that musubi is both a principle of learning and

teaching, and that the art must be taught with the same principle as
it espouses. Ultimately, he says, it expresses a spiritual discipline of
self-refinement:
Musubi is both a method of learning and the goal of study. Musubi, in

its ultimate refinement, relates to the achievement of a sense of universal
harmony and, in technique, the ability to control encounters for the good.
But can such ability be achieved by forcing, coercing, or frightening a per-
son into learning it? No. Musubi must be taught and studied according
to the principles it exemplifies so that the Aikido student’s consciousness
may be refined along with his physical movement. Musubi must be taught
through good interaction and firm but kindly guidance. (1989, p. 9)
In the context of intersubjectivity, musubi in Aikido is akin to being

highly sensitized to the ki of your partner and relates to the Ki Aikido
principle of ‘know your partner’s mind’ and ‘respect your partner’s ki.’
De-ai and Ma-ai
In accordance with the principle of musubi, which expresses the inter-
connectedness and, most importantly, the blending of one’s movement
and energy through Aiki, de-ai (correct timing) and ma-ai (respectful,
harmonious distance) are vital components in Aikido training. It is criti-
cal to distinguish between blending with one’s attacker/partner through
aiki (harmonization with universe, restoring order, oneness) and merging
with the attack. The latter implies a kind of convergence or absorption of
the partner’s ki. To some extent, at least tactically, this is visibly true—
one’s calmness and non-resistant blending allow nage to neutralize or
dissipate one’s opponent’s energy. However, true to its origins in budo
(particularly kendo, or sword training), respectful and proper harmonious
distance (ma-ai) is integral for mutual protection. Tactically speaking,
ma-ai means not allowing the attack to enter and occupy one’s spherical
center; and de-ai refers to the correct timing in order to fulfill musubi
(blending) and harmonious connection with one’s partner. The implica-
tions for this training as a metaphor for daily life lived in intersubjectivity
are at the heart of Aikido as a ‘path of love,’ and are further explicated
and emphasized in the pedagogy and praxis of Ki Aikido.
Aikido thus represents a praxis or path moving beyond mere conflict
resolution to one of harmony through nondual awareness, and with
what modern Japanese philosopher Kitaro Nishida describes as ‘pure

experience.’7 This kind of pre-reflective immediacy to experience, within
a context of non-dual ontology, is pivotal to Ueshiba’s vision of Aikido.
As such, it offers invaluable insight and methodologies based on inter-
dependence and cooperation that can be adapted to other pedagogical
practices toward fostering intersubjective contemplative learning. In
the next section, I take a close philosophical look at the experience of
intersubjectivity.
Practice as Intersubjective Awareness

Contemplative Eastern traditions such as Buddhism establish enlighten-
ment, here understood as bodhicitta, or ‘awakened heart,’ not as a the-
oretically knowable Truth, but as an empirically accomplishable goal:
one that is cultivated through experiential path of knowing, doing, and
being. A contemplative practice that gains us ‘oneness of body-mind’
(e.g., Aikido, yoga) will invariably lead one to encounter habitual pat-
terns of embodied emotions, thought, and (re)action. Buddhist dis-
course describes such psychosocial patterns as conditioning. Conditioned
psychosocial patterns are in the way of our being authentically intersub-
jective. These patterns lock us into the egoic self and prevent us from
looking out and opening to the emergent reality of another being or
other beings with whom we can practice intersubjectivity. To practice
is to engage with one’s conditioned nature, to recondition and re-enact
(Varela, Thompson, & Rosch, 1991), re-engage, repotentiate, and rein-
habit the lifeworld as a fully present interrelational being.
Aikido, much like mindfulness mediation, is a practice for reconcilia-
tion between the dualistic Self (relative truth, in ‘two-truths’ theory) and
the egoless Self (absolute truth)8 beyond dialectical reflection, through
embodied and enacted engagement with Other in intersubjective connec-
tion, that is, in the ‘betweenness’ (aidagara) of spatial-Basho. Basho or
topos (Nishida, in Yusa, 1997) here isn’t invoked merely to address the
so-called ‘explanatory gap’ between cognitive science and phenomenol-
ogy. Rather, in the context of Aikido and its cosmological/ontological
view of universal existence, Basho is a lived-world of energetic field of
non-duality. This is central to understanding the core of Aikido’s teach-
ings, beyond culturally rooted religiosity or mysticism. What occurs in
the intersubjective field in moments of encounter, when Ueshiba sug-
gests that an attack is over before it has begun, is that one who has
98 M. A. GORDON
vanquished aggressiveness and a fighting mind (e.g. separateness of self/

Other) within one’s self has already defeated the attacker? When a nage
(the attacked) is able to still himself or herself and receive the attack
without resistance in a spirit of harmony, there is, in effect, nothing to
attack—the uke (the attacker) is confronted with his own aggressive
intent-in-action, and shifts from an object relation with ‘an enemy,’ to
being received and thus protected from himself.
As Yuasa (1987), in his chapter on Japanese philosopher Tetsuro
Watsuji, asks: ‘What does it mean to exist in betweenness (aidagara)?’
What Yuasa is addressing here is not merely a phenomenological prob-
lem, but a methodological one. ‘If a characteristic of Eastern thought
is that a lived experience of cultivation is the methodological route to
enlightenment,’ he asks rhetorically, ‘this means that the very character
of the dualistic mode in the relationship between the mind and body will
gradually change through the process of cultivation’ (p. 28). This pas-
sage describes the very essence of contemplative practice in Buddhism—
to dissolve the illusion of substantive ego-self through the phenomenal
meta-awareness of discursive thought and the self-generating narrative
of ‘I’ as the flow of mental activity. The following section goes into the
actual Aikido training and shows how the experiential, practical path of
‘harmonization’ heals conditioned dualism.
From ‘Ki-Joining’ to Indivisible Wholeness:

Aikido Training
The training exercises in Aikido, while comprising infinitely variable and
adaptable techniques for unarmed self-defence,9 provide a simulation of
conflict through which the defender can learn to calmly, lightly, in per-
fect timing and stable posture, gain control of attacker. Ki development
in Aikido training uses mind-body coordination principles and exercises
as a way to help students grasp and cultivate the same kind of calm, sta-
ble, and determined states of readiness, movement and flow that Ueshiba
was able to experience.10
Partners team up through physical contact exercises of self-defence
not to simply learn body-mechanics to overpower an opponent as seen
in Judo, Karate or similar martial arts, but to develop an acute aware-
ness of the aforementioned energy-field (ki) within which contact occurs.
This practice goes beyond mere proprioception of one’s singular subjec-
tive movement and agency and requires inter-subjective awareness and
a meta-perception of the field itself, indistinct from the uke and nage
within it. In this sense, this ‘ki development’ of sensing, joining and
being inseparable-from Ki (universe; wholeness) is akin to Bohm’s idea
of the implicate and explicate order—both are inextricably enfolded, or to
describe more accurately (quantum) entangled (Bohm, 1981). Ueshiba
defined this dynamic as love. For our purposes, we can recognize it as
moving from conceptual intersubjectivity to engaged and embodied
intersubjectivity.
Now let us talk about the actual ki training method. Listed below are
the two sets of Ki Development and Ki Aikido principles. These prin-
ciples11 (Shifflett, 1999, pp. 78, 167) were developed by Sensei Koichi
Tohei, former Chief Instructor of the Aikikai (world aikido body) who
after the founder’s death went on to incorporate Japanese yoga principles
into the study of ‘ki development’ in Ki Aikido.
Four Principles of Mind-body Coordination
1. Think of Your One Point

2. Completely Relax
3. Have a Light Posture
4. Extend Your Mind
Five Principles of Mind-Body Coordination in Aikido
1. Extend Your Mind

2. Know Your Partner’s Mind
3. Respect Your Partner’s Ki
4. Put Yourself in Partner’s Place
5. Perform With Confidence.
The first set of principles give students a method for effectively observ-
ing the nature of their mind manifest through their body state as regards
stability, calmness, and relaxation, while being tested for balance or reac-
tion by their partner. For example, by thinking of one’s virtual center at
their abdomen, the ‘one point,’ the mind and the body align in a natu-
ral way to become ‘immovable’ (fudoshin), which results from ki-joining
and harmonization. Similarly, with these principles in place as embodied
awareness and state-based calmness and relaxed movement, practition-
ers can engage in Aikido exercises in motion—attack and defense—with
the relational aspects of Other (e.g. ‘respect your partner’s ki’) as a
means of blending or harmonizing their movement with the attack. In
doing so, aikidoka (participants of Aikido) are thus engaged in shared
100 M. A. GORDON
meta-awareness of dynamics that transcend dualism, experiencing first-

hand that a lived experience of inseparability from the ki field brings to
fruition a felt-sense of the ‘oneness of body-mind,’ as referred to in Zen
training. This ‘oneness’ experience is most starkly demonstrated in shugyo.
Shugyo is the enhancement of a student’s increased capacity for
presence, to be witnessed as tada ima, ‘only now…there is only this
moment’ (Saotome, 1993, p. 162) or ichi go ichi e, ‘one life, one meet-
ing’ (Saotome, 1993, p. 173). Thus, budo training is not so much about
preparation for war, but the preservation of life, and the fearlessness of
one’s indomitable spirit in engaging the liminality of life and death in any
encounter. In the martial context of such a liminal and martial encoun-
ter, it is the calmness and concentration, and the harmony of one’s ki
(aiki), the absence of any ‘spiritual separation’ that leaves one vulnerable
to injury, that secures protection of life. This liminality can be seen in
the expression sei shi ichi ryo: ‘life and death are one’ (Saotome, 1993,
p. 165). Saotome writes:
Standing on the edge of life and death, you cannot make a lie. Standing
on the edge of life and death, your physical and your spiritual vibration can
only speak the truth, and your deepest self will appear. A master under-
stands this, and he awaits an imbalance, an opening in the other’s defence.
He surrounds the emptiness, the negative space in which to catch the ene-
my’s spirit and vibration, with his presence. (1993, p. 169)
In essence then, Aikido is a spiritual path or do, through shugyo

(cultivation), of cultivating mind-body coordination that results in
calmness, readiness, relaxation, presence. One cultivates for an embod-
ied and felt sense of calmness through partner training for the con-
tinuously lived experience of liminality that dissolves the duality of
life-death and self-Other in daily life. Training with a partner thus
becomes a canvas of relational dynamics on which a spiritual exercise in
moving from singular subjectivity to relational intersubjectivity, in which
physical confrontation constitutes one’s own encounter with ego. The
cultivation of non-resistance, of joining in and blending with the other
takes place at such a point of contact.
Vignette #2: Mirrorboxing—From Self-Projection to Reflection and
Synchrony
I shall now slip into another first-person narrative to describe a teaching
experience in the Aikido dojo (training hall) that leads to a deeper under-
standing of intersubjectivity.
The ikkyo undo (first principle exercise) instructs students to ‘raise

hands to eye level’: from the hanmi stance (basic aikido posture: one foot
forward, turned out slightly, the rear foot at almost a right angle to the
front) the student bends the knee to allow a forward movement from
the body/hips, leading to a swinging up of the hands, with her finger-
tips directed toward an imaginary partner’s eyes. Imagine bringing your
hands and arms up as if to make applause at eye level.
In a very direct application of this exercise (which one does repeti-
tively on one’s own, such that it becomes natural, effortless), the syn-
chronized raising of the hands/arms, anchored with the mid-point in the
abdomen or ‘one point’ (Jap: hara) allows the nage to make contact with
an attacker’s strike to the top of the head (shomenuchi), done with a
weapon or edge-of-hand. The contact with the strike blends with it in
an upward motion, redirecting the attacker’s hand or weapon strike in
a matched ‘cut’ back toward them in a circular movement, forcing the
attacker to turn away and protect their balance. In this way, their strike
is redirected such that the attacker’s cut turns on themselves. Ultimately,
this is done with the least physical movement necessary: the raising of
hands with a ‘directing’ of ki blends and ‘extends’ the same kind of
sword-like feeling to the attacker, diverting or interrupting the attack,
which in effect ‘moves’ the attacker’s mind subconsciously, forcing them
to miss the target, or at least to create an opening (suki), a weakness, in
the attacker’s ki.
In studying this exercise recently with my students, I emphasize how
one’s calmness as the defender (nage) allows one to be ‘one step ahead’
of the attacker, and thus move in perfect unison with the opponent’s
raised arm attack. To demonstrate this principle, I stand in front of the
large windows in the dojo, which now looking out to darkness, offers
reflective black surface of my body in motion.
I speak of the principle of ‘knowing your partner’s mind,’ while tak-
ing the aikido posture to draw/receive the shomen strike (making my
body oblique to the attack, not square-on). Since the ‘attacker’ in the
reflection is me, I highlight how it is impossible to escape an awareness
of my own intention to attack. First detected is the impulse to attack;
what follows is the slightest impulse to move my body in succession. As
if to respond to my reflection’s attack, I raise my hands in ikkyo undo,
obviously in perfect coherence with my ‘shadow’ partner.
This, I explain, is perfect aiki. My internal awareness makes it impos-
sible for me to fool myself through my own reflection. Thus, being
in stillness, open, ready and attuned with the other, I am able to
102 M. A. GORDON
instantaneously perceive the attacker’s mind (or their energy-inten-

tion-thought to attack), and thus effortlessly, and without hesitation,
move in perfect matched synchrony to diffuse the attack without clash.
In addition, the attacker’s intention and aggression has already put
her out of her own synchrony. This reveals two critical points. One, the
attacker is already out of sync with herself (here I use the analogy of a
four-colour printing process in a newspaper, where the color register is
off; the printed version shows off-register color shift in the reproduced
photograph). This disharmony shows, as O Sensei taught, how one ‘has
already been defeated.’ Second, to follow the latter, that his asynchro-
nous mind/body betrays his attack, thus allowing me to move impercep-
tibly in perfect timing with him. This is in fact precisely what occurred
when Ueshiba was able to pre-emptively evade his sword challenger’s
strikes in the previously mentioned encounter, leading to his epiphany
from which Aikido was borne.
The above vignette reflects the multilayered aspects of intersubjec-
tivity, also understood as dependent co-arising in Buddhist discourse,
encountered via our phenomenal perception. Coming back to our main
concern in this essay, Aikido can be seen as contemplative practice in
action; it is inherently relational, thus second-person oriented. At the
same time, one cultivates a state of non-reactive responsiveness and read-
iness that produces, as the saying goes: ‘minimal effort for maximum
efficiency.’ Much like in meditation where practice highlights and then
diminishes one’s habitual mental discursiveness, partner practice makes
one first aware of, then adaptive to, one’s own reactivity when faced with
the ‘challenge’ of a partner entering one’s space. Within the value frame-
work of conflict resolution, harmony of dissonance, and the unification
of the ‘human family’ as envisioned by the founder, Aikido echoes the
pragmatism of Buddhist contemplative practice: in order to fulfill the
practical and soteriological goals of resolving conflict arising from dual-
istic separateness, one must first examine and overcome one’s own egoic
defensiveness and aggression. In this sense, Aikido goes beyond the
first-person mind-body unification of contemplative practice to directly
relational self-Other unification. The primary focus of the art is to make
one aware of one’s own dualistic nature and how we are out of accord
with another due to our inner separateness and discord, which is mir-
rored in our reactive aggression to Other.
Wallace (2001) brings in a similar relational view concerning the con-

ceptualization of self, going beyond first-person:
[T]he self is brought into existence by the power of conceptual imputa-

tion…. Buddhism maintains that conceptual frameworks are not private.
They are public and consensual. So the ways in which I perceive and
conceive of myself and others are inextricably related to the community
of language-users and thinkers with whom I share a common conceptual
framework. (2001, p. 2)
Wallace (2001) describes seeing how others see us as a kind of reiter-

ated empathy “in which one views one’s own psychophysical processes
from a ‘second person’ perspective” (2001, p. 5), and that this is as ‘real’
as our ‘first person’ perspective—neither exists independently of one
another. Wallace further points out that in Buddhist methodology, the
realization that interior and exterior existence are inherently unreal, there-
fore that no distinction exists, is achieved through Dzogchen12 practice.
Below, I offer another vignette that illustrates Aikido’s potential for
pedagogical leadership.
Vignette #3: Aikido as Embodied, Non-resistant Leadership
From the ‘mirror boxing’ example above, we move to a partner-to-part-
ner exercise. Facing each other in seiza (kneeling position, ankles under),
one partner extends out his arms to be held. The uke holds the sides of
nage’s wrists (like the nage, who is holding wide handlebars, the uke is
in turn, holding nage’s wrists). With a spirit of honesty, the nage cannot
make any conscious effort without encountering resistance, especially as
the uke is exhibiting stable mind/body coordination.
Rather, with the uke ‘following’ lightly—that is prepared for any
movement so as to follow through their control/attack/test—nage must
in fact ‘follow’ their tester’s ki, joining with the forward movement of
the uke’s grip/intention. And like the mirror boxing analogy, the nage
moves in a synchronous and unbroken fluidity that will end up with the
uke in an unstable position, thus having to ‘escape’ (ukemi) in self-pro-
tection. Simply put, the nage lowers her elbow in a relaxed manner,
swooping in with her and her partner’s wrist, such that the partner, still
holding, is ‘lifted’ up (mind-body) in a continuous, destabilizing motion.
This is called ‘leading’ or ‘moving’ your partner’s mind.13
104 M. A. GORDON
If we return to our primary concern here, how might Aikido model a

praxis of relationality in such a contemplative way? How might this trans-
late as warriorship for educators? Etymologically, the word ‘educate’ has
its roots in the Latin educere, ‘to lead out.’ This has radical implications
if taken to heart in pedagogy, suggesting its core mission or purpose is
to lead by example, and to inspire. From the vantage point of working
toward interpenetration via contemplative practice, to be ‘educated,’
then, means to be led to self-awareness, to an awakened state. Within the
values of contemplative traditions such as Aikido and Buddhism, to be
awakened is to be aligned with self-evident truth, to overcome the fear of
being awake and the fear of looking within. Aikido cannot be reduced to
merely tactical training, neither should its potential contribution to ped-
agogy be reduced matters of tactic. Rather, Aikido offers pedagogy the
concept of warriorship as a process of learning to become intersubjective
and co-developmental through relational encounter.
Transformative Pedagogy as Human

Interdependence
While Western philosophy and Eastern philosophy share similar aims
in terms of knowing, doing and being, a preoccupation with an objec-
tivist approach to epistemology and ontology continues to dominate
scientific rationalism. This is largely the result of the problematic theo-
retical circularity encountered in the subject-object split, despite volu-
minous advances in phenomenology by the likes of Levinas (Levinas &
Cohen, 2005), Buber (1971) and Merleau-Ponty (2012) However, in
Eastern approaches, pragmatic and achievable trait and task are facilitated
through cultivation of the self for ‘body-mind oneness’ (Eisai, as cited in
Yuasa, 1987). In the principles and training of Ki Aikido and Shambhala
Buddhism, as examined here, one can see a soteriological ethos for
enlightenment through ‘peaceful warriorship.’
In relation to pedagogy, the discussion serves to humanize educators
in their roles not only as pedagogues, but also as human beings tasked
with the ‘tensional, ethical’ praxis of dialogue (Stewart & Zediker,
2000). Leadership exemplifies praxis by privileging the relational over
the individual, humanness over objectivity and productivity. If indeed,
O’Byrne (2005) says, the function of pedagogy is to ‘teach revolution.’
The same message is given by Freire (2000), as below:
A revolutionary leadership must accordingly practice co-intentional educa-

tion. Teachers and students (leadership and people), co-intent on reality,
are both Subjects, not only in the task of unveiling that reality, and thereby
coming to know it critically, but in the task of re-creating that knowledge.
As they attain this knowledge of reality through common reflection and
action, they discover themselves as its permanent re-creators. (p. 69)
While Aikido is not presented here as an idealized or singular path to

praxis, it does point the way to knowing-being through intersubjectivity
as do or ‘way,’ through non-violent presencing and interconnectedness.
Aikido thus represents a praxis or path moving beyond mere conflict res-
olution to harmony through nondual awareness, intersubjectivity, and
nondual ‘pure being.’
Notes
1. Raúl Fornet-Betancourt, Helmet Becker, Alfredo Gomez-Müller, &
J. D. Gauthier. (1987). The ethic of care for the self as a practice of free-
dom: An interview with Michel Foucault on January 20, 1984. Philosophy
and Social Criticism, July 12: pp. 112–131. ‘Practices of freedom’ is in
reference to Foucault’s thoughts on the co-relation between freedom
and ethics being co-related, as expressed in late life interviews, as regards
his theory on ‘care of the self’ and how it impacts ethical relations with
action towards others.
2. I have written about this elsewhere, as regards Aikido as praxis, and the
implications for pedagogical application regarding intersubjectivity.
Gordon, M. A. (2016, March). Towards pedagogical warriorship: Aikido
as contemplative education through relational praxis and the primacy of
other. Paper presented at the 60th annual conference of the Comparative
International Education Society, in Vancouver, Canada.
3. This utterance was made by Ueshiba, following a challenge that he,
unarmed, accepted, from a naval officer student who attacked him with a
wooden sword. Ueshiba’s famous epithet arose from his ability to effort-
lessly evade his attacker while simultaneously protecting the challenger
from harm. This ability emanates from an embodied non-duality with the
flow of nature, the Universe, both conceptually and physically.
4. As Gunnlaugson (2009) defines it: “second-person approaches to contem-
plative education involve exploring contemplative experience from an inter-
subjective position that is represented spatially as between us, in contrast to
inside us (subjective position) or outside us (objective position)” (p. 2).
106 M. A. GORDON
5. Yasua guides us here that the Japanese term “between” (aida) connotes
a physical sense of space, ‘between a thing and a thing,’ such that our
“betweenness” implies our existence in a definite, spatial Basho (place,
topos, field). “Naturally,” he says, “this Basho is not a position in a neu-
tralized, physical space that obliterates any human significance; rather, it
is the life-Basho in which we find the interconnected meanings of the life-
world” (Yuasa, 1987, p. 38).
6. h ttp://www.salon.com/2015/09/27/corporate_mindfulness_is_
bullsht_zen_or_no_zen_youre_working_harder_and_being_paid_less/
and http://www.buddhistpeacefellowship.org/white-privilege-the-
mindfulness-movement/?blm_aid=6718486.
7. Feenberg (1999) comments that: ‘Nishida shared this concept of pure
experience with D. T. Suzuki, who popularized the identification of
enlightened consciousness with a kind of immediacy prior to all reflec-
tion. Suzuki’s influence, in turn, is explicitly present in Nishida’s later
theory of Japanese culture where he writes that “No-mind (Mushin) can
be considered the axis of the Oriental spirit (Suzuki Daisetz)”’ (Nishida,
1991, p. 72, in Feenberg, 1999).
8. Kapstein, Matthew. (1997). Buddhist perspectives on ontological truth.
In Eliot Deutsch, & Ronald Bontekoe (Eds.), A companion to world
philosophies (pp. 420–433). Oxford: Blackwell. This is a reference to the
Buddhist theories of ‘emptiness’ and ‘two-truths’ (śūnyatā) explicated
by highly influential Indian philosopher Nāgārjuna (ca 150–250 AD) of
the “middle way” (Madhyamika) tradition. These two paradigms can be
expressed (cognitively and ontologically) as a dialectical tension between
what “is” (“absolute truth”) and what “appears to be” (phenomenal, or
“relative truth”), leaving us with a “both/and” paradox in his teaching of
Emptiness (that the relative and absolute truth are interdependent).
9. Aikido movements revolve around two general principles: in tenkan, one
enters into the centre of an attack (in the attacker’s ‘place,’ accelerating
the centrifugal or centripetal force; in irimi, the nage or defender enters
into the attack, redirecting uke’s force to cause them to turn. In either
general counter-movement from the nage, the uke is—by the nature of
his continued attack—forced to make ukemi: escape. In essence, this ulti-
mately forces the uke to question his aggression. In its most advanced
form, suggested Ueshiba, the attack is over before it begins. Thus, exists
the axiom about Aikido that it is “winning without fighting.”
10. Koichi Tohei (b. 1920–d. 2011) was an early student of the founder,
eventually becoming chief instructor and the first awarded the high-
est rank of 10th Dan. Tohei keenly observed that while many students
were emulating the founders’ movements, they were incapable of throw-
ing and controlling their ukes with the same effortlessness. Ueshiba,
it seems, was unable to transmit in a cohesive, accessible way, the deeply

embodied esoteric spiritual principles--coupled with years of rigorous
and highly integrated martial training—through a singular pedagogy.
After the war, Tohei studied the principles of mind-body coordination
of yoga-influenced teacher Tempu Nakamura. He was soon to discern
from Tempu’s approach that what Aikido students were unable to rep-
licate from Ueshiba’s movements (and what Ueshiba was unable—or
unwilling—to explicate) was the founder’s powerful feeling: his Ki. In
other words, what made the Ueshiba the embodiment of his own art, was
his exquisitely tuned flow-state of mind-body unification, his capacity to
move freely and in totally harmonized timing with an attack—in essence,
to defeat the attack before it arose. After the founder’s death in 1969,
Tohei (1980) began to adapt Ki Development into Aikido training, using
mind-body coordination principles and exercises.
11. The wording of the Ki Aikido principles listed here were adapted slightly
from Tohei’s original wording by Sensei Ken Williams, whom after
being affiliated with Tohei’s Shin Shin Toitsudo Aikido (now, Ki Society
International), went on to form his own Ki Federation of Great Britain.
12. From Tibetan Buddhism, also translated as “Great Perfection,” Dzogchen
aims to attain and cultivate a natural primordial condition, considered a
liberatory achievement in the Nyingma tradition.
13. Spiritually speaking, this aspect of self-awareness, linked to the Buddhist
concept of karma, is absolutely central to Aikido. There is not ample
space here to explore this inter-spiritual pedagogical aspect of Aikido,
where the nage is—without being destructive, but rather non-resistant
and protective—leading the uke to face their own choice to attack. This is
effectively a kind of karmic encounter. In a spirit of loving protection, the
aikidoist seeks to dissolve the seed of aggression in the attacker’s mind or
conditioned nature. This is highest spiritual aim of Aikido, which led to
Ueshiba deeming it a ‘path of love.’
References
Bohm, D. (1981). Wholeness and the implicate order. London: Routledge &
Kegan Paul.
Buber, M. (1971). I and Thou (1st ed.). New York: Free Press.
Feenberg, A. (1999). Experience and culture: Nishida’s path “to the things
themselves.” Philosophy East and West, 49(1), 28–44.
Gordon, M. A. (2016, March). Towards Pedagogical Warriorship: Aikido as con-
templative education through relational praxis and the primacy of other. Paper
108 M. A. GORDON
presented at the 60th annual conference of the Comparative International

Education Society, Vancouver, BC.
Gunnlaugson, C. O. (2009). Exploring presencing as a contemplative framework
for inquiry in higher education classrooms (Doctoral dissertation, University of
British Columbia).
Levinas, E., & Cohen, R. A. (2005). Humanism of the other (N. Poller, Trans.)
(Reprint ed.). Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press.
Routledge.
O’Byrne, A. (2005). Pedagogy without a project: Arendt and Derrida on teach-
ing, responsibility and revolution. Studies in Philosophy and Education, 24(5),
389–409.
Saotome, M. (1989). The principles of aikido. Boston: Shambhala.
Shambhala.
Shifflett, C. M. (1999). Aikido exercises for teaching and training. Berkeley:
North Atlantic Books.
Stewart, J., & Zediker, K. (2000). Dialogue as tensional, ethical practice.
Southern Journal of Communication, 65(2–3), 224–242.
Tohei, K. (1980). Ki in daily life. Tokyo: Ki No Kenkyukai.
Shambhala Publications.
Varela, F. J., Thompson, E., & Rosch, E. (1991). The embodied mind: Cognitive
science and human experience. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Wallace, B. Alan. (2001). Intersubjectivity in Indo-Tibetan Buddhism. In E.
Thompson (Ed.), Journal of Consciousness Studies (pp. 209–230). Exeter, UK:
Imprint Academic.
Yuasa, Y. (1987). The body toward an eastern mind-body theory (T. P. Kasulis‚
Ed.). Albany: State University of New York.
Yusa, M. (1997). Contemporary Buddhist philosophy. In E. Deutsch & R.
Bontekoe (Eds.), A companion to world philosophies (pp. 564–572). Oxford:
Blackwell.
CHAPTER 4
Moto-Morphosis: The Gestalt

of Aikido and Psychotherapy,
and Motorcycling as ‘Way’
Introduction
This essay explores the idea of ‘skillful attunement’ and ‘embodied
consciousness’ (Merleau-Ponty, 2012), and body-mind-ecological unity
through the intersubjective and intercorporeal practice of the Japanese
defensive art of Aikido. Aikido is a practice of non-dual awareness, teach-
ing practitioners to make no conceptual distinction between themselves,
an ‘opponent’ and the world around them, allowing them to ‘harmo-
nize’ and blend their spirit or life energy (ki: Japanese) with infinite ki of
the Cosmos. These phenomenological aspects are also considered via the
intersubjective notion of social self in the philosophies of G. H. Mead,
Buber, Tetsuro Watsuji (cf. Odin, 1995)—and expand the idea of gestalt
(e.g., in Gestalt Therapy) through Japanese philosopher Kitaro Nishida’s
notion of basho (Japanese: temporal-spatiality). Spiegel’s (2010) phe-
nomenology of motorcycling as ‘rider-bike unity’—much like the har-
monious relationship between attacker and defender in the non-dual
ontology of Aikido—is seen as a practice that cultivates one’s attuned,
incorporated relationship with the dynamics of perception, experience,
reality-at-hand, and ecology at large.
No matter the size, shape, or style of a motorcycle, the experience
of riding can be enthralling. The kinesthetic, elemental, sensorial, and
pan-affective aspects of riding demand of a rider moment-to-moment
attention which, if such a rider is not fully attentionally engaged, provides
a panoply of sensual, motor-sensory delight. If we are not so enthralled,

110 M. A. GORDON
the aspects of riding that elicit such heightened experience between rider,
machine, and road can make themselves known abruptly catastrophi-
cally and unforgivingly. In 2010, I had a motorcycle accident that, by
all measures, should have taken my life. Instead, I walked away relatively
unscathed—physically, that is. The impact of what happened and its bear-
ing on me would unfold long after the debris was cleared from the pave-
ment. By physical and psychospiritual measures, I contend that three
factors respectively saved me: A lifetime of motorcycle riding experi-
ence; a lifetime of regular training in the Japanese defensive art of Aikido
(i.e., mind-body coordination, relaxation, alertness, break-falling); and
a lifetime of self-development and reflectivity through creative practices
and psychotherapy.
This essay explores this near-fatal accident as interpretive inquiry, spe-
cifically how it affords reflection on the gestalt—that is, the whole con-
text, totality, the eruption—of my overall life situation (Perls, Hefferline,
& Goodman, 1951). I am not reducing the analysis of my accident
to a momentary lapse in otherwise sound riding judgment. The cen-
tral concern here rather is what allowed this near-fatal lapse of skillful
attention in that split-second leading to my collision? What undermined
my otherwise highly attuned sense of timing, readiness, and situational
awareness accrued through decades of Aikido training? Certainly, emo-
tional stress occurring in my ‘life ecology’ was a contributing factor. As
a self-employed psychotherapist and a lifelong professional singer-song-
writer, I was at a crossroad in my personal and professional life as regards
my domestic relationship, my career, ambitions, and sense of purpose-
ful path. The flashpoint of my near-death experience (NDE) serves in
this essay as a reflection case study into a meta-view of ‘practice’ in these
three critical areas of my life: therapy, Aikido, and motorcycle riding.
Taking the psychotherapeutic lens, the unconscious psychological forces
affecting me and dominating my gestalt at the time constitute what Jung
called the ‘shadow self’—the unseen but powerful drivers at work in the
hidden corners of our subconscious process of ‘individuation.’ Rather
than dwelling singularly on this psycho-emotional aspect, however, this
essay focuses on the ill-effect on rider awareness and skillfulness—my
general level of stress and emotional distraction serving as a background
(or ‘ground’) in the terminology of Gestalt Therapy. In the Gestalt
Therapy model, the individual subject (‘figure’) is considered in terms
of their ‘boundary contact’ with his or her overall situation (‘ground’).
The various movements to withdraw, push away, suppress, and resist
4 MOTO-MORPHOSIS: THE GESTALT OF AIKIDO … 111
such contact are the subject for therapeutic discovery and ‘growth.’
Existential psychotherapist Irvin Yalom (2013) describes working with
the ‘here and now’ of the in situ therapy experience between client and
therapist, contrasted with analyzing the ‘there and then’ of one’s past
trauma, relationships, and experiences which may entail emotional dis-
tancing, intellectualizing, and other associated shifts away from client
growth. On a motorcycle, not being fully attuned in the gestalt sense to
the ‘here and now’ of a situation at hand can prove fatal.
Regarding the physicality of riding, I address both the practical and
phenomenological relationship and dynamics of the rider and bike dyad,
and in particular the idea of ‘rider-bike unity’ through the work of
Bernt Spiegel (2010). Spiegel invokes the phenomenology carried from
Heidegger (2010) through Merleau-Ponty (2012) and Ingold (2002)
regarding the ‘transparency’ of tool usage as an extension of our sens-
ing-sensate self. Here, Spiegel differentiates between what he calls a
‘cargo-rider’ (one who rides on a bike), and a ‘component-rider’ (one
who rides with or in a motorcycle). This is a relational understanding
of riding, albeit through a transhuman relationship. This understand-
ing is based on the idea of rider-bike unity that one is not relating to
a motorcycle but to the world, through the motorcycle. The motorcy-
cle is to the rider—like Merleau-Ponty’s (2012) blind man (sic) sens-
ing the world through a walking stick—an interface with the world.
Thus, in the Gestalt Therapy psycho-phenomenological model explored
here, rider-bike unity becomes a measure of one’s gestalt awareness.
As regards the kinesthetic and ontological aspect, Käufer and Chemero
(2015) point out that Merleau-Ponty ‘views the body schema as a kind
of knowledge of a whole Gestalt’ (Käufer & Chemero, p. 105) and that
in Merleau-Ponty’s own words: ‘the “body schema” is, in the end, a
manner of expressing that my body is in and towards the world’ (cited
in Käufer & Chemero, p. 105). Käufer and Chemero (2015) note how
Merleau-Ponty illustrates this motor intentionality through the ‘trans-
parency’ of tool usage, as the way our ‘lived body’ engages with the
world. As an example, he speaks of a blind man (sic) using a cane, the
latter of which ‘dissolves’ as a tool object and is, as Heidegger suggested,
‘ready-to-hand’ in an indistinguishable sense from the user’s body. Put
more clearly, there are ‘levels’ of awareness in the practice of motorcy-
cling. Firstly, there is the ‘inner awareness’ or rider-rider unity, that is,
one’s integration psychosomatically within one’s experiential bound-
ary before one interfaces with the bike. Secondly, there is the rider-bike
112 M. A. GORDON
interface and one’s unity in that interface relationship. Lastly, there is

the rider-bike unity/disunity in relation to the road and other objects
in temporal-spatiality. Thus, the rider-bike interface is a point, in gestalt
terms, of boundary contact in each of these three levels of conscious
awareness and practice.
I use the term ‘moto-morphosis’ here to refer to motorcycle riding
as a practice that carries far more depth for one’s self-inquiry and gen-
eralizable skill and knowledge for daily living than simply skillful riding.
‘Morphosis’ here suggests that in my self-reflection about my NDE and
the observations I make about the layers of meaning and learning expe-
rienced through it, the NDE has been a transformational, or perhaps
transmutational, experience. I am a more attuned person, not simply a
more cautious rider. As a parallel to the idea of rider-bike interface as
contact-boundary experience and inducing awareness regarding the var-
ious levels of psychosomatic registers, I draw on the relational practice
of Aikido, a defensive Japanese art which teaches practitioners to blend
and harmonize with their attacker. Aikido, rather than simply a ‘martial’
series of techniques for self-defense is training in somatic and kinesthetic
sensitivity, timing, and response. It is an art in which one is challenge to
reflect in their physical movements an spiritual, ontological, and moral
view of non-dual intersubjectivity and intercorporeality, and a living
intentionality or ‘embodied habitus’ (Inoue, 2006) of non-resistance.
The purpose and context of the inquiry into this ‘motormorphosis’ of
my NDE then is not a prima facie forensic view of the accident, my
motorcycling skill or rider error. Rather, it is to see motorcycling-as-a
practice linked to my own extensive practice view of the Japanese notion
of self-cultivation (Yuasa, 1987) of mind-body unity through the art of
Ki Aikido. ‘Aikido’ is widely translated as meaning ‘the way of peace,’
where ‘ai’ means harmony, ‘ki’ represents spirit or universe, and ‘do’
means way or path. Practitioners take turns simulating armed, unarmed,
and hand-to-hand combat attacks with one another, learning to take
an opponent’s own force and through skillful timing, diffuse the attack
with calm control. Following the death of Aikido’s founder (Morihei
Ueshiba) in 1969, Chief Instructor Koichi Tohei, who had studied
Tempu Nakamura’s mind-and-body coordinated principles of Japanese
yoga (Davey, 2013), integrated principles of mind and body coordi-
nation into what became ‘Ki Aikido.’ This new pedagogical approach
allowed people to learn calm stability through ‘ki development’ exercises
(offered separately from Aikido) and to allow Aikidoists (Japanese:

aikidoka) to apply these embodied principles not just through more
effortless Aikido but to carry them into daily life through heightened
awareness and calm relaxation.
In Ki Aikido, skillfulness is not merely developed via ‘martial’ (e.g.,
‘combative’) or self-defense tactical training but as a ‘way’ or michi
(Davey, 2002) of body-mind unity for daily living (Tohei, 1972).
Practice as ‘way’ or michi in this Japanese sense of self-cultivation goes
beyond technical training or skills acquisition; it is a practice that is inte-
grated into every aspect of one’s being. There is a recursive or circular
integration with one’s ‘life ecology’ as a means of cultivating reflective
awareness and attunement through practice. Here then, I focus on the
crisis that occurred within my own life ecology, the rupture of gestalt
represented in my NDE. Continual training in mind-body coordination
in Ki Aikido generates a natural kind of circularity in other aspects of
my daily life. The principles of mind-body coordination in Ki Aikido are
meant to apply universally, not simply on the mat through Aikido. In
internalizing, applying, observing, and generalizing the Aikido principles
to daily life, and finally taking the spiritual, psychosomatic and emotional
learning back into the training in Ki Aikido and its principles on the mat,
one begins to experience this recursive rhythm of learning as growth and
self-cultivation. Specifically, I explore how my embodiment of non-re-
activity, relaxed posture and so forth through years of Aikido training
factored into surviving my motorcycle accident. I explore how Aikido
training—with its continual focus on harmonizing or blending through
synchronized temporal-spatial awareness and movement—applies to the
dynamics of riding. While the motorcycle doesn’t directly substitute as
an opponent or antagonist training partner in Aikido, I make the case
here that the inherent risks of riding a motorcycle—namely, impact with
the ground or collision with another vehicle—overlap with the learning
on the mat in Aikido as it relates to being aware, relaxed, ready, non-
reactively responsive and in relationship. Simply put, seeing motorcycling
as a ‘way,’ it is suggested, puts one in the frame of mind and embod-
ied habitus of, in Aikido terms, ‘becoming one with the situation’
(Phillipson, 2009, p. 121). Ultimately, one aims to avoid unnecessary
risk in motorcycling. Similarly, Aikido aims to avoid conflict. To be skill-
ful means to be aware and attuned enough to not be there in the first
place!
114 M. A. GORDON
This essay was delivered at the 8th annual International Journal of

Motorcycle Studies in Rancho Cucamonga, California, in July 2018. In the
question and answer session of the panel discussion, an audience member
posed the question of whether motorcyclists are inherently motivated or
at least stimulated by risk. I responded that, speaking personally, I accept
risk as an element of riding that can be mitigated and controlled to a cer-
tain extent (through skills, planning, good riding habits); however, it is
not what draws me to ride. Nor can I say that speed is a primary moti-
vation in riding, as thrilling as it is. Rather, what lures me to ride is the
sense of movement, of forward propulsion. There is, as is familiar to any
rider, a visceral, emotional, sense-stimulating, invigorating, and life-af-
firming affect associated with the movement of landscape, the swoosh-
ing of air against one’s body, the sound of the revving engine, and the
feel of the rubber gripping the road in rotational trajectory forward that
transcends mere locomotion. Riding is about the symbiosis of rider-bike
dyad in a unique and transhuman relationship that induces a feeling of
freedom. On a metaphorical level, it is possible to say that every ride feels
like an adventure, an evolution from what preceded—far or near in the
past—and thus almost a reinvention or at least a renewal of one’s sense
of stasis. In his book Essays in Radical Empiricism, James (2012) notes
how phenomenological experience, our lived reality, and our sense of for-
ward trajectory only ever reveals itself as a moment-to-moment process.
‘We live, as it were, upon the front edge of an advancing wave-crest, and
our sense of a determinate direction in falling forward is all we cover of
the future of our path’ (James, 2012, p. 44). Motorcyclists in this sense
live in movement towards the curvature of the road, while not having it
completely in full view or experience. Thus, riding contains with it the
essential elements of experiencing one’s life process itself, with its itiner-
ant upheavals of either life-threatening or life-affirming undulations.
As with any purposeful reflective practice, my intention is to draw on
this dramatic personal chapter as a means of better applying life experi-
ence as impetus for authentic integration, self-actualization, and growth
(Perls et al., 1951). Taken an order of degree further, the body-mind
unification ‘way’ of Aikido includes a total, holistic, cosmological-on-
tological view of existence. Gestalt therapy is evoked here in a similarly
broader sense regarding cultivation one’s self toward greater ecological
attunement. This essay explores this idea of ‘skillful attunement’ and
‘embodied consciousness’ (Merleau-Ponty, 2012), and body-mind-
ecological unity through the intersubjective and intercorporeal practice
of Aikido. These phenomenological aspects are also considered via the

intersubjective notion of social self in the philosophies of G. H. Mead,
Buber, Tetsuro Watsjui (cf. Odin, 1995)—and expands the idea of gestalt
through Japanese philosopher Kitaro Nishida’s theory of basho (Japanese:
temporal-spatiality). Rider-bike unity—much like the harmonious rela-
tionship between attacker and defender in the non-dual ontology of
Aikido—is seen as a practice that cultivates one’s attuned, incorporated
relationship with the dynamics of perception, experience, reality-at-hand,
and ecology at large.
Map Legend
Before we begin, a few key terms are worth highlighting for refer-
ence throughout this essay. The broader themes of Aikido and Gestalt
Therapy will be introduced in depth further along:
Uke/Ukemi: attacker or training partner who receives the technique

in Aikido. Ukemi is the ‘art of protecting oneself’ (in order to attack
continuously).
Nage: person on receiving end of attack or initiating, drawing out or neu-
tralizing uke’s impulse or attack.
Ki: universe; universal life force; vital energy; potential energy; animism
Figure/ground: from Gestalt Therapy—figure is the experiencing, reflec-
tive subject; ground is the context, environment, ecology and dynamic
inner/outer feedback, the ‘field’ in which the figure is situated, consid-
ered, inextricably formed/informed.
Aida: betweenness, intersectionality, and liminality. This term connotes
not only intersubjectivity but refers to ontological positioning and rela-
tion of self-other, self-society, self in spatial-temporality, re: theories of
Kitaro Nishida, Tetsuro Watsuji, Kimura Bin.
Awase: meeting point; to match up; drawn towards.
Musubi: to blend; tied up with; merge.
Ground Zero
The details of my accident are quite straightforward enough: I was side-
swiped by an oncoming car. Stopped at a pedestrian-controlled crosswalk
on an east-west corridor, low evening sun blocked the western horizon
on the downslope to my right. To my left was the upslope facing east.
116 M. A. GORDON
A single vehicle—a commercial utility truck—was stopped at the red

light in the intersection, in the curb lane on my left. Time stood still;
the red traffic light, the ambiguous flashing ‘red hand’ signaling pedes-
trians to proceed across the crosswalk with caution. With a quick but
concerted glance in either direction, and a red light for east-west traffic
on the main road, I proceeded through the pedestrian-marked intersec-
tion with the intention to turn left in front of the truck, which was at a
standstill to my left. As I moved forward, the red traffic light rapidly—
and out of my peripheral vision—changed to green. Just as I moved
past the truck’s bumper, an approaching westbound car—seeing a green
light ahead—accelerated. The car broadsided me, violently ramming the
motorcycle out from under me with direct force at the front wheel and
forks, spinning the still-running bike on its side axis all the way across
the other side of the intersection. From an eyewitness account and my
body position in the immediate aftermath—the bike knocked out from
under me and sent sliding-spinning across the opposite side of the inter-
section—my body had flown straight up feet first in the air, my head and
neck impacting vertically down on the pavement. A horrific scene, as
described by the witness who saw the impact and came forward at a later
date. ‘My husband is a rider,’ she said. ‘I don’t know how you survived.
You landed straight down on your head, with your neck twisting.’
The answer to me was apparent, the signs pointing to my unconscious
and habitual skill and relaxation from Aikido training, which initially
prevented me from blacking out unconscious due to shock. Secondly,
a slight scuff on one forward side of my helmet, and slight abrasion
and pain on the heels of my hands further showed that I instantane-
ously went into a graduated break-fall, or as it is called in Aikido, ukemi
(Japanese: protection, escape) to minimize impact and injury. Thirdly,
my slow deliberate self-check in getting up from lying face-down on the
pavement, and my spatial awareness of the position, state, and danger of
myself and my running bike in traffic all pointed to the attenuated con-
trol of the ‘iris-like’ aperture (trauma exposure) response of my limbic
system—closing down my consciousness almost to the point of uncon-
sciousness, then slowly giving me peripheral vision, hearing, executive
decision-making ability and calculated, strategic movement (‘is my neck
broken? Teeth? Eyes? Can I move?’). All of these incremental and calcu-
lated observations and adjustments I can, without doubt, assign to my
many years of sensitivity through Aikido training.
What, then, is Aikido, and how did it save my life? First, let me fore-
stall the thought that the critical, ‘autonomic’ skills and embodied
responses acquired through a lifetime of motorcycling (at least the one’s
after the critical error in judgment to risk a ‘stale’ red light) weren’t
indeed critical in protecting further injury or death. These shall unfold
later on.
Aikido (ai: harmony; ki: energy, life; do: way or path) is a defensive
art originated in Japan by founder (O Sensei, or ‘Great Teacher’) Morihei
Ueshiba.
By his own account, Ueshiba had studied and integrated some 30
martial arts, notably from the samurai warrior or bushido combat tradi-
tions, and in particular from kenjutsu (swordsmanship) and jiujutsu (K.
Ueshiba, 1985). After Ueshiba’s own spiritual transformation however,
Aikido emerged in its full form as the founder’s vision of non-violent
skillfulness, based on his re-interpretation of budo (martial way or ‘war-
riorship’) as ‘loving protection of all things.’ Aikido became known and
promoted as the ‘art of peace’ and ‘non-dissention’ (M. Ueshiba, 1992).
As an evolved combat art, Aikido simulates life and death interactions,
particularly involving edge weapons (i.e., katana or samurai sword, or
the wooden version: bokken). With progressively developed calm, stable,
and fluid movement, attackers (uke) are skillfully and protectively con-
trolled with minimal exertion or force by the defender (nage or tori).
However, extending from Ueshiba’s foundations in Shinto and shin-
gon Buddhism, Aikido is aimed at fostering psychospiritual transforma-
tion through continuous training (shugyo), ‘purification’ of one’s inner
aggression, dualistic conditioning (e.g., self vs. other; subject-object,
mind-body dualism, humans-nature) and narcissistic orientation such
that it is replaced with an empathic, non-competitive, unified cosmologi-
cal relationship with all life (Gleason, 1995).
Returning to the earlier point in the vignette of my accident, what
undoubtedly contributed to saving me from an otherwise fatal impact is
years of repetitive ukemi in the Aikido technique/principle of ikkyo. In
its basic technical form, this ‘first principle’ of Aikido is summarized as
an attack-defense sequence thusly: uke (attacker) comes straight toward
nage (defender), aiming to control nage by grasping the nage’s oppo-
site-side wrist (ostensibly, to prevent drawing of nage’s sword or other-
wise to destabilize the nage). This would appear in this example with the
attacker coming to grasp the defender’s right hand/wrist with their own
118 M. A. GORDON
right hand. Nage ‘agrees’ with the onrushing movement, ‘drawing in’ the
attack by taking a diagonal step off-the-line to their own rear right corner
while ‘leading’ the uke’s grasping right hand where nage’s own hand was
in relation to the initial point of attack. In effect, the uke must keep ‘chas-
ing’ the point of attack (hand/wrist) that is moving away in unison with
nage’s entire body. The nage is literally ‘not there’ at the point of maxi-
mum attack. In continuous motion, this ‘drawing in’ of the attacking/
grasping hand of the uke, while offering no counter-move or resistance,
gathers up the forward energy and redirects uke’s grasping hand/wrist
and elbow in a sharp, circular, and fluid motion back toward the uke’s
face in a sweeping upward circle, while also taking control at the uke’s
elbow at a right angle. To avoid losing balance backwards with this ‘wave’
of movement coming back at them in the form of their own wrist and
elbow moving toward their face, the uke must protect his or her balance
by pivoting her or his body 180° in the direction from which he or she
came, thus giving up the initial attack vector. The nage’s continued circu-
lar ‘agreement’ with the attacker’s thrust (more specifically, the attacker’s
ki; Japanese: ‘life force’) back towards uke allows her or him to move with
the whole body through uke’s elbow and wrist, controlling him or her
forward, down and finally pinned by the arm to the ground.
For beginners, this movement has a slow, sweeping sequence: attack,
evasion, redirection, and immobilization. This is to allow the nage to
develop timing, maintain ma-ai (Japanese: harmonious or respectful dis-
tance, spatial relationship), and for uke to build a confident attack full of
ki, while allowing her or him to safely break the fall. At a very high level
however, the defense technique happens instantaneously—matching the
unhesitant and explosive rate and force of the attack itself. Rather than
turning around and ‘guiding’ the uke back in the direction from which
she came, the ‘turn’ or circle redirecting her force is executed in a much
smaller circle at the point of contact (awase) with much greater rota-
tional torque. The result is that the uke is directed straight down on her
or his head and must distribute the force of impact throughout the bodily
points of contact with the mat to minimize injury: turn the head, slide
heel of hand forward, shoulder down, then legs slowly landing down or
cantilevering along the body axis like the runners of a rocking chair. The
returning, circular energy of the attacker’s movement comes back toward
them like the cut of a sword, in one fluid motion.
While the above description may seemingly contradict or violate the
avowed ethos of non-violence in Aikido, it is important to note that
protection from harm must extend beyond ‘self-defence’ to include

the nage, the attacker. In this sense, Aikido is addressing the rupture in
the harmony of the moment, of the ki of the universe. Ultimately, this
is done by stopping the attack before it begins, by having no ‘break’
in one’s own extension of ki (thus, being body-mind unified, still, and
in harmony with the universe itself, or aiki) and thus preventing the
attacker from finding any ‘opening’ to exploit. The same principle-in-action
can be seen in Japanese sword training (e.g., kendo) where there is no
swordplay—rather, the winning combatant is the first to sense and act
on this opening or break in ki (Japanese: suki) from the other, and thus
move in with lightning speed to strike a hit and thus gain a point. This
aspect of training reflects the samurai principle of ‘readiness,’ of living
each moment as ichi go ichi e: ‘one life, one encounter,’ and ‘an exchange
of time and space with the spirit of moving into the very heart of your
enemy’ (Saotome, 1993). In other words, while the stakes suggest ‘one
lives, one dies’ in combat, through Aikido—in which one develops one’s
own body-mind presence and calmness for skillful blending or merging
with the attacker’s movement (musubi)—nage has both the spirit of ‘lov-
ing protection’ and skill to use the least force to control the situation
while not giving up one’s own life in the face of another’s unrelenting
attack.
Motorcycling can be a lot like combat, with similar stakes; a life-
death liminality on a razor’s edge. In can be said of motorcycle riding
that most riders—consciously or not—may recognize or even thrive on
the thrill of such risk. At the same time, as with aikidoka, they don’t
seek death. Was my NDE the result of my losing this self-preservational
instinct or awareness through unnecessary risk? Was I subconsciously sac-
rificing my life?
Firstly, the anatomy of ikkyo defense laid out previously exhibits the
similar autonomic reaction I had in my accident: my subconscious mind-
body responding without conscious effort with the result of protect-
ing myself from breaking my neck. But much like the aforementioned
embodied skills acquired from years of riding—quick reflexes, light hold
on the controls and knees lightly gripping the fuel tank and subframe,
even the pre-conscious apprehension of the oncoming vehicle that pre-
vented me from accelerating that much sooner past the truck such that
I would have been critically hit midway on the bike—there is much more
to unpack from this accident than merely good luck or good habits.
120 M. A. GORDON
Truthfully though, it is what led up to the accident, and the psycho-emo-

tional aftermath, that is the subject of this essay. It is within this view
that skillfulness—whether in riding, in ukemi, or in the healing from
one’s trauma—is considered. Skillfulness here is reflected in the entire
psychospiritual mirror, the gestalt, of one’s life. In this sense, the skillful
experience of riding or a practice such as Aikido fold back into holistic
integration, learning, reflexivity, and self-cultivation. Thus, this essay
explores the whole of this NDE, this liminal event horizon, via reflective
awareness. What is the gestalt of this incident, the learning and integration
of skillfulness that I have and can further adapt to being fully, consciously
awake to my circumstances, my surroundings, my life path? It is in the
spirit of these questions that I invoke Aikido training as a mode of under-
standing of these various life dynamics.
It may appear from an outsider perspective that through Aikido one
gradually develops the ability to respond to and blend with an ‘attack’
with calm, powerful control. While this is true, a deeper understanding
is that the training is situated in a spiritual-ontological worldview, which
the founder Ueshiba represented in the ancient sacred geometry model
of triangle, circle, square (the latter of which houses all three shapes, as
a whole). Thus, rather than simply represented by a peak ‘waveform’ of
ready > response > control (this, e.g., looking like a seismic graph event
on a Richter scale, or strong heartbeat pulse seen an EKG monitor), the
triangle-circle-square represents a path of continuous awareness: trian-
gle = openness, readiness; circle = moving into the center to ‘blend’ with
a situation; square = applied control, resolution, and diffusion. In this
model, the intention or ‘ground’ spiritual orientation of non-dissen-
tion, non-duality, and non-violence—the open stance toward life repre-
sented by the triangle—sets the stage for the completion of the whole
matrix (Gleason, 1995). As we shall see this open stance to (one’s) life is
vital for working with the various stimuli in one’s life ecology, including
aging, relationships, life/work balance, health—all the psycho-emotional
material that forms feedback for one’s full, authentic, conscious pres-
ence. In Gestalt Therapy, these various dynamics form the figure/ground
field within which we creatively adapt and adjust, grow and creatively
evolve.
Notwithstanding the risk of motorcycling, at risk of stating the
obvious I suggest here that it is a practice that demands one’s full and
immediate attention, skillfulness, and awareness of mind/body state at
every moment. In life, on the mat in Aikido, and on the road, one is
constantly confronted with the liminal edge of life and death, be it fig-
urative, material, or spiritual. It is not simply the case that motorcycling
and Aikido both develop interrelated skillfulness in timing, and coordina-
tion of movement. While that is true, the awareness here is that there is
an integration of skillfulness that works in circularity between these two
key practices. In each situation—on the bike, or with a training partner
on the mat—I bring nuanced embodied skill and learning from one to
the other. Some of these nuances include minimal effort or movement,
enhanced peripheral awareness, ‘feather’ or light touch (on bike con-
trols, brakes; on partner’s body) and so forth. The key point brought
forward from Aikido training here, however, is that a focus on height-
ening one’s ability to react in the most skillful way—in the moment—is
largely misguided. Research has indeed shown that, in visual perception
at least, there is a 250 ms delay or latency between stimulus and cortical
processing or awareness (Woods, Wyma, Yund, Herron, & Reed, 2015).
It is, in other words, ‘too late’ by the time one recognizes an attack and
tries to respond. In our psycho-emotional experience, suppressed or
otherwise unconscious patterns, schema or traumata can be triggered,
leading to panic, conflict, generalized anxiety and a range of other symp-
toms. Similarly, in the risk-reward balance of riding motorcycles, lack of
sophisticated, continually attenuated skillfulness can result in unnecessary
injury or fatality.
Motorcycle racing instructor and author Code (1993) labels these
dangerous blind spots in riding ‘survival reactions,’ unconscious limbic
and sensory-motor responses that leave us ‘freezing up’ and making crit-
ical, life-threatening errors (Code, 1993). The triangle-openness-ready
stance of Aikido as an embodied ‘way’ has a parallel in motorcycling.
What is meant here is the embodied relationship one has with the motor-
cycle before one climbs on. In his book The Upper Half of the Motorcycle,
Bernt Spiegel contrasts being on a motorcycle with being in a motor-
cycle (Spiegel, 2010). Spiegel lays out his model of unification between
rider and machine, of moving from what he calls ‘cargo-rider’ to ‘com-
ponent-rider’ relationship of rider-machine. Here, we are no longer
‘on’ the motorcycle, we are ‘in’ it, or rather, with it. Compared with
the Aikido context, rather than seeing the uke (attacker) as initiator and
driver of movement, it is really the nage (one executing technique) who
is following the uke. If one is in perfect sync—especially before the actual
122 M. A. GORDON
attack takes shape—the movement is over before it begins. Much can,

and will be said here, then about attunement, learning to be and move
‘in sync’ with similar perturbances, oscillations on the road, in life, in
relationship—loss of traction, fear of death, panic—in a skillful and har-
monious way, beyond metaphor. Doing so affords us the experience of
full agency, of choice, rather than seeing life as something that happens
‘to us.’
Japanese View of Self as Mind-Body

This article examines the phenomenological aspects of motorcycling
and Aikido via my NDE from a practice viewpoint, as regards my own
continued self-development. This view reflects the soteriological vir-
tue ethics of Aikido as ‘way’ or michi. As regards this practice views,
Japanese philosopher Yasuo Yuasa (1987) writes about mind-body inte-
gration not simply as phenomenological inquiry but toward cultivation
of one’s self as a balanced and fully-realized being. Yuasa notes that the
Japanese traditions ‘generally treat mind-body unity as an achievement,
rather than an essential relation’ (cited in Odin, 1995, p. 372). As G. H.
Mead (cited in Odin, 1995) continues regarding this Japanese view of
psychosomatic development, ‘the self is not initially there at birth, but
is something which requires development through intersubjective praxis’
(cited in Odin, 1995, p. 372). This thought is echoed by Yuasa (1987)
who states that in Japanese Buddhism the mind-body integrated self is
only achieved through deliberate self-cultivation, rather than pre-existing
within the ‘everyday’ self.
Odin (1995) explains at length how the work of German philo-
sophical anthropologists Feuerbach and Dilthey were influential to
Mead’s emergent social theory of the (intersubjective) self, and Buber’s
‘I-Thou’—the latter of which stands as a pivotal Western philosophical
model of the Buddhist precept of interdependence. Odin (1995) points
out also that Feuerbach and Dilthey’s philosophies of the ‘social self’ also
shaped the ideas of Buber and Meade’s visiting contemporary scholar in
Germany at the time, Japanese philosopher Tetsuro Watsuji. Whether in
Buber’s ‘I-thou’ relational model, the theories of Kyoto School progen-
itor Kitaro Nishida, Watsuji, or its roots in Zen philosophy, Odin points
out this shared philosophical view that ‘the self is a function of the dia-
logical principle of aida, “betweenness”’ (1995, p. 429).
Tanaka (2017) elaborates on Merleau-Ponty’s theories of embod-

iment, bringing in the mind-body unity aspects of traditional Japanese
philosophy and contemporary theory, including his own work on inter-
corporality and aida (Tanaka, 2017). Tanaka states that aida essentially
refers to ‘the spatial distance between two things or the temporal dis-
tance between two events’ qualifying that ‘as it merely refers to distance,
aida itself is nothing. This idea is meaningful from the relational point of
view’ (p. 343).
Tanaka (2017) moves from Merleau-Ponty’s idea of unidirectional
incorporation ‘in which the lived body unilaterally incorporates the
instrument’ (e.g., incorporating the ‘feel’ of a car from bumper-to-
bumper while driving), to mutual incorporation where ‘the recipro-
cal interaction of two agents in which each lived body reaches out to
embody the other.’ (p. 342). This mutual incorporation, he says (such
as in playing music or a game of tennis), is based on a ‘perception-action
loop between self and other’ and begins as de-synchronized, after which
the interaction gains autonomy or flow. Initially, says Tanaka (2017), ‘a
dyadic system emerges through the intercorporeal loop of action and
reaction between self and other’ (p. 342). In this ‘enactive subjectivity,’
states Tanaka, ‘movement and perception are entangled, co-constituting
what Weizsäcker (1940) called the “gestalt cycle” (Gestaltkreis), in which
what an organism perceives is permeated by how it moves, and how it
moves anticipates what it perceives’ (p. 343).
Tanaka (2017), summarizing Kimura Bin’s view of human subjectiv-
ity, notes that:
the most fundamental aspect of subjectivity is not found in self-con-

sciousness or transcendental ego, but in spontaneous movements directed
toward the environment…what we call the self is nothing more but the
principle of connection that is working ‘between’ (aida) us and the world.
(Kimura & Vincent, as cited in Tanaka, 2017, p. 343)
Returning to the ‘way’ of Aikido, we see as its fundamental principle the

coordination or unification of one’s mind-body, to facilitate intercorpo-
real, enactive intersubjectivity and synchrony with totality or ecology.
Odin (1995) highlights that this ‘psychosomatic body-mind’ approach in
Japanese Buddhism is reflected in several historic practices:
124 M. A. GORDON
1. sokushin jöbutsu or ‘enlightenment in this body’ in Kukai’s Buddhism

(774–835AD)
2. shinjin ichinyo or ‘oneness of body mind’ of the Rinzai Zen of Esai
(1141–1215)
3. shinjin gakudo or ‘studying the way with body-mind’ in Soto Zen of
Dögen (1200–1253)
4. shikshin funi or ‘nonduality of body-mind’ in nichiren Buddhism
(1222–82). (Odin, 1995)
Odin (1995) points out that high-ranking Ki Aikido teacher (Japanese:

shihan) David Shaner comments in his own academic work on Japanese
‘bodymind’ that the Zen meditation of Dögen, the tantric mandala-
visualization practice of Shingon Mikkyō Buddhist Kukai—and, most
certainly training in Ki Aikido: ‘...result in the achievement of a body-
mind experience, or what [Shaner] otherwise calls “first-order bodymind
awareness” characterized by the spatial embodiment of “an expanded
periphery and horizon in toto”’ (1995, p. 370).
In summary, we can lay out this aspirational practice of bodymind
(using Shaner’s term) awareness and unification thusly: from self, to self-
other (social self or aida), to self-other-Cosmos. Hence, we are brought
back to the earlier section regarding the phenomenological view of
rider unity in motorcycling and the three ‘layers of awareness’ I intro-
duced: rider-rider, rider-bike, and rider-bike-Cosmos. This circular pro-
cess of body-mind, intercorporeal, non-dual awareness, and integration
is indeed reflected in the epiphanic statement by Aikido founder Morihei
Ueshiba: ‘I AM the universe!’ (cited in Stevens, 1987). Challenged by
a visiting naval officer and swordsman, Ueshiba—unarmed against
the wooden sword (Japanese: bokken)—was able to evade every cut,
thrust, and poke of his attacker, by moving in precise synchrony with
the attacker. ‘Just prior to your attacks,’ Morehei explained, ‘a beam
of light flashed before my eyes, revealing the intended direction’ (cited
in Stevens, 1988, p. 58). His challenger submitted to defeat, stating
Ueshiba’s defense was ‘impenetrable.’ In Aikido, an ‘opening’ in one’s
ki (i.e., concentration, intention, directed energy, stillness, etc.) is called
suki. By embracing and integrating the notion, feeling and embodi-
ment of being inseparable from the universe itself, Ueshiba remained
calm, unfettered, anchored in the Zen mind-body principle of ‘immov-
able mind’ or fudoshin. To revisit Tanaka’s commentary on aida here,
‘through this resonance between bodies, we can directly grasp the inten-
tion of another’s action’ (Tanaka, 2017, p. 339) (Illustration 4.1).
Illustration 4.1 Shūchū, “concentration or focus”
The ‘Gestalt’ of Aikido and Riding as Aida

(‘Betweenness’)
Having already seen the parallels between Japanese philosophy and
Gestalt Theory in the work of Kimura and Tanaka, we turn now to
Gestalt Therapy theory as aida or ‘betweenness’ in terms of working
with the psychosocial and emotional dynamics of ‘bodymind’ (Shaner,
1985) awareness as a practice. As discussed earlier, the consequences of
being ‘out-of-sync’ with one’s inner emotional life, social relationships,
and so forth can have catastrophic consequences for motorcycling in
terms of rider-bike unity, and in the Aikido context, can leave one open
126 M. A. GORDON
to attack. In the ‘daily life’ view of Ki Aikido, this suki or ‘opening’ or

depletion of one’s ki would result in taking on undue stress, or incurring
illness. In their key work on gestalt therapy, Perls et al. (1951) lay out
that: ‘Among the biological and social sciences, all of which deal with
interacting in the organism/environment field, psychology studies the
operation of the contact-boundary in the organism/environment field’
(Perls et al., 1951, p. 5). What is this contact-boundary and this ‘field’ as
it relates to our discussion of Aikido, self, therapy, and riding? In Gestalt
Therapy, we find as its core concern the very motor intentionality, skill-
fulness and ‘projective capacity’ Merleau-Ponty (2012) refers to in the
‘transparent instrument’—e.g., the ‘blind man’s (sic) cane.’ Perls et al.
(1951) invoke this liminal contact-boundary to examine all aspects of
perception and (inter)action as a ‘whole’ or field encounter with their
environment:
Experience occurs at the boundary between the organism and its environ-
ment, primarily the skin surface and the other organs of sensory and motor
response. Experience is the function of this boundary, and psychologi-
cally what is real are the “whole” configurations of this functioning, some
meaning being achieved, some action completed. (1951, p. 3)
They continue:
When we say “boundary” we think of a “boundary between”; but the

contact-boundary, where experience occurs, does not separate the organ-
ism and its environment; rather it limits the organism, contains and pro-
tects it, and at the same time it touches the environment. That is, to put
it in a way that must seem odd, the contact-boundary — for example, the
sensitive skin — is not so much a part of the “organism” as it is essentially
the organ of a particular relation of the organism and the environment.
Primarily, as we shall soon try to show, this particular relation is growth.
(1951, p. 5)
We shall return to the idea of growth in gestalt therapy in this essay as

it relates to adaptation, learning, and self-cultivation of psychospiritual
awareness. In the meantime, let us briefly explore more of this ‘organ-
ism/environment field,’ motor intentionality, mutual incorporation and
aida in the specific practice of motorcycling.
‘Cargo-Rider’ Versus ‘Component-Rider’:

Aida (‘Betweenness’) and Rider-Bike Unity
Spiegel, in his pivotal book The Upper Half of the Motorcycle (2010), uses
the example of a telescoping handheld pointer to define the limits of
human sense receptors as being at the point of contact with the tool. If
one is to touch the pointer tip to a wall and move it along, the ‘mapping’
and sensation of the wall are, as previously described, not felt directly
through their fingertips, but extended through the tool in an imagina-
tion-perception function as if the fingertips were making contact. As
Ingold (2002) writes: ‘If, as Heidegger seems to suggest, self and world
merge in the activity of dwelling, so that one cannot say where one ends
and the other begins, it surely follows that the intentional presence of
the perceiving agent, as a being-in-the-world, must also be an embodied
presence’ (Ingold, 2002, p. 169). ‘“The body,”’ Ingold continues, ‘(as)
Merleau-Ponty wrote, “is the vehicle of being in the world, and having
a body is, for a living creature, to be involved in a definite environment,
to identify oneself with certain projects and be continually committed to
them”’ (Ingold, 2002, p. 82).
From Unidirectional Incorporation

to Mutual Incorporation
Indeed, let us return now to the nature of the rider-machine union as a

similar kind ‘practice’ or ‘way,’ in the sense of achievement of body-mind
coordination explored earlier in Aikido, meditation and so on. Spiegel
(2010) describes the connection between the organic self-awareness sys-
tem of rider (‘matrix’) with the partner system of the machine (motor-
cycle; patrix). The result is, Spiegel says, a matrix-patrix ‘junction’ or
interface between two separate sub-systems through ‘intimate action
and mutual assimilation’ (p. 84). Thus, he says, ‘A new unit, with new
system characteristics, has been formed from two separate subsystems.’
Being ‘absorbed’ by the bike, and absorbing the bike simultaneously in a
‘higher level’ of integration, leads to what Spiegel calls a ‘super-ordinate’
system. The suggestion here is that this kind of ‘mutual assimilation’
does transcend one’s ordinary boundary through interface displacement.
Spiegel is speaking of the motorcycle as a tool (here we return to the
128 M. A. GORDON
example of the ‘pointer’ touching the wall), such that while the physical
interface is between the user and tool, it is also where the sense receptors
physically terminate, and subsequently it is where the tool becomes an
extension of one’s sensing self in the world, and hence ‘where the inter-
face is experienced’ (Spiegel, 2010, p. 87). He continues:
…when an object is wielded with the utmost virtuosity (whether a pointer

or a motorcycle), there are simply no sensors on its outer surface (at the
end of the pointer or on the motorcycle’s contact patches) and no neural
connections to the center. Therefore, it’s all imagination. (p. 94)
Spiegel (2010) reminds us of some crucial observations about at

least two of these ‘waypoints’ as regards motorcycling. Returning to the
mutual ‘absorption’ of the rider and machine, he reminds us of some
basic physics as regards the ability to move into interface displacement—
that is, seamless integration of rider, machine-as-tool, and movement. As
such, the two are crucially interdependent: lean angle, and contact patch.
The former, he lays out is part of our ‘internal’ biomechanical aware-
ness in terms of our balance and individual attenuation to ‘uprightness’
in our physical movement. The latter is a highlight of the fact that the
point of friction—static or dynamic—for a motorcycle rests upon the
‘contact patch’ of the front and rear tiers respectively, crucially com-
prised of an area roughly equivalent to the palm of one’s hand. Simply
put, one is only ever riding on a few inches of rubber. This ‘contact’
patch is the interface between the rider, the road, the conditions, and
extending line of their adjustment curve in riding acuity and skill to
override their, literally, natural inclination (lean angle).
Spiegel (2010) stresses that a rider’s inhibition to push their lean
angle preference is pivotal to their riding skill and safety: too timid, and
they risk understeering/navigating a tight turn radius on a curve; too
aggressive, and the result is equally disastrous. Spiegel also suggests a
lack of integration and attunement with the rider-machine dynamics can
disclose dis-integration, whether through inattention to steering, brak-
ing, acceleration, lean inputs or corrections, and so on. Thus, going
from ‘static’ to ‘dynamic’ friction (e.g., sliding; contact patch) is equil-
ibrated through the kind of daily ‘evidence experience’ (learning on
the fly, in the moment) and ‘immediate insight into a situation,’ which
Spiegel defines as ‘not acquired after discursive consideration and logical
reasoning’ (2010, p. 97). It is ‘impossible,’ Spiegel asserts, to ride fast

without interface displacement; in that traction control arrives not as
‘conscious thoughts’ but through a process of ‘slipping in’ to the motor-
cycle, where ‘the direct route from the initial sensing of the physical
event to conscious control of action and reaction is much faster and less
prone to interference than the indirect path through the rational mind’
(p. 98). Ultimately, Spiegel says, interface displacement leads to higher
unification between rider and machine, moving one from a ‘cargo-rider’
to ‘component-rider’ relationship of rider-machine. We are no longer
‘on’ the motorcycle; we are ‘in’ it, or rather, with it.
Riding as Embodied Learning

As riding instructor/author Keith Code (1993) stresses, the risks of
incurring out-of-phaseness or desynchrony with the motorcycle, result-
ing in Spiegel’s dis-integration, have lethal consequences. In this next
section, we briefly explore Code’s discussion of ‘survival reactions’ in
motorcycling, and how applied skillfulness can override our panic, lim-
bic reactivity, and motor-sensory ‘freezing up.’ While certainly useful
as life-sustaining skills in motorcycling, the focus here is to widen the
frame of Code’s (1993) observations of riding risks/skills to a broader
consideration of how similar psychological, emotional, and social skill-
fulness can lead to the kind of growth referred to by Gestalt Therapy and
suggested earlier in the practice or ‘way’ of Aikido. Code asserts that the
standard survival reaction (SR) triggers in motorcycling are: ‘In too fast’;
‘Going too wide’; ‘Too steep lean angle’; ‘Concerned about traction’
(Code, 1993, p. 13). The resulting SRs, according to Code, are:
1. Roll-off the gas.

2. Tighten on bars.
3. Narrowed and frantically hunting* field of view.
4. Fixed attention (on something).
5. Steering in the direction of the fixed attention.
6. No steering (frozen) or ineffective (not quick enough or too early)
steering.
7. Braking errors (both over/under braking). (p. 14)
Code (1993) says that these SRs are the result of automatic (or sub-
conscious) fear reactions. ‘Whether for a real or an imagined reason,
130 M. A. GORDON
anything that triggers one of the above survival reactions (SRs) is an

attempt to reduce or avoid injury. None of them work in harmony
with machine technology or rider control’ (p. 14). Taking a brief look
at a few of these SRs yields interesting metaphors for life in general—
our emotional reactions, for example, (1) roll-off the gas. The rider
instinctively cuts the throttle to slow down the bike on a too-fast/
too-deep approach or radius of a curve. Thinking the reduced speed
will slow him or her down and allow her or him more time to adapt
to the radius is a critical error. In fact, when the throttle is reduced,
the bike ‘sits up’ taller/straighter (as does the rider), thus reducing the
needed lean angle of rider-bike to follow the curve. The result is the
bike heads straight on off the road or into an obstacle. The second-
ary effect of this is seen in 3, 4, and 5 of the above list. This reac-
tion can be grouped as target fixation or, as Code (1993) calls it, ‘fixed
attention.’ In other words, in a panic, one’s SR cause them to ‘lock
in’ to the obstacle or fast-approaching hazard ahead (e.g., edge of
the road, guard rail, tree, etc.), and rather than apply needed adjust-
ment—steering, throttle, lean angle inputs—fear keeps their attention
and thus their body frozen in place, leading them exactly toward the
target. Conversely, learning the physics of one’s machine, and moving
beyond the limits of one’s fear, SRs, and basic skills sets the rider up
to adapt to the road and be in synchrony with the motorcycle and the
conditions.
It is asserted here that these very dynamics and adapted skills, if
not directly, fall metaphorically in place with what Perls et al. (1951)
lay out as growth via working with the contact-boundary of one’s
organism-environment field. As we have seen in this essay, as subjec-
tive beings our experience of our ‘field’ or ecology is inseparable from
our ‘lived body.’ Certainly, as seen in Code’s SRs, we carry embodied,
automatic responses to stimuli, threat and so forth. Taking this further,
however, these automatic reactions are also identifiable as our associ-
ations, psychological conditioning, the expression of our entire inter-
nalized, embodied life experience. In other words, the body reveals
who we are through our physical reactions, gestures, and emotional
responses. Thus, ‘growth’ in the gestalt therapy sense can be seen as
skillful contact with boundary/field, generating increased awareness
and adaptation.
Emotional Survival Responses and Transmutation

Through Self-Cultivation
A common aphorism in lay Buddhist practice is that in working with
one’s psycho-emotional patterns and blocks, to paraphrase Robert
Frost’s A Servant to Servants (1914), ‘the best way out is always
through.’ As Confucius asked rhetorically: ‘The way out is through
the door. Why is it that no one will use this method?’ Gestalt Therapy,
Aikido, and self-transformation through ‘moto-morphosis’ or rider-bike
unity, it has been suggested here, are practices that make use of ‘con-
tact-boundary’ with our world, our daily encounters, our lingering unre-
solved struggles and tensions, toward social and psychospiritual growth.
The aim of Gestalt Therapy, and indeed Aikido, is the same: to begin
honestly with where we are, and to engage in practices that foster cultiva-
tion of a more relaxed, relational, and non-reactive self. In Buddhist and
certainly Aikido terms, this evolved self is situated within a worldview of
non-dualism—the notion that all of reality has merely the conditional
appearance (relative reality) of distinct materialism and discrete elements,
when in fact this is an error or confusion (maya) stemming from the
skewed purview of a separate ego-identity within us. Watts (1974) refers
to this mistaken notion that we are separate identities and egos engaging
a world ‘out there’ as ‘skin-encapsulated egos’ (Watts, 1974, p. 24).
The contemplative practice of mindfulness meditation (shamatha)
through what is called ‘bare attention’ allows practitioners to ‘start
where they are’ through non-judgmental self-observation. The effect
of this steady, patient, and non-interventionist meta-cognitive approach
regards all arising phenomena as similar mental activity. The focus of this
contemplative awareness is not on the content of the mind, rather the
process or nature of mind. This practice of simple mindful awareness fos-
ters insight into one’s pervasive mental activity and emotional ‘afflictions’
without regard to specific content and is meant to lead practitioners
toward the Buddhist values known as the Four Immeasurables. These are
aspired to as the following qualities: more compassionate regard of our
own unfolding experience (compassion or karuna); awareness that this
compassion or connection to our own struggles is common to all sen-
tient beings as ‘suffering’ (thus fostering the quality of ‘equanimity’ or
upekkhā); that this equanimous view and compassionate grounding lead
to an attitude of loving-kindness (metta); and finally, that one enjoins in
the well-being of others (‘empathetic joy’ or mudita).
132 M. A. GORDON
Thus, the study of one’s own mind allows us to become ‘familiar’

with one’s psychological, emotional, and cognitive patterns, thus trans-
forming them through adhering to the Four Immeasurables. Tibetan
Buddhism includes a methodology beyond simple self-observation
for working with our inchoate psycho-emotional conditioning, which
forms the ‘ground’ or basic relative pattern of our apparent individual
identity. This practice is formed around the representative concept of
five ‘Buddha families’ or ‘wisdom energies,’ each of which alone or in
combination comprise or symbolize a given person’s emotional-ener-
getic characteristics or schemas (Rockwell, 2002). Each family or energy
grouping contains respectively destructive or enlightened aspects. In my
own study and practice with these, for example, I identified my orienta-
tion with Vajra, also described as the direction of North and season as
Winter. In its destructive orientation, Vajra represents cold anger, stub-
bornness, and control. However, in its enlightened aspect, Vajra reflects
clear-mindedness, steadfastness, and wisdom—cutting like a sword. By
working with these emotional resonances in contemplative practice,
one moves from feeling trapped or disgusted by these disruptive nega-
tive emotional schemas toward transmuting them into their enlightened
expression.
There are countless psychotherapeutic approaches and modalities
for working with one’s conditioning, blocks and psychodynamic oscil-
lations, all guided by improving one’s relationship with self and oth-
ers. The purpose of raising the Tibetan example is to invoke a similar
East Asian philosophy of self-transformation through practice, embed-
ded in an ethical, non-dualistic ontology. One of the instructions in
the Tibetan lojong mind-training discipline is to ‘drive all blames into
one’ (Trungpa, 2005, p. 68). The idea here is that the ‘vengefulness’
of blaming others distracts us from looking within at our own reac-
tions, and from our capacity for self-forgiveness and compassion for
others.
Gestalt Therapy and Aikido invite us to indeed look at our own inter-
nal disruptions or lack of cohesion, or to look to the contact-boundary
with our ‘field’ as a means of examining capacity for growth. While it
would be a stretch to make any such claims in general about motor-
cycling, the contact-boundary with the experience of riding can cer-
tainly ‘awaken’ us dangerously to our incongruity with ourselves or
our ‘world,’ or to adapt Spiegel’s terms: ‘interface displacement’ vs.
disintegration. To put the latter term to more psychological use, how-

ever, it is evident that many people (certainly psychotherapy clients,
though not necessarily all motorcyclists!) arrive to adulthood ‘dis-inte-
grated.’ Adverse childhood experiences or developmental trauma and
attachment wounds predictably set children up to internalize cogni-
tive distortions and to adopt coping strategies or what can be seen as
‘maladaptive’ behaviors—in other words, survival responses. In Schema
Therapy (Young, Klosko, & Weishaar, 2003) as an example, such coping
strategies learned in early life are based on three categories: (1) over-
compensation (e.g., control); (2) surrender (e.g., people-pleasing); and
(3) avoidance (i.e., withdrawal, self-soothing, stimulation-seeking).
In the face of ‘contact’ with our everyday field (e.g., in the risky activ-
ity of operating a motorcycle), we can run squarely into these interfer-
ence patterns, often only when a crisis demands truthful reckoning by
means other than blame of others or obstinacy. In the case of my NDE in
this article, all of these interference patterns formed my contact-bound-
ary. By this, I address two of the ‘layers’ mentioned in this essay’s intro-
duction—the first layer being the physical contact-boundary of rider-bike
and physical object (pavement, impacting car); and the second layer
being the array of unconscious Jungian ‘shadow’ forces in my life gestalt
that compromised my full awakeness and coordinated attention. Again,
I can only account for my survival based on the mitigating habits and
embodied coordination stemming from years of riding skillfulness, this
augmented by a lifetime of training in the temporal-spatial mind-body
coordination from Ki Aikido. As more than one person remarked after
hearing of my accident, ‘It was not yet your time to die.’ While my
enhanced proprioception and acquired riding skills may have saved my
physical life in the micro-moment of the collision—and certainly buff-
ered the rapid shutting down of consciousness from the limbic system’s
shock—the deeper, emotional, and meaning-based shockwave erupted
days after the accident.
Psychotherapist Terence Real suggests that many men—suffering from
a cultural deficit of hyper-masculinity, lack of attenuated, open emo-
tional vulnerability, and emotional literacy—endure what he calls ‘covert
depression’ (Real, 1998, p. 59). Only when a life crisis erupts beyond
their ability to suppress or mask it (i.e., gambling debts, a heart attack,
drunk driving accident, marital affairs, etc.) does this covert depression
emerge as overt depression. Having now, though involuntarily, reached
134 M. A. GORDON
the light of day, this overt depression can be addressed and treated
through self-care, therapy, and repairing one’s relationships both with
self and others. My accident was a wake-up call—particularly for some-
one who was gainfully employed as a psychotherapist helping others
through such crises, and as someone focused on mind-body-spirit coor-
dination in daily life through Ki Aikido. In the case of my NDE, having
calmly survived the immediacy of the accident and being relatively phys-
ically unharmed, I awoke abruptly days later in a cold sweat of uncon-
trollable panic and emotion. Physical survival and shock being out of the
way, it was now ‘safe’ for my body and psyche to let the layers of fear,
shame, and existential gravity surface.1
Closing Thoughts
This essay has engaged in an interpretive inquiry into my personal
NDE by way of looking at the embodied awareness and skillfulness of
Aikido—a defensive Japanese martial art that requires studied attune-
ment into relationality, intercorporeality, and interconnection. Parallels
between Aikido training and advanced motorcycling reveal a simi-
lar sense of intercorporeality or kinesthetic attunement with through
enhanced rider-bike mutual incorporation or integration. In this
enhanced rider-bike unity—as with Aikido bringing the practitioner into
‘being at one with the situation’—comes an ecological, non-dual and
holistic ‘field’ awareness of ourselves and environment, we have drawn
on phenomenology and Gestalt Therapy to see the inseparability of self
(‘figure’) and experience/world (‘ground’). Spiegel’s (2010) ‘inter-
face displacement,’ where the motorcycle (or in Aikido, one’s attacker)
is seen in non-dualistic relationship with the rider allows—even necessi-
tates—‘immediate insight into a situation.’ Similarly, in the traditional
and Japanese psychosomatic view of selfhood in Buddhism, Aikido and
contemporary social cognition theory, we have explored how practices
that cultivate ‘mind-body unity’ are grounded as aspirational and achiev-
able, the latter in the sense of not only ‘first-person’ integration of mind-
body, but the lived, liminal, fluid, and intercorporeal sense of the world
as aida or ‘betweenness.’ Finally, rather than succumbing to the dualistic
notion of riding on a bike, the practice of being in the bike can attune us
not only to the machine but the road—our ecology of experience, per-
ception, and interaction with daily life.
Note
1. In my work as a psychotherapist. I almost exclusively use Eye Movement
Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) therapy—a modality based on
a trauma model. Simply put, by mimicking and stimulating brain process-
ing through cross-hemispheric stimulation and coherence seen in Rapid
Eye Movement (REM) during deep sleep, EMDR allows clients to safely
reprocess traumatic material. These trauma episodes or internalized pat-
terns of fear, shame, or powerlessness—which are often ‘somaticized’ or
in-the-body—shift from reoccurring or being triggered as a ‘present’
or real experience, to being related to as a past memory. In reducing the
overwhelming mind-body ‘state’ (hyper-arousal) triggered by the past, cli-
ents are able to engage their affective state (emotions) in a much more
workable way. Feeling is no longer synonymous with danger. Similarly, this
article points to cultivating mind-body calmness and non-reactivity as a
way of actively diffusing overwhelm, danger, and unnecessary defensive-
ness in-the-moment, pro re nata.
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136 M. A. GORDON

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Trans.). Albany, NY: State University of New York Press.
PART III
A Relational View of Practice
Illustration III.1 Do, “way or path”

CHAPTER 5
The Way of the Classroom:

Aikido as Transformative and Embodied
Pedagogy Through Self-Cultivation
Introduction
In this essay, I explore the psychospiritual, non-dualistic, and relational
aspects of Aikido as a model of self-transformation toward an ‘embod-
ied habitus’ (Inoue, 2006, p. 230) of moral virtue (altruism), empathic
resonance, and interconnectedness. This essay begins with British psychi-
atrist Ian McGilchrist’s (2009) stirring notion that our over-rationalistic
epistemological worldview has actually negatively altered our cognition
through neuroplasticity. In other words, our skewed, dualistic, acquisi-
tive, and target-focused view has become our practice, resulting in a
world that reflects the ‘epistemological error’ of our separateness from
nature. The approach of Aikido teaching and learning as a pedagogy as
self-and-other transformation is explored here in ways that are aimed at
being transferable and generalizable to many educational contexts.
The use of two specific words in this essay—‘pedagogy’ and
‘classroom’—is of important note here. In conventional usage and
indeed throughout the literature on holistic and contemplative edu-
cation, ‘pedagogy’ usually points to school instruction methods,
A version of this chapter is published elsewhere as: Gordon, Michael A. (2019).

The way of the classroom: Aikido as transformative pedagogy through self-
cultivation. In J. Lin, B. Kirby, S. Edwards, & T. Culham (Eds.), Contemplative
pedagogies for transforming teaching, learning and being. Charlotte, NC:
Information Age Publishing.

140 M. A. GORDON
practices, and theories. Similarly, ‘classroom’ normally signifies discus-

sion about the locality and culture of institutional school instruction
and learning. In this essay, both terms connote a philosophical rather
than a literal understanding of their place in the psychospiritual devel-
opment of learners and educators. ‘Pedagogy’ is raised here in a more
radical etymological discussion of the term, which means ‘to lead’ (on
foot) or accompany a child to and from school. This essay takes a more
metaphorical approach of this literal definition by exploring pedagogy
as ‘leading and accompanying’ the child’s process as self-cultivation, thus
connoting a co-creative, reciprocal, and mentoring-based relationship.
In a similar vein, ‘classroom’ in this essay is less a container for ped-
agogical technique than as a medium through which transformational
education and self-cultivation can occur as ‘way’ from the point of view
of East Asian practice, and which exemplifies philosophy ‘as a way of
life’ (Hadot, 1995).
If British psychiatrist Ian McGilchrist (2009) is right, then his theory
confirms a pervasive cognitive bias of Western thought. The same notion
has been put forth in 2500 years old Buddhist teachings: We don’t see
the world as it is; we see it as we are (Rinpoche, Swanson, & Goleman,
2008). McGilchrist’s 20 years of research culminating in The Master and
His Emissary suggests how millennia of Western thought has both pro-
duced—and is indelibly shaped by—an epistemology that reproduces
over-localized, target fixated, rationalistic, and logocentric thinking. The
latter, he says, is the neuroanatomical domain of the left hemisphere of
the brain, the active neural matrix that brings into consciousness our
tactile and calculable interaction in the space-time of the world neces-
sary to survival. However, as McGilchrist (2009) explains, the left hem-
isphere conducts itself so in service (as the ‘emissary’) of the relational,
contextual, global function of the right side of the brain. Over the course
of Western discourse and civilization however, the roles have become
reversed. In a kind of neuroplasticity run amok,1 the Western cognitive
model of reality reflects an over-consumptive, industrialized, technolo-
gized world that is out of balance with nature. In effect, our rift from
nature reflects our own ‘divided brain.’ Following this, then, how do we
correct this historical deviation, and what role could education play?
In line with McGilchrist’s dramatic assessment, this essay examines
the role of contemplative practice—specifically, through the lens of the
mind/body self-cultivation of the Japanese martial art of Aikido—to be
transformative and restorative for both educator, students, and toward
5 THE WAY OF THE CLASSROOM: AIKIDO AS TRANSFORMATIVE … 141
harmonized relationships with life in totality. Unlike the kind of hydro-

ponic education environment of modern schooling,2 where students sit
rigidly row-upon-row in desks and chairs, under artificial lights, walled
off from one another’s interiority and the natural world to be ‘fertilized’
with knowledge from sanctioned sources of sterile curricula, contempla-
tive practice focus on one’s psychospiritual development in coherence
with their environment. As Nakagawa (2000) emphasizes, this approach
reflects and engenders a holistic cosmology of interdependence.
Yuasa (1993) highlights that, as with much Eastern philosophy, the-
ory and practice are not so split, dichotomized, and problematized as
they are in the Western tradition of rationalism, positivism, and objective
empiricism in pursuit of proving ultimate truth about reality.3 Rather,
one’s psychospiritual development unfolds through praxis or practical
knowledge (not unlike neoclassical Hellenistic philosophy), dispens-
ing of fixation on empirical, epistemological or ontological ‘proof.’ In
essence, the true nature of reality is something to be individually realized
through self-cultivation, transposing the goal of discovery of truth to one
of achievement.
Contemplative education as a practice approaches each pedagogical
space as being an already living ecology of human beings. Something is
already happening by way of emotional, psychological, and somatic reg-
isters for those who carry forth life narratives, daily psychosocial strug-
gles, aspirational intentions, and the emergent interpersonal dynamics of
the group (Bai, Park, & Cohen, 2016; Shotter, 2005). Contemplative
practices for students and educators alike bring awareness to one’s
moment-to-moment experience not only as a methodology for emo-
tional regulation in the classroom, but as a way of experientially investi-
gating the relationship between the transitory aspect of one’s thoughts,
feelings, and bodily sensations, with their perception (or even, psy-
chological projection) of and engagement with the world around them.
While contemplative practices may provide exposure to and even insight
into our psychological, physical, and emotional reflexivity, the question
remains: How do we work with these registers to remediate such reflex-
ivity and reactiveness? In other words, how do we move from contem-
plative awareness to transformation in our ways of being and doing? This
essay explores these questions by first identifying what pedagogical and
inhabited psychosocial practices are already in place, and then, through
our physical interactions—through our enhanced awareness of our body
as the ‘shadow of the mind’—how we can begin to transform them.
142 M. A. GORDON
What might an embodied awareness entail? Beyond mere somatic

sensation, Linden (1986), Shusterman (2006), and Freiler (2008) are
among many authors who advocate toward ‘thinking and learning
through the body.’ Linden comments: ‘By simply executing a movement,
a person is making a philosophical statement; thus, it is possible to use
movement education as a means of philosophical education’ (Linden,
1986, p. 107). Put another way, Schatzki (cited in Green & Hopwood,
2015) suggests that ‘bodily doings and sayings, and bodily sensations and
feelings, are the medium in which life and mind/action are present in the
word…By way of the body, mind is present in experience’ (2015, p. 20).
This chapter explores these interpersonal and pedagogical interactions,
and contemplative practice as transformational, by way of the author’s
lifelong experience teaching and training in the Japanese defensive art of
Aikido. Distinctive from other ‘martial’ arts, Aikido is a non-competitive
form of training where one learns to move in synchronous timing and
space in response to the attack of a partner. As we shall see, the goal in
Aikido is not to merely physically or coercively counteract an opponent’s
movement, but rather to be sensitively attuned to one’s surroundings to
apprehend and blend with the attack as it arises. Doing so enables one to
use ‘minimum effort and maximum efficiency’4 (a term paraphrased from
Judo founder Kano Jigoro; October 28, 1860–May 4, 1938) to resolve
the conflict with a non-destructive attitude and outcome. Thus, Aikido
embodies a spirit of protection for self and other true to its spiritual
foundations in Shintoism and Buddhism.5
That said, Aikido is highlighted here not as a model of high moral
virtue as such, but as aspirational as that may be. Nor is the purpose
to focus on the specificity of Aikido technique in its own regard even
though, while the operative principle of ‘do no harm’ from Buddhist
precepts underpins Aikido’s ethos, it is also a highly effective and practi-
cal form of conflict resolution (e.g., self-defense). How, then, does fore-
grounding Aikido illustrate the contemplative as transformational? The
answer, as we shall see, lies in the aforementioned notion that contem-
plative awareness of one’s embodied cognitive, emotional, and somatic
reflexivity is the ground for one’s enhanced capacity for responsiveness. In
other words, transformation begins within and is reflected without in our
interactions. Aikido is presented here as a practice. Moreover, it is sug-
gested here that practices are always occurring in pedagogical spaces, and
in large extent through our metaphorical and physical bodily actions. As
Green and Hopwood (2015) write:
When professionals are engaged in practice, in performing their profes-

sional work, their bodies are always-already active participants…These
bodies are not at all supplementary to what is happening; indeed, to a sig-
nificant if varying degree, they are energizing and orchestrating the prac-
tice in question, anchoring it and organizing it. Knowing how to go on,
what to do next, etc., is a matter of practical reason as much as anything
else, and this reasoning is always embodied, in the sense that it is tacit,
experiential (‘body’) knowledge, or knowing, realized and expressed in
what is done, in and through practice. (p. 26)
Green and Hopwood (2015) make a profound observation here about

our hidden embodiment. The question they raise is not the matter of how
we become more embodied per se, rather in what ways are we already
embodied, and how do we enact self-transformative practices to become
more aware and skillful in making these unconscious embodiments con-
scious, empathic, and relationally whole.
Pedagogy as Practice, Practice

as (Self) Transformation
The question arises: what is being practiced, and what is the impact on
the well-being of those involved? Do these practices reproduce or trans-
form the aforementioned problematics of ‘hydroponic education,’ social
isolation, and individualized ontology?
As a psychosocial—and psychospiritual—model, Aikido is presented
in the context of a classical Eastern education paradigm as moral vir-
tue, relational and aesthetic self-cultivation through practice or ‘way’
(Japanese: do or michi), even practice as spiritual cultivation (Davey,
2002; Nakagawa, 2000). I suggest here, then, that Aikido is both a prac-
tice that is a pedagogy, and pedagogy as practice. As a ‘way’ in the Eastern
tradition, Aikido also resembles what we shall explore further on as
the idea of ‘living curriculum.’ The notion here is that the contempla-
tive-transformative axis of practice becomes us through ‘embodied habitus’
(Inoue, 2006, p. 230). It is suggested here that, as in Aikido, one’s
grounded, calm, and centered non-threatening stance can have a neutral-
izing or grounding effect in-and-of itself. This is not, however, to imply
that to such aspirational qualities could only be achieved through such
specific training. Rather, it is that contemplative practices akin to Aikido,
those that focus on mind-body coordination in-and-through relational
144 M. A. GORDON
awareness, can have a therapeutic effect6 on all aspects of one’s living.

Simply stated, one’s ‘outer’ posture becomes a reflection of one’s ‘inner’
posture, allowing us to connect in wholeness with, as Kant says, the
‘inner possibility’ in all things (in Shotter, 2005, p. 135). As Linden says
(1986): ‘Posture is really an intention to relate to life in a given way, and
that is exactly what a philosophy is’ (1986, p. 108). He continues that
one learns from Aikido ‘how to use the training as a situation in which to
create and divert philosophical change’ (1986, p. 110).
In other words, we carry with us the learning and enhancements
toward being less reflexive such that it is reflected in our daily life. In this
recursive pattern between self-awareness and other-relatedness, between
classroom practice and our work-life relationships, everything becomes
pedagogical and becomes a transformative teaching and learning space.
In seeing all things as being inherently involved and already-in-
relationship, Shotter (2005) contends that we can move into being
more ‘relationally-responsive’ (as cited in Shotter, 2005, p. 158). This,
he posits, contrasts ‘aboutness-thinking’ with ‘withness (dialogic)-
thinking’ (2005, p. 145). This chapter suggests a pedagogical (re)turn to
education’s radix as a transformative developmental process, where philos-
ophy guides the pursuit of wisdom as the spiritual path of bridging self-
awareness (contemplative consciousness) with ontological awareness
(cosmic consciousness).
Toward a Contemplative Habitus

Radical educators, including Illich (1971), Goodman (1960), Freire
(2000), and Gatto (2010) have commented that the development of
modern industrialized schooling brought with it, implicit socialization
of norms, domination, and oppression known as the ‘hidden curricu-
lum.’ Gatto (2010) writes of the creation of two-tiered education as an
internal class striation within education, and the dehumanizing effects of
mass schooling, overcrowding and standardized testing. Vallance (1973)
notes: ‘The functions of this hidden curriculum have been variously iden-
tified as the inculcation of values, political socialization, training in obedi-
ence and docility, the perpetuation of traditional class structure–functions
that may be characterized generally as social control’ (1973, p. 5).
Notably, Bourdieu (1977) describes these carried, socially engrained
dispositions of the hidden curriculum form, our habitus.7 Through the
lens of the holistic well-being of learners as human beings, however, we
might also consider the ‘missing curriculum’—and thusly, room for a

‘new’ contemplative habitus. As hooks (1994) comments, for exam-
ple, formal education creates a sterile environment, stifling creativity and
passion—much akin to the sterile ‘hydroponic’ model presented in the
introduction to this chapter. ‘If we are all emotionally shut down,’ asks
hooks, ‘how can there be any excitement about ideas?’ (hooks, 1994,
pp. 154–155). Bai et al. (2016) emphasize that far from being emotion-
ally ‘shut down,’ classrooms are a locus of the entire panoply of human
emotion and experience, which ‘flood our consciousness, teacher and
student alike, moment by moment. All these very human experiences are
acted out subtly and not so subtly, spoken of or hidden, guarded or left
open’ (Bai et al., 2016, p. 113). Bai et al. (2016) go on to highlight that
awareness of these turbulent psycho-emotional processes, even if they
were the subject of schooling, demand more than a cognitive intellectual
approach: They are embodied aspects of the whole person. As Hart (2004)
says: ‘How we know is as important as what we know’ (2004, p. 28).
Mindfulness and embodied knowledge, it should be noted, do not
necessarily connote a spiritual approach or practice intention. That said,
higher education students who might benefit or be drawn to such sec-
ular practices may be attracted from a place of spiritual hunger. In one
long-term research project alone, Astin, Astin, and Lindholm (2010)
conducted a seven-year study on the impact of college on the develop-
ment of students, concluding that ‘spirituality is fundamental to the lives
of students’ (2010, p. 1). Astin et al., conclude that after approximately
5000 studies spanning four decades researching the lives of students,
only a fragment of research even acknowledges spirituality.
With such explosive psycho-emotional material, carrying with it
such emancipatory human spiritual hunger and potential, how do we
then go about safely liberating educational spaces in a way that fosters
respect, safety, diversity, kindness, and compassion? How do we, practi-
cally speaking, attend to the embodied ‘inner and outer’ dichotomy of
our unfolding selves in a way that teaches how to coexist more compas-
sionately, respectfully, and mindfully? This is a call to embrace a ‘living’
or ‘spiritual’ curriculum (Magrini, 2015; Moffett, 1994). Further, it
speaks to the urgent need of educators to see their own healing being
inextricably bound with the transformative ‘therapy’ of the classroom
and students. As Bai, Scott, and Donald (2009) suggest: ‘Indwelling
interpersonal relationship requires that educators engage in the Art of
Awareness. We must find ways to reflect on relational connection and
146 M. A. GORDON
disconnection in ourselves and on our feelings, beliefs, and perceptions

in relationship with others’ (2009, p. 332). Aikido, then, is put forth
here as an ‘art of awareness.’
Aikido: How Is It Contemplative,

and in What Way Transformative Education?
Morihei Ueshiba (1883–1969), founder of Aikido and known as

‘O Sensei,’8 evolved his art after years of his own training, teaching,
adaptation, and integration of traditional Japanese martial arts or bujutsu
including kenjutsu (sword), yari (spear), and most prominently jujutsu,
all of which are interwoven in a unifying spiritual connection to divinity
through the deeply animistic Shinto religion. Ueshiba’s focus on trans-
forming aiki-bujutsu (martial skills) to aiki-budo (martial ‘way’—see budo
in footnote, above) reflects his emphasis on spiritual transformation
through self-cultivation.9 His use of the prefix aiki comprises the funda-
mental spiritual expression of Ueshiba’s teachings. Ai translates as ‘har-
mony or blending’ and Ki represents the ‘living universe, or underlying
animating force of nature.’ Finally, do means ‘path’ or ‘way.’
Aikido thus represents a kind of paradox: How can a way evolve out
of martial skills be an expression of love and peaceful resolve? Also, how
is this an expression of transformative teaching and learning? It is impor-
tant to first situate Aikido within the deeper spiritual expression of budo
principles, expressed by Ueshiba, thus:
The source of Budo is God’s love — the spirit of loving protection for all

beings … Budo is not the felling of an opponent by force; nor is it a tool
to lead the world to destruction with arms. True Budo is to accept the
spirit of the universe, keep the peace of the world, correctly produce, pro-
tect and cultivate all beings in nature. (Ueshiba, 1985)
As has been noted (Ueshiba, 1985), the word Ai connotes ‘love’ in

Japanese; a distinction O Sensei (‘great teacher’) emphasized throughout
his remaining life. Aikido is thus to be understood as the ‘path of harmo-
nizing with the universe’ and of harmonizing through ‘love’ or divine
unification of humans, nature, and the cosmos.
Ueshiba’s transition from bujutsu to budo reflects a spiritual as much
as a methodological shift as regards Aikido in the context of Japanese
martial arts. To those unfamiliar with the art, from the outside, Aikido
trainees (or, Aikidoka) may appear like any other martial arts practition-
ers: engaged in a matrix of vigorous, repetitive attack-defense exercises
(forms or kata). However, it is the aiki, the ‘blending and harmonizing’
with one’s partner, that distinguishes Aikido.
Ki Aikido, developed by Koichi Tohei (January 20, 1920–May 19,
2011), former Chief Instructor of the Aikikai or central worldwide
Aikido organization, is an evolution of Aikido. Drawing from Japanese
yoga founder Tempu Nakamura’s (July 20, 1876–December 1, 1968)10
shinshin-toitsu-do (‘way of mind and body unification’), Tohei adapted
his own shinshin-toitsu Aikido. Traditionally, as in many Japanese mar-
tial arts, one discovers and develops their flow of power—ki—without
direct instruction but rather through repetitive, dedicated training (keiko,
‘practice’) that results in more relaxed, natural, and efficient execution of
techniques (Illustration 5.1).
Illustration 5.1 Keiko, ‘training; practice; study’

148 M. A. GORDON
Ki Aikido focuses on ‘ki development’ directly as personal training

for ‘daily life’ by studying integration of one’s personal ki (Japanese:
‘life force’) with infinite or universal ki. Exercises based on principles
of ‘mind and body coordination’ allow partners to test one another for
balance, relaxation, and gain in situ awareness of how the ‘body is the
shadow of the mind’ by contrasting innate tension and subconscious
reaction with calm, natural stability (e.g., aligning one’s self with uni-
versal ki). Adapting Nakamura’s teaching and Aikido allowed Tohei to
discover a teaching method through Ki Aikido that enabled beginners to
directly cultivate the effortless power, relaxation, and flow that Aikido’s
founder exhibited, but which eluded many of the teachers and students
who tried to emulate Ueshiba’s movements without his feeling—his ki.
To simplify, what is presented in Aikido is a modern, kinesthetic, part-
ner-based training for mind and body coordination as a means of cul-
tivating one’s sense of non-resistance (harmony) with others and the
world around them, for daily life. This notion of self-development as
cultivation of spiritual principles is deeply embedded in Japanese culture
and philosophy (Kasulis, Aimes, & Dissanayake, 1993; Nakagawa, 2000;
Yuasa, 1987, 1993).
What does Aikido look like? More importantly, what does it feel
like? Since Aikido is non-competitive, that is, it is not a sport; it does
not involve sparring or combat. Yet, out of its martial or budo lineage,
the spirit of a face-to-face life-threatening encounter is summed as: ‘one
lives, one dies.’ This credo is not to be taken literally in the sense of
destroying one’s opponent. Rather, it is the cultivation of a strong-willed,
centered, and indomitable spirit. Herein lies the paradox of Aikido: That
the rightness of defending one’s self against an aggressor is also imbued
with an intention to protect and even transform the aggression in one’s
opponent.
How is this possible? The basic notion is that by learning to calm
one’s self and develop relaxation, one cultivates an ever-present natural
responsiveness, allowing them to move and blend with their opponent’s
grab, hold or strike, in unison. With no defender (nage: Japanese.)
‘there’ to resist them, the attack becomes effectively defunct. To embody
this readiness, calmness, openness, and ‘not-there-ness’ requires con-
stant effort and self-examination through partner exercises, in which,
for example, to see where one is being tense or exhibiting a ‘fighting’
or resistant mind in reacting to a hold or attack by their partner. It is,

in effect, the ability to go from a habitual reaction-opposition mode to a
ready-responsive-synchronization mode of movement.
Vignette #1: Basic Aikido Posture—Physically, Relationally, Metaphorically
Partners stand facing one another in an oblique posture, feet placed at

approximately 60˚ angle, thumbs/hands aligned and outstretched, palms
wideset and facing as if about to clap or holding a parcel. The initiating
partner (nage) offers a wrist; their partner (uke) receives the invitation,
taking hold. At that moment, nage ‘knows’ the mind of their partner, as ki
is extended with their intention through their hand/fingers to grip around
the wrist. By ‘following’ this extension of their attacker’s mind in a calm–
and body-mechanically identical direction, movement—the nage is able
to alternatively turn, make space or enter into their opponent’s place to
either induce a joint immobilization, unsettle their posture or momentum
of attack such that the uke has to ‘escape’ or be pinned/subdued. As Terry
Dobson, one of a few Americans who trained in Japan with O Sensei dur-
ing the last 10 years of the founder’s life, titled his book, It’s A Lot Like
Dancing. (Dobson, 1994)
Ultimately, the aim is to sense the intention, the ki of the attack, before
it begins; to move in undetected paired rhythm (da-ai; timing) with-
out being grabbed, so that at the maximum force or thrust of the attack,
nage is not there, and uke is projected forward, or otherwise neutralized.
A throw, for example, is expressed as the principle of kokyu or ‘breath
power.’ Kokyu-nage is thus a technique of perfect timing, ki and harmo-
nious space (ma-ai: Japanese) that appears to outsiders as improbable as
it seems pre-arranged or choreographed, rather than what it is: throwing
without throwing. The very ethos of Aikido is expressed, thus: ‘victory
without fighting’ (masakatsu agatsu: ‘true victory is victory over one-
self,’ in Stevens, 1995, p. 104).
In Ki Aikido, one develops a foundation in mind and body coordi-
nation, learning to ‘extend their mind’ (ki), and think from their center
(Japanese: hara, tanden). One can think of these two principles as radi-
ating concentric circles. The ‘inner circle’ is developing the embodied or
subconscious habit of thinking and moving from one’s physical center.
The ‘infinite circle’ is to see one’s physical center as being the center of a
universe that extends limitlessly in every direction. Thus, to ‘extend one’s
150 M. A. GORDON
mind’ means to be connected to limitless stability, lightness, immovabil-

ity, ungraspability of ki. In Ueshiba’s words, according to his eldest son
and initial successor, Kisshomaru:
When an enemy tries to fight with me, the universe itself, he has to break
the harmony of the universe. Hence at the moment he has the mind to
fight with me, he is already defeated. There exists no measure of time – fast
or slow…Aikido is non-resistance. As it is non-resistant, it is always victori-
ous. (Ueshiba, 1985, p. 177)
Again, as we consider these observations it is important to remember

that this essay is not intent on focusing parochially on Aikido training
itself. Rather, and in keeping with the theme of education as self-cultiva-
tion, let us explore the broader place for Aikido as a contemplative and
transformative model of teaching and learning. Following, I first outline
five positive benefits from Aikido as a mind-body discipline. Secondly,
I identify five themes of what spiritual cultivation through a relational
practice such as Aikido offers pedagogy at large (Illustration 5.2).
Illustration 5.2 Hara, ‘one point; centre’

The Benefits of Aikido Training for Daily Life

Increased calm, clarity, focus, confidence.
Better posture, stability, mind-body coordination.
Reduced stress
Increased relational skills and sensitivity (‘dialogic movement’)
Enhance sense of self, purpose, and happiness.
Growing neuroscientific research suggests that the benefits of contem-

plative practice, e.g., meditation, extend beyond meditative states to
actual observed changes to brain itself.11 As regards the benefits of med-
itation and mindfulness in the classroom, Shapiro, Brown, and Astin’s
review (2011) reflects rapidly growing interest and evidence to support
further beneficial integration. If we return to the idea of applied wisdom
in the introduction to this essay, we find in Aikido not simply a model
for secular virtue practice, but a ‘second-person’ contemplative peda-
gogy (Gordon, 2019). In applied research, Lantz (2002) conducted a
grounded-theory phenomenological study that showed that concen-
trated participation in Aikido brought positive benefits to marital and
family development for participants, identifying 12 basic themes: self-
defense, self-confidence, physical vitality, concentration, respect, friend-
ship, moral development, spirit, training for life, grades, respect for life,
and the importance of the martial arts instructor. Croom’s (2014) liter-
ature review suggests that martial arts including Aikido promote mental
health and psychological well-being within the assessment paradigm of
Positive Psychology, specifically: ‘PERMA: positive emotion, engagement,
relationships, meaning, and accomplishment’ (2014, p. 59). As regards
benefits for educators and clinicians, Faggianelli and Lukoff’s (2006)
small study of psychotherapists who are also Aikidoists revealed benefits
including increased emotional presence, responsiveness, and integration
of spirituality into their practice. Lukoff (2014) also studied Aikido as
mindfulness training for psychology students, observing similar benefits.
The following is a simple mind-body coordination exercise that can
be experienced by novice students with basic instruction. The aim of
this exercise is to build awareness of ki, by contrasting the limits of one’s
physical exertion and power (tension) with their natural coordination
(extending their mind; ki). This approach is what in Ki Aikido is called ki
development.
152 M. A. GORDON
Vignette #2: Microcosm—The Universe in One’s Hand
One is instructed to make a circle between their index finger and thumb by
touching them tip-to-tip. Their hand will look like the universally recog-
nized ‘OK’ gesture one makes with the remaining three fingers extended.
Looking down on top of the circle, the person connecting the thumb and
forefinger tips is instructed to hold tightly with conscious physical effort.
Their partner, with no effort at all, is able to insert their left/right hand
index fingers at opposite sides of the ‘circle’ and pull it apart.
Now the first partner is instructed to connect their thumb and fore-
finger tips together forming the circle, but this time with no physi-
cal exertion. They are instructed to hold with enough pressure as if to
hold a piece of paper aloft. What changes, however, is the visualization
and thus the intention and feeling (otherwise, their extension of ki) that
is now directed in an unbroken circuit, round-and-round through their
hand, from the tip of their thumb back around to the tip of their index
finger. The energy loop is closed, like a cyclone moving through their
hand. When the other person now inserts their fingers into the circle to
try and break the loop, it is immensely difficult. The fact that it requires
much more leverage than before to try to break the circle open, with the
other person NOT resisting or using strength, suggests that their coordi-
nated mind and body exhibit a much more stable and unbreakable bond.
This test does not prove an ‘unbreakable grip’ but rather the principle of
‘immovable mind.’ In other words, when one embodies the exclamation of
Aikido’s founder Morihei Ueshiba (O’Sensei) that ‘I AM the universe,’
they become exponentially more immovable in spirit. When one focuses
on one’s limited circle of physical power (e.g.. the body) their mind and
body are thus easily moved.
Anyone can learn the exercise outlined above. Many of us have heard of, or
even witnessed, feats of ‘superhuman’ strength—a mother is suddenly able
to lift a car or an enormously heavy wooden or steel beam with her bare
hands when her child is trapped beneath. Again, to emphasize that such
feats are not supernatural phenomena is to recognize that often our own
inner psychophysical patterns of self-doubt and resistance (e.g., fear, aggres-
sion, tension) prevent us from naturally utilizing the full mental or phys-
ical power that comes from unified mind and body (or, put another way,
fully unified conscious-subconscious responsiveness). How, you may ask, is
this relevant in the classroom or the schoolyard? What good are these class-
room/dojo laboratory micro-instantiations of stability through mind-body
unification when it comes to physical or virtual bullying or shaming?
The short answer here points to what in psychological vernacular is

known as ‘state vs. trait.’ In the above vignette, when our body-mind
is in a state of resistance and tension by trying to ‘stop’ external stim-
uli or threat (the separating of one’s palms forcibly) we induce further
struggle, intrusion, force, and internalization of the ‘attack.’ However,
when we begin with the principle that our life force (ki) is already unified
through our palms with that of the infinite cosmos, we not only tran-
scend such reflexive resistance in ourselves, but also remove the counter-
reaction from our ‘attacker’ by not giving them force to act against. Over
time, this principle ‘becomes’ us such that the state (non-resistance)
becomes our natural way (trait). Contrasting such experiences in a safe
setting allows us to generalize the learning for ourselves to our daily life,
and to abstract the principle of non-resistance from not only physical sit-
uations, but toward recognizing that any threat begins with an internal
reaction or trigger based on our existing state or trait (e.g., fearfulness,
low self-confidence, etc.).
In sum, exercises such as the one described above allow participants
to develop an embodied, self-evident, and empirical sense of ‘immova-
ble mind’ or fudoshin in Japanese. This is to emphasize that the aim of
such partner ‘tests’ for stability of body and calmness of mind is not a
physical feat (though one’s physical posture is greatly stabilized): rather,
their stable posture is the result of a unified mind and body, in turn, uni-
fied with the entire Cosmos. This experience of one’s effortless ‘power’
(mental strength and physical posture) being palpably linked through a
lived sense of inseparability with all of nature is at the very core of aiki.
To summarize, Aikido brings with it many of the benefits identified
in empirical research and outcome studies of other mind-body practice,
including contemplative meditation and yoga. In a larger sense, however,
we can see an expanded spiritual and philosophical benefit from Aikido,
one that extends to enhanced learning and pedagogical practices. In the
following, we will explore a few key benefits to Aikido.
Pedagogical Insights from Aikido

• Increased relational awareness; ‘Withness-thinking vs. Aboutness-
Thinking’ (Shotter, 2005) as development of virtue
• Pedagogy and learning as path vs outcome
• Going beyond ‘minding’ (Gangadean, 2006, p. 381) to moving
without thinking. Or, ‘thinking through the body’ as Shusterman
154 M. A. GORDON
(2006, p. 17) describes his practical or performative somaesthetics

(Shusterman, 2012)
• Teaching to teach
• Teacher as student
Indeed, as we have seen, Aikido is a Japanese ‘way’ (michi or do in

Japanese), a path of study as ‘philosophy as a way of life,’ to reference
Hadot (1995). It is my contention that we can extend this notion in the
current context as pedagogical therapeutic to the kind of modern hydro-
ponic schooling exemplified by the isolating, decentered-subject, positiv-
istic empiricism outlined earlier in this chapter. To invoke a ‘therapeutic’
here then suggests a kind of restorative, healing approach in response to
a system that is flawed or harmful.
If we expand on this in the context of contemplative, embodied dis-
ciplines such as Aikido, as Linden (1986) suggests, such movement
practices become transformative as they bring conscious, principled
awareness to ‘movement education as a means of philosophical educa-
tion’ (1986, p. 107). I suggest that this approach sees Aikido as ‘dia-
logic movement,’ in the sense that one’s point of epistemological and
ontological ‘correction’ is the dissolving of dualism itself: self/other;
attacker/defender; foe/friend, and so forth.12 In the model of Aikido
training, for example, one’s ‘embodied habitus’ (Inoue, 2006) becomes
a non-aggressive open stance, an invitation of sorts that responds to the
sensitivity of changes in the felt emotional, postural dynamic (e.g., one’s
emerging intention to ‘attack’) with the purpose of restoring harmony.
As a form of thought and understanding, Shotter’s term for the latter is
‘relational-responsiveness’ (2005, p. 158).
To demonstrate the transferability of mind-body coordination for
daily life, included below for comparison is a description of my newly
adopted practice of Japanese brush calligraphy. Rather than facing the
challenge of a physical attack, in shodo one must work with the brush,
ink, and paper in the way it reveals one’s inner resistances, tensions, and
obstacles, for example, fear of making a mistake, of not being immedi-
ately perfect, or a habit of comparing oneself to others’ abilities, accom-
plishments, to effortless, flowing form through the brush strokes. My
drawing on 25 years experience of Aikido reveals a transferable, adapt-
able embodied habitus—and a kind of instant facility—that made the
otherwise challenging skill of brushwork somehow familiar.
Vignette #3: Shodo, the ‘way of the brush’
‘Breathe deeply,’ the teacher begins. I hold the brush upright, hovering its
long, tapered bristles, ready with black ink, precipitously above the paper.
‘Now, with your out-breath press the tip down on the paper. Pause…Then
carry on in one continuous movement and pressure in the direction of the
character’ (kanji: Japanese).
I am studying Shodo, Japanese calligraphy, otherwise translated as the
‘way of the brush.’ After a quarter of a century, and now an advanced
Aikido practitioner and teacher, I am a neophyte to this art. And yet, when
the sensei guides us to ‘use your whole body to move the brush, not just
your hand,’ the instruction is immediately familiar, actionable, and embod-
ied. To move the mind and body in a coordinated way is the very core
of Aikido training and its principles. We move in silence, connecting to a
sense of body-mind—brush flow within our own deep concentration, with
the aim of calmness, relaxation and connection to the spirit, feeling and
meaning of the kanji we are brushing. This is aesthetics not merely as skill
acquisition, but as path.
Practical Wisdom Through Contemplative

(Kin)Aesthetic Practice
The vignette above is clearly not about the confidence of having
advanced skill. As a new student to brush calligraphy, though I bring a
lifetime of Aikido experience, I cannot claim a parallel acuity in shodo.
Rather, what the vignette illustrates is that the deeper learning of con-
templative practices comes from embodied awareness of, and relaxation
into, relationships: relationship with my in-the-moment state (‘breathe!’
says the teacher, ‘and then relax the brush onto the paper.’), relation-
ship with my personality/ego traits (e.g., wanting to be ‘good ‘at cal-
ligraphy right away, intrusion of negative cognitions, such as, ‘I’m no
good at this’), and relationship with apparent ‘externality’ (the not-me
of the brush, the ink, the paper). Such discontinuities are thus worked
with as arising, conditioned (mis)perceptions and liminalities of ‘self
vs. other,’ ‘inner vs. outer,’ ‘energy/thought vs. matter,’ and so forth.
What practices such as Aikido or shodo teach us, then, is that in work-
ing with our inner blocks and resistances vis-à-vis our daily interac-
tions, we can evolve into more non-reactive, flowing, and effortless
responsiveness.
156 M. A. GORDON
Again, if we do not see the world as an objective, that is, separate ‘it
is,’ but as ‘we are,’ then when we begin to transform what we are in our
reactive patterns, and in turn transform our world. The world we inhabit
then becomes more an exercise in the aiki of Aikido—the path of harmo-
nizing our conditional, illusory, and relative ‘self’ with the absolute and
unconditional ki of the indivisible and non-dual Cosmos. In an educa-
tional context, what might this look like? An otherwise overwhelmed stu-
dent or teacher can ‘extend her or his mind’ (e.g., thinking of connecting
with the larger ki of the universe) when they think about the mountain
of work ahead, or the chaotic energy of the classroom. By making it their
practice to think from their ‘one point’ or hara in the lower abdomen,
one develops a calmer mind and more stable posture, both inner and
outer, to verbal or physical threats. Ultimately, Aikido (‘the way of har-
monizing oneself with the universe) moves us from an epistemology and
habitus of separation, to non-dual awareness and relationship with the
Cosmos itself. When we don’t see others as an enemy, when we begin to
let go of attaching our personal identity to outcome or result, when we
can approach new situations with openness and relaxed attention rather
than fear, we breathe into life as-it-happens more adaptively.
Final Thoughts
Given the grave challenges facing inhabitants of earth for a sustainable
future, the radical transformation of education is a call to action to shift
our very way of relating. Aikido, as reflected upon in this chapter, is pre-
sented less as a means or a skillful discipline of self-defense but rather as a
transformative pedagogy—a path or ‘way’ (do) of learning that shifts our
individualized, siloed approach to learning-outcomes to one of immer-
sive relationality and attunement. Aikido is a path of ‘living spirituality,’
or in Hadot’s words, ‘philosophy as a way of life.’ In Aikido, one tran-
scends form itself (or technique) to give way to takemusi aiki: sponta-
neously arising (non) technique, blending one’s movement effortlessly,
without conscious thought, to mirror the movement of others toward
diffusing dissension and restoring harmonious order. As Zajonc (2006)
emphasizes, this combination of ‘inner posture’ and outward skillfulness
reflects a shift in attention from what we know to how we know. In this
sense, we move from simply ‘first person’ contemplative intention and
awareness into practice that becomes immersive in, and transformative
of, relationships. It is, as Zajonc states, ‘the profoundly difficult task of
learning to love, which is also the task of learning to live in true peace
and harmony with others and with nature’ (2006, p. 2).
The transformation of education through contemplative and rela-
tional ‘ways’ such as Aikido invites us to embrace the idea of ‘living
curriculum,’ to cultivate spirituality not in the religious or metaphysi-
cal sense but in terms of more refined and empathic attunement to all
life. We must, as Zajonc (2006) suggests, ‘balance the sharpening of
our intellects with the systematic cultivation of our hearts’ (p. 2). In
the Japanese idiom, this is the cultivation of kokoro (heart-mind), call-
ing and ‘leading’ (as the etymology of ‘pedagogy’ suggests) to ‘prac-
tice an epistemology of love instead of an epistemology of separation’
(Zajonc, 2006, p. 1744).
Notes
1. McGilchrist indeed contends that the human cranium has adapted to
accommodate increased left-hemispheric cortical mass.
2. Rasmussen (2016) for one has spoken of hydroponic education.
3. Throughout this essay, ‘east’ and ‘west’ are used not as geographical or
cultural pointers, but rather to signify differences between their respec-
tive classical, canonical, and philosophical roots. For a historical Western
epistemological overview, Tarnas (1993) is excellent, while Kasulis et al.
(1993) are instructive in comparing the two historical worldviews as they
regard philosophy of ‘self’ and ‘body.’
4. Paraphrased from Aikido, seiryoku zeny (‘focused effort, maximum effi-
ciency’) is a concept introduced by Judo founder Kano Jigoro (October
28, 1860–May 4, 1938), which has also proliferated through other mar-
tial arts, notably Aikido (Stevens, 2013).
5. more aptly, budo, meaning the ‘way of the warrior’ which is expressed as
‘loving protection for all living beings.’
6. In the Western tradition, Hadot writes eloquently of philosophy as a ‘way
of life’ which requires self-reflection for transformation (Hadot, 1995).
7. Bourdieu’s ‘habitus’ is defined by Webb et al. (2010) as ‘[a] concept that
expresses, on the one hand, the way in which individuals “become them-
selves”—develop attitudes and dispositions—and, on the other hand, the
ways in which those individuals engage in practices’ (2010, p. xii). So this
relates to the internalization, not necessarily deterministically, of social
values and norms. Bourdieu makes a further distinction however that
specifically speaks to the ‘bodily hexis’ of ‘physical attitudes and disposi-
tions which emerge in individuals as a result of the relationships between
particular fields and individuals’ habitus’ (2010, p. x). It is argued here,
158 M. A. GORDON
without dwelling on Bourdieu’s specific theory, that the latter addresses

the ‘embodied habitus’ referenced in this chapter, as it relates to the
inhabitation and expression of habitus via bodily hexis, through conscious
and unconscious practices, gestures, postures and so forth, which emerge
as our ‘philosophical statement’ through our actions and presence.
8. (sensei is a Japanese word colloquially used to connote a teacher, literally:
‘one whom has lived/gone before.’ O is an honorific attributed to an
older man meaning ‘venerable.’ So, ‘great teacher.’)
9. According to his eldest son and first familial heir to the lineage of Aikido,
Kisshomaru (Ueshiba, 1985).
10. Nakamura is credited with introducing yoga to Japan (Davey, 2013).
11. For example, Desbordes, Gaelle, Lobsang Tenzin Negi, and Thaddeus
W. W. Pace et al. (2012). ‘Effects of Mindful-Attention and Compassion
Meditation Training on Amygdala Response to Emotional Stimuli in an
Ordinary, Non-Meditative State.’ Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 6.
12. Drawing a parallel in psychotherapy theory, Burris (2005) writes that:
Dell, a family systems therapist inspired by the systems thinking of
Maturana, posits that family systems achieve pathology because of what
he calls ‘epistemological errors’: Either the refusal to acknowledge reality
or the desire to control reality. Reality, in Dell’s definition, is the coupled
nature of human interaction, or structure determinism (2005, p. 5).
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CHAPTER 6
Conclusion
See Illustration 6.1.
Illustration 6.1 Kokoro, “heart; mind”

164 M. A. GORDON
A Holistic Relational Paradigm

This book opened with a crisis, a ‘brush with death’ (to once again,
relate to the contact of brush, paper, and ink in Japanese shodo callig-
raphy) as a crisis of awakening. Indeed, as Anderson (2000) points out
in the context of personal relationships, such a rupture in our world can
be a source of personal growth and self-understanding rather than some-
thing that paralyzes us. It can be treated therapeutically. In her work on
how early attachment wounds and abandonment erupt in the face of the
demise of a romantic relationship, Anderson makes use of the Japanese
term akeru, saying she was astonished to see that the many definitions
of the word all related to abandonment: “...to pierce, to open, to end,
to make a hole in, to start, to expire, to unwrap, to turn over.” The idea
that an ‘ending’ and a ‘beginning’ were one-and-the-same inspired in
Anderson a motif with akeru around turning the pain of emotional aban-
donment into healing and integration of our broken parts.
Taking this a step further into a spiritual, ontological, or transpersonal
psychological understanding, one might find meaning and transformation
of such eruptions in our lived experience or gestalt as a ‘spiritual emer-
gency’ (Grof & Grof, 1989). Certainly, there is great value in placing the
arc of our life events within a wider context. Surely, it would seem this
is the core of the central ideas of this very book you are reading. There
is, however, a caution to reading things too closely as personal narrative,
as a ‘blowing up’ in size or magnification for closer view the minutiae of
our inner lives, our intrapsychic processes (and, to be fair, this is not the
project of Grof). In other words, while there is meaning to be found and
growth to be explored in seeing our struggles as a psychospiritual process
there is a risk of such introspection folding back into our individualized
outlook, of becoming solipsistic. In his book, The Trauma of Everyday
Life, psychiatrist and Buddhist teacher Mark Epstein (2014) point out
that it is precisely because we experience, attend to or avoid our personal
trials and tribulations as ‘singularities’ that induces more isolation, more
suffering. We get ‘caught’ in our own story, says Epstein, reinforcing and
inducing further self-identification with the shame of our predicament,
patterns, and conflicts. This, in turn, stirs up self-aggression, identification
as a victim, and thus a retaliatory reflex to seek revenge or relief through
others (2014, p. 42). ‘The trauma within’ writes Epstein reflecting the
Buddhist view about the nature of suffering, ‘prompts us to search for
a culprit, and we all too often attack ourselves or our loved ones in an
6 CONCLUSION 165
attempt to eradicate the problem. This splitting of the self against the self
or against its world only perpetuates suffering’ (pp. 28–29).
Epstein makes the keen observation that the Buddha’s own life—
though mostly unnoticed in commentary about his life and work—was
shot through by the developmental trauma of losing his own mother
shortly after his own birth. While it would be tempting to psychopathol-
ogize the Buddha’s teachings in a reductive way by highlighting this
‘primary trauma’ in his early life, Epstein’s work deftly focuses on how
the Buddha’s Four Noble Truths and other teachings on suffering and
enlightenment focus on the primacy of suffering itself. Life is suffering,
taught the Buddha. As Epstein writes: ‘The traumas of everyday life can
easily make us feel like a motherless child’ (2014, p. 17). He goes on, in
relating a story about a therapy patient, ‘It is not as important to find
the cause of our traumatized feelings as it is to learn how to relate to
them’ (ibid.). To further emphasize this point of taking personally what
happens to us, to identify with tragedy or trauma, Epstein says that often
this alienation, isolation, and shame—as has been explored in this book’s
chapters—is rooted in early life neglect, attachment insecurity, and lack
of parental attunement. ‘Traumatized people are left with an experience
of “singularity” that creates a divide between their experience and the
consensual reality of others’ (2014, p. 55). Epstein’s work focuses on
the Buddha’s view and ‘methodology’ of how to escape this ‘singularity’
phenomenon through the Four Noble Truths. Namely, these teachings
are rooted, as Epstein reminds us, in what the Buddha called ‘Realistic
View.’ That we suffer and feel alone, in the face of daily struggles
and tragedy, is a fact of life. The ‘developmental trauma’ of not being
securely attached precedes any ‘singular’ experience—it is universal. As
Epstein writes: ‘We emerge, as infants, from a relational matrix and then
struggle to come to terms with the trauma of aloneness’ (2014, p. 48).
The Buddha’s prescription for the Four Noble Truths is laid out in what
he called the ‘Eightfold Noble Path’ of conduct and attitude. In other
words, if life is suffering, and all sentient life struggles with imperma-
nence and survival, then a practice with this view is the ‘way out.’
Modern Western psychotherapy is of course grounded in the the-
ories of Sigmund Freud, who characterized these endemic human ‘life
and death’ drives (Eros and Thanatos) as the forebearers of what he called
‘neurosis.’ And, as explored earlier through Freud, Marcuse, Shepard,
Butler, Hillman, and others, much of human activity and civilization can
be seen as the projection of these ego-afflictions, of the struggle with
166 M. A. GORDON
impermanence, as the grand theater of psychological repression, power-

lessness, infant omnipotence, and control played on a vast scale. Becker
(1997) emphasizes how aptly Otto Rank and later Eric Fromm were to
elaborate Freud’s characterization of these psychosocial drives as ‘narcis-
sistic.’ This brings us back to a central theme of this book that while a
‘singular’ crisis such as my own ‘brush with death’ may seem to an unex-
pected reckoning with death itself (so-called death anxiety), on deeper
introspection it reveals a deeper calling to encounter our fear of living.
Here, Becker (1997) points out how Rank suggests our fear of life and
death is a global, totalizing psychological force. In doing so, he points
to William James who characterized fear as ‘fear of the universe’ (cited
in Becker, 1997, p. 145). What Fromm spoke of as ‘fear of freedom,’
writes Becker, is really an overwhelm with the task and responsibility of
living, of being alive. Becker writes: ‘It is the fear of childhood, the fear
of emerging into the universe, of realizing one’s own independent indi-
viduality, one’s own living and experiencing’ (ibid.). Thus, says Becker,
this overwhelming ontological fear compels us into transference, as a
reflexive and desperate measure to ‘tame the terror’ (of existence) (ibid.).
Others expanding on Becker’s approach it as ‘terror management theory’
(c.f. Solomon, Greenberg, & Pyszczynski, 2015).
To bring this back directly to the context of this book, and of my own
self-study and autobiographical narrative about my ‘brush with death,’
we return full circle to the same conundrum I described at the begin-
ning of the book: If I survived my ‘brush with death’ then what of my
life? To once again paraphrase my original Aikido teacher, Aikido is a
way of developing ourselves to overcome the ‘fear of living.’ The com-
mon ground here then is to see these various theories and approaches,
whether Buddhist, psychoanalytic or existential humanist, is that if ‘life
anxiety’ is as universal and inseparable with ‘death anxiety’ and that
one can engage these paradoxes of existence through ‘practice’ or way.
In contrast to the ‘singularity’ bubble of our personal travails, Epstein
comments how psychotherapy can reveal ‘how trauma robs it’s victims
of the “absolutisms” of daily life: they myths we live by that allow us to
go to sleep at night trusting that we will still be there in the morning’
(2014, p. 54). While Epstein is not suggesting we invite trauma as a ther-
apeutic tool, he is at the very least pointing Anderson’s (2000) use of
the term akeru—that is, to see the wound, trauma, the ‘piercing’ as an
opening of consciousness, a source of self-reflection into the complacency
into which we are conditioned to the ‘absolutisms’ of our daily lives in
the face of impermanence, chaos, and unpredictability. Yalom (2009),
6 CONCLUSION 167
contemplating his own mortality in his twilight years as a psychiatrist

tending to the ‘death anxiety’ of others, leans toward a stoic and existen-
tial approach. What Buddhism refers to as ‘impermanence’ Yalom charac-
terizes as the ‘givens’ of existence: sickness, old age, aloneness, and death.
However, whether on the one hand we are crushed by the ‘singu-
larity’ of events or intrapsychic patterns that isolate us, or on the other
collapse under unbearable weight of the ‘givens’ of existence, imperma-
nence, and the shattering of our ‘absolutisms’ about the predictability of
life, we can define this inescapable experience as traumatizing. Modern
neuroscience gives us a very good working model examine the phenom-
enology and neuroanatomy of the brain—that which has its correlations
in the phenomenology of Buddhist thought. Siegel (2010) outlines a
‘hand model’ of the working ‘triune brain’—the brainstem, the limbic
system, and prefrontal cortex. Each in sequence represents an advanc-
ing evolutionary mechanism of survival response, threat detection, and
highly attuned (e.g., reflective, adaptive, predictive, analytical) attention.
Holding your thumb in your palm, with your fingers curled over it, the
triune brain layout is thus: The wrist represents the spinal cord, the palm
is the brainstem, where the thumb rests are the limbic area (amygdala,
hippocampus, the so-called seat of ‘freeze-fight-flight’ response) and the
curled fingers the prefrontal cortex. He then goes on to explain fear/
threat stimulus and response. In a highly surprised or aroused state of
fear, we can think of the hand flexing wide open, fingers uncurled and
thumb splayed out. The limbic area is exposed and threatened and a
cascade of freeze-fight-flight reactions can reflexively and autonomically
take over. We are stuck, defensive, withdrawn, or aggressive. Mindfulness
training, Siegel points out, can help us habitually down-regulate these
inchoate reflexive responses so we can ‘fine-tune’ our responses to diffi-
cult emotions and stimuli.
Epstein (2014) refers to the traditional Buddhist teachings of the
Four Noble Truths, particularly the Buddha’s basic instruction toward
‘Bare Attention’ as a means of impartially observing the nature of our
reactive mind during mindfulness meditation. Over the course of this
book, I have presented Aikido as a methodology of overriding the same
reactive responses with the ‘real time’ simulation and challenge of an
Other—a real physical, existential, and psychological threat in spatial-
temporality that can help us similarly observe and down-regulate our
habitual (read: baseline, evolutionary, limbic) reflexivity. Most impor-
tantly, the training in Aikido is not guided as ‘physical’ or even psycho-
logical preparation for war (e.g., ‘martial’ training), but rather to help us
168 M. A. GORDON
see our internalized/externalized schema of dualism: self/other, inner/

outer, target/enemy, and so forth. It is a spiritual path to align with the
true nature of an indivisible universe and to bring ourselves into har-
mony with it. Epstein (2014), as with this book itself, draws on child
development theory and traditional Buddhist teachings to see the nature
of the human ego as in an early infant stage. In order to move from the
fused ‘omnipotence’ fantasy (e.g., that the mother is an extension of
the child’s absolute needs and wishes) to the Realistic View of the Four
Noble Truths (or, Freud’s Reality Principle), the child must safely expe-
rience individuation, as Jung called it, or disillusionment. Not everything
revolves around the narcissistic needs of the child. The ‘good enough’
attachment (p. 29) and mothering of the child prepare it for the stresses
and, indeed, the ‘givens’ of existence, says Epstein, referring to the work
of British developmental psychologist D. W. Winnicott. Similarly, mind-
fulness meditation in Buddhist practice is guided as a gentle ‘holding’
of ourselves—our minds—as if an infant, in this caring, attached man-
ner (2014, p. 38). Over time and effort, this sustained method of Bare
Attention can expand and progress to allow the ego to relax and not
torment the mind with the ‘afflictions’ posed by impermanence, and the
‘self’ that must continually defend against it. ‘If you create an atmos-
phere of attunement and responsiveness with yourself,’ Epstein writes,
‘one that mimics the emotional and mental state of an attentive parent,
this pain and sorrow becomes not only endurable but self-liberating.’
Epstein continues, importantly: ‘It releases, and in the process, we can
also be released’ (ibid.). As it relates to the ‘mission’ of Aikido, as it
were, this in a nutshell captures what the founder, O’Sensei expressed as
masagatsu agatsu—‘true victory as victory over oneself.’
It would be a great understatement to point out that activities such as
Aikido or motorcycling that do skirt the edge of danger, injury, or death
are not for everyone. Nor would it be fair to say they should be in order
to realize the illusory nature of our ‘absolutisms’ or complacency about
the tempestuousness of daily life. However, the fact remains that under
the surface and waiting to erupt are the subconscious patterns of with-
holding, fear, and apprehension (against the fear of life, death) that can
be engaged directly through contemplative practice, riding or—in this
study—the defensive art of Aikido. We can call this approach to self-cul-
tivation ‘edge-work’ or working with our ‘liminal edge.’ We can, in fact,
compare Siegel’s (2010) ‘hand model’ of the (over)reactive brain—
fingers splayed out, the limbic ‘palm’ exposed—with a phenomena that
6 CONCLUSION 169
Stenner, Greco, and Motzkau (2017) refer to as ‘liminal hotspots.’ The

authors describe this phenomenon as ‘an occasion during which peo-
ple feel they are caught suspended in the circumstances of a transition
that has become permanent,’ and which ‘are characterized by dynamics
of paradox, paralysis, and polarization, but they also intensify the poten-
tial for pattern shift’ (2017, p. 141). They go on to clarify that there is
‘object’ for this occurrence—it is an event, a ‘happening’ which brings
‘sustained uncertainty, ambivalence, and tension,’ an ‘impasse’ in which
they are stuck in ambiguity and paralysis (ibid., p. 142). Buddhist
contemplative practice and, in this study, the art of Aikido are well-
established methodologies for actively engaging and ameliorating—
through the kind of parental ‘attunement and responsiveness’ Epstein
(2014) outlines—the potential for these habitual ‘liminal hotspots’
to overtake our lives. Earlier in this book, I introduced the Japanese
phrase Ichi-go, Ichi-e (‘one chance, one encounter’), which in the con-
text of Aikido represents a life-and-death reckoning, a confrontation with
our mortal safety which is both ‘singular’ and ‘absolute/existential’ in
terms of how we respond. In other words, we may live or die by the
very nature of how we are habituated to respond to ‘threat.’ Thus, in the
Aikido training, one takes up Ichi-go, Ichi-e as both a sharp and ‘ready’
attunement and responsiveness, and a spirit of being ‘fully alive’ in every
moment.
Briefly, before taking a broader approach at what ‘attunement and
responsiveness’ mean in a wider (read: educational) context, I would like
to outline some of the core principles of Ki Aikido, as both pragmatic
and metaphorical instructions for daily life. While these following prin-
ciples may only become fully embodied and realized through partner
training on the mat, they bear explication as a way of bringing out their
deeper resonance re: virtue ethics and the spiritual intention to seek har-
mony and wholeness in a relational context. These principles are:
1. Extending Your Mind

2. Know Your Partners Mind
3. Respect Your Partners Ki
4. Put Yourself In Your Partner’s Place
5. Perform With Confidence
The first principle ‘Extending Your Mind’—into which, two ‘vignettes’

in this book give an experiential glimpse—represents a kind of ‘field
170 M. A. GORDON
awareness.’ In extending one’s awareness, attunement, openness, and

ki outward, one is both connected to and co-creating a feedback loop
of sensitivity and positive mind-body (e.g., spiritual) energy. If we
put the practical, skills-based experience of this principle in context, it
becomes more ‘palpable.’ For example, after many years of Aikido train-
ing, I went snowboarding for the first time. The basic posture of being
strapped into the bindings of the snowboard put on into an almost
identical frame as the Aikido hanmi posture. However, the instructor
guided us to keep our gaze forward and out where we were headed.
If we looked down, our body would unconsciously follow our mind
and exert pressure on the tip of the board, thus making us fall right
where we were looking, DOWN! If we look out, the board would ‘let
out’ (with our weight more distributed). As with the ‘target fixation’
in the motorcycling chapter of this book, ‘where you look is where you
go.’ Secondly, by extending one’s ‘mind’ outward (e.g., infinitely), one
is also enacting a psychosomatic state (or, also a conscious/subcon-
scious) of unity. One exudes a feeling of complete relaxation, expan-
siveness, and sense of ‘oneness’ as infinite time-space beingness (or, in
Japanese, this kind of field-space can be referred to as basho). Another
way of characterizing this ‘extending your mind’ effect is to think of
‘urban myth’ stories of people inexplicable lifting a car to get a trapped
child out, or an impossibly heavy beam that’s collapsed on someone. In
reference to Yuasa’s (1993) theory of ki as a ‘third force’ (discussed in
Chapter 1, the Introduction to this book)—this, in contrast with being
confined to the ongoing mind/body Cartesian divide in science and phi-
losophy—what could be described in these instances is a total focus of
purposiveness. Real life examples of ‘total purposiveness’ in a stressful situ-
ation could include unhesitatingly rescuing someone. ‘Extend Your Mind’
here combines the most efficient, effortless, singular and complete enroll-
ment possibly of the body’s total alignment in engagement to that pur-
pose—muscles, connective tissue, postural strength and complete exertion
in mind–body unification. In the Aikido context, the principle of ‘extend-
ing your mind,’ though directed through exercises toward such (self-de-
fense) purposiveness, is more about cultivating a habit of extending ki in
six directions: up, down, left/right, forward, and back, at all times.
The second principle ‘Know Your Partner’s Mind’ isn’t about
mind-reading or the fantasy of having full knowledge of your partner’s
actual thoughts. However, flowing from the first principle, if we are
6 CONCLUSION 171
attuned with a ‘telepathic resonance,’ we can develop a kind of bodily

prescience with the mind—rather, the ki—of our partner. For example,
if we know our spouse or work partner is under duress, we are sensitive
to the probability that communication with them will be highly charged.
Progressing along, this prescience can be like antennae, for example,
with strangers in a potentially dangerous scenario in the street, where we
are able to ‘read’ their ki before anything actually happens and catches us
off guard.
The third principle ‘Respect Your Partner’s Ki’ again follows from
the previous principles sequentially and progressively. If one is aware
and attuned, then one can alternately yield or hold space, or enter into
the center and neutralize a situation. It is interesting to make note of
the colloquial expression to ‘get to the heart of (a matter).’ This phrase
suggests several interpretations. The ‘heart’ of a situation might be its
emotional center, central concern or what is most at stake for those
involved. It also suggests quite simply what is at the core of a situation,
its broader consequences rippling out from what occurs radially at the
nexus. It is possible, as we have seen with Aikido’s greater spiritual-
ontological purpose—inextricable and emanating from its core budo
principle of ‘loving protection of all living things’—to see this princi-
ple of ‘Respect Your Partner’s Ki’ as being attuned ‘to the heart of the
matter’ in all situations, as an orienting view and ‘way.’ While it takes
years to develop mastery in terms of the Aikido techniques or exercises,
beginners can get an immediate sense how their own resistance or ego
creates a clash of ki or disconnection. Merleau-Ponty (1968) in his lat-
ter work wrote of the ‘intertwining’ and ‘chiasm’ of the ‘flesh.’ Here, he
was working out a phenomenological understanding of how as experi-
ential beings we are both sensing and sensed (here, Merleau-Ponty refers
to the paradox of how when we touch one hand with the other, we both
feel one hand and also feel touched). We are, Merleau-Ponty points out,
entangled in our intersubjectivity. As Yuasa (1993) suggests in his the-
ory of ki as a ‘third force’ this entanglement, intertwining and chias-
mic (‘crossing-over’) experience as intersubjectivity is not conceptual or
merely physical (e.g., Merleau-Ponty’s ‘flesh’) but rather potentiated by
the life energy (ki) of the subject-object interactivity.
Historically, in Aikido training—and contemporary ones that follow a
more ‘traditional’ model of Japanese training—a student would receive
very little feedback or explication of the techniques. Rigorous training
172 M. A. GORDON
of basic exercises (Japanese: kihonwaza) onward through advanced tech-

niques is meant to induce, over time, eventual softening, relaxation,
effortless, ultimately giving over to the abandonment of preoccupation
with fixed techniques in the syllabus toward takemusu aiki—O’ Sensei’s
highest order of spontaneously arising, natural technique. With this, in
many of the (Japanese) martial arts, one gradually (or, eventually) starts
to develop acuity and insight as to the ki or the ‘inner energy’ involved,
thus allowing them to relax more. In Ki Aikido, as introduced through-
out this book, students begin with this ki-awareness as the focus of the
exercises. In other words, ki development is the foundation and focus of
the training, realized through the structure and study of the Aikido exer-
cises. Another way this is expressed is that principle precedes/transcends
technique. One develops facility in the exercises/techniques as a result of
seeing them as expressions of the principles, rather than the opposite. In
‘Respect Your Partner’s Ki,’ we have the very essence of Aikido’s princi-
ple of ‘non-dissention.’
The fourth principle ‘Put Yourself In Your Partner’s Place’ again has
a dual-meaning in that it denotes the actual modality of physically and
energetically occupying the center of the attack,1 while also representing
the ethos of Aikido as enacted empathy toward helping ‘transform the
heart of your opponent.’ Standing in the shoes of another we feel into
their predicament and adapt and even lead or usher them to safety (in
contrast with ‘taking them out’ first). This overriding principle of skillful
protection has a correlation in daily life within therapeutic practices such
as ‘constructive dialogue’ (otherwise known as ‘active listening’), or in
softening our body language, posture, and physical orientation in dyadic
relationship and related approaches associated with non-violent commu-
nication and conflict resolution training.
Lastly, the fifth principle ‘Perform With Confidence’ is self-evident as
a teaching encouragement and a form of auto-suggestion—the student
internalizes (as with all the principles) this statement as a performance
enhancement, but also as a spiritual undertaking toward strengthening
one’s spirit in the emergence of our authentic self. Slowly, we begin to
move, act, think, speak, create, and exist as a natural expression of our
genuine nature, letting the habitual, and learned adaptations of our per-
sonality development slough off. True to the Aikido ‘path,’ this is what
the training entails—letting go and becoming who we truly are. As it is
commonly described, Aikido is about ‘getting out of our own way.’
6 CONCLUSION 173
Love as ‘Way’
One word thematically unifies the subject of this book: love. I use this
word not in the modern romantic or familial sense, but in the classical
meaning of higher universal love, or agape. From the previous descrip-
tions of Ki Aikido principles—with their roots in pragmatic training and
as spiritual purification, we see not just a dedication or intention toward
love as a quality, purpose, or ethic, but as an ontology. Love is the uni-
verse, according to the principle of aiki (spiritual harmony of heaven/
earth). In the western context, Fromm (1956) highlighted the difference
in the prosaic or romantic, and spiritual, concepts of love by suggesting
that the modern cultural norms focus on acquiring a love object. That
is, being loved by another, and thus proving our lovability, impedes our
focus on being loving toward another—or others. Rather than being an
object, Fromm says, love is a faculty, requiring us to ‘become aware that
love is an art, just as living is an art; if we want to learn how to love we
must proceed in the same way we have to proceed if we want to learn
any other art, say music, painting, carpentry, or the art of medicine or
engineering’ (1956, p. 6). He elaborates:
The main condition for the achievement of love is the overcoming of one’s
narcissism. The narcissistic orientation is one in which one experiences as
real only that which exists within oneself, while the phenomena in the out-
side world have no reality in themselves, but are experienced only from the
viewpoint of their being useful or dangerous to one. The opposite pole to
narcissism is objectivity; it is the faculty to see people and things as they are,
objectively, and to be able to separate this objective picture from a picture
which is formed by one’s desires and fears. (Fromm, 1956, 118)
While the factitude of being ‘objective’ is debatable here, nonetheless,

Fromm makes the point that we must engage a more altruistic notion of
love and inclusivity to overcome our narcissistic tendencies. I have made
the case in this book that this kind of ‘micro-macro’ manifestation of
narcissism playing out in the anthrogenic ecological crisis we face glob-
ally demands healing in the individual and collective sphere. To ‘heal’
means to be ‘whole,’ and thus pedagogy that is motivated to induce pos-
itive social change requires educating the ‘whole person’ within an eco-
logical or holistic framework.
In this book, I have introduced the Japanese defensive art of Aikido
as a Japanese ‘way’ or path (do or michi) that is rooted in a spiritual
174 M. A. GORDON
ontology, a cosmological model of reality as non-dualistic and aligned

with Buddhist (e.g., Shinto and Shingon) phenomenology. This aspira-
tional approach to self-development is rooted in ethical consideration of
one’s actions within the larger ecology. It is, at its heart, a path of love.
This notion of higher love is starkly contrasted, as Fromm posits, from
the ‘norm’ within a capitalistic society, where ‘fairness ethics’ connotes
‘fair exchange,’ as opposed the Biblical edict to ‘Love thy neighbor as
thyself’ (1956, p. 130).
The empathic love Fromm advocates requires the commitment and
skillfulness dedicated to learning any art. It is a practice. Fromm (1956)
asks: ‘Can anything be learned about the practice of an art, except by
practicing it?’ (1956, p. 107). The will to know others with genuine
sincerity implies a kind of practice of openness—a willingness to inti-
macy. What greater intimacy can one seek than to enquire into the deep-
est thoughts and feelings of another so as to understand and relate to
them better? It can be said that Aikido invites such an intimacy, to seek
to understand and transform the spirit of aggression in another with
calm control—to restore balance and accord or harmony. However,
such a practice requires a focus on attunement, and as Fromm reminds
us, ‘one cannot learn to concentrate without becoming sensitive to one-
self’ (1956, p. 115). Developing this kind of attention or concentration
Fromm likens to learning to drive a car,2 where one develops sensitivity
to all conditions of the experience. ‘Yet, he is not thinking about all these
factors; his mind is in a state of relaxed alertness, open to all relevant
changes in the situation on which he is concentrated—that of driving his
car safely’ (1956, p. 115). This book discusses such attunement through
embodied intersubjectivity. Specifically, Essay 4: ‘Moto-Morphosis’
looked at the evolution of Merleau-Ponty’s (2012) notions of skillful
attunement, embodied consciousness, and unilateral incorporation through
Tanaka’s (2017) discussion of mutual incorporation or intercorporeality
as ‘enactive subjectivity.’ Tanaka’s theory extends the Japanese notion of
aidagara or ‘betweenness,’ seen in work of Kitaro, Watsuji, and Kimura.
In the same notion, this book has drawn out how Aikido is an art that
cultivates one’s inner sensitivity such that they can be attuned to another
with calm, responsive presence, enabling them to, much like Fromm’s
driving skill analogy, ‘move without thinking’ to resolve the situation
safely. Thus, in the broader scope of learning and teaching relationships,
Fromm makes a radical observation that gets to the heart of Aikido’s
aspirational purpose: ‘While we teach knowledge, we are losing that
6 CONCLUSION 175
teaching which is the most important one for human development: the
teaching which can only be given by the simple presence of a mature,
loving person’ (Fromm, 1956, p. 117). Our task, then, as educators, par-
ents, and fellow sentient beings, as put forth in this manuscript, notwith-
standing the priorities of curriculum, subject matter, methodology or
assessments, is the focus on the development of the teacher or individual
as leader, as healer, as an ennobled warrior of compassion.
In the following sections, I summarize and review the major themes
of this book as follows:
1. The intimacy of education.

2. Self-cultivation within a ‘horizon of significance.’
3. We call each other into being: bodily attunement to interdependence.
4. Practice not as preparation for performance, but for awakened
living.
1. The intimacy of education

This book has explored the notion of educational spaces as cultivational.
This horticultural metaphor of cultivation stands in contrast to the
industrial schooling model of ‘hydroponic’ or neo-industrialized educa-
tion. From this cultivational approach, pedagogy that is ‘left in peace’
(Jardine, 2012) from the fragmentation of modern socioeconomic forces
that coerce hyper-competitiveness, individualism, and learning as labor
market skill-acquisition, can instead flourish through an unfettered,
unique, and hermeneutic process of self-discovery and collaborative
learning. The stakes for such a shift in pedagogy, Jardine suggests, are
very high, and go to the very core of how learning is entangled with full
human development and well-being. ‘There is thus a terrible intimacy to
a pedagogy left in peace,’ writes Jardine (2012, p. 6). He continues: ‘It
is, after all, my life, the only life I will have, that is being, or failing to be
shaped, and thus too for every student and teacher’ (2012, p. 6).
Having explored the Japanese and otherwise East Asian philosophy
of ‘becoming’ through cultivation of self, and the notion of the ‘psy-
chosomatic self’ in the philosophical anthropology of Mead, Watsuji,
Nishida, Kimura, and Yuasa (cited in Odin, 1995), what emerges is a
pedagogy that supports learning toward what Maslow called becoming
‘fully human’ or self-actualized (1998). Assagioli (1965) laid out his own
spiritualized, transpersonal theory of self-actualization as psychosynthesis,
which is the integration of one’s inner psychological makeup toward
176 M. A. GORDON
highest spiritual (transpersonal) consciousness. And yet, while becoming

fully human or a ‘whole self,’ as evidenced in the so-called Third Wave
of humanistic psychology pioneered by Maslow and many others, is an
ennobling goal, it is one set against the ethical, philosophical, and prag-
matic implications of being only unto the self.
2. Self-cultivation within a ‘horizon of significance’: from one Charles
Taylor to another
The essays in this book have variously explored the notion that educa-
tion is inextricably linked to self-cultivation. Most importantly, this view
of self-development is imbued with aspirational value ethics: that one’s
self-cultivation is driven not only by the desire for personal authentic-
ity but that it is inextricably linked with a sense of altruistic concern for
the well-being of the world. This idea of self-development is rooted not
only in the drive for acquisition of knowledge but also, more importantly
even, what the Buddhists call ‘skillful awareness’ or ‘practical wisdom.’
The idea that one’s drive for learning and personal progress must eschew
concern for others or a holistic regard in general is dialectic rather
than mutually exclusive. In the classic text, Sayings of the Jewish Fathers
(Taylor, 1897), British academic Charles Taylor translates and quotes the
Talmudic scholar Hillel The Elder’s famous words from the Mishnaic
tract, the Pirkei Avoth: ‘If I am not for myself, who is for me? And when
I am for myself, what am “I”? And if not now, when?’ Over a century
later, the more recent and Canadian scholar Charles Taylor (1992)
pondered Hillel’s same philosophical quandary about the ethical con-
sideration of ‘I’ and ‘authenticity’ and the pursuit of self-truth (Taylor,
1992). As I have explored in the second chapter in this book, ‘Teacher
as Healer,’ Taylor (1992) too recognizes a false dichotomy between nar-
cissistic self-interest as ‘authentic self,’ and an idealism or altruism that
forgoes any authentic self in favor of collective good. Rather, says Taylor,
a middle ground exists dialectically between these two extremes, where
the concern for self-authenticity can be tempered or balanced within a
‘horizon of significance.’ By this, Taylor suggests, one can pursue the
authentic meaning and fulfillment of one’s life path without extinguish-
ing or negating the rights or concern of others, or in fact of the world
(life) itself. This virtue ethics approach to self-cultivation is, in traditional
Buddhist teaching, reflected in a cyclical path of learning and integration
through practice. In the aim to become enlightened, one does not seek
some imperial truth. Rather, through sustained practice and humility
6 CONCLUSION 177
(e.g., Aikido, contemplative practice such as meditation), one becomes

immediately familiar with the non-dual nature of phenomenal reality,
thus integrating such skillful awareness or practical wisdom back into
their practice. To quote the Buddhist adage, ‘the path is the goal.’
3. We call each other into being: bodily attunement to interdependence
This book has focused on the notion of practice, that is in the recog-
nition and skillful application of the inseparability of subject-object,
self-Other, and self-World, as seen in the Buddhist teaching of interde-
pendence. The prime lens through which I have explored this two-fold
view of the ‘inner’ (mind-body) and ‘outer’ (body–mind-World) dia-
lectic is the Japanese defensive art of Aikido. Aikido, with its founder
Morihei Ueshiba’s deep immersion in the animistic monism of Shinto
and Shingon Buddhism, is not merely as it may appear: A technical ‘mar-
tial’ study of how to non-destructively resolve conflict in the face of a
physical attack. Rather, it is situated within a cosmological framework, an
ontology that sees any physical aggression as a disruption of spiritual har-
mony or order. In this sense, the aikidoka sees herself as the human/
mortal (e.g., relative reality) manifestation of divine or universal energy.
In the cultivation of one’s calm, attuned field of awareness, and by staying
calmly and steadfastly in the center of one’s non-violent purposefulness,
one not only non-aggressively resolves human conflict, but also one acts
as a conduit of universal order, of the cosmos balancing itself. We have
seen that the name, Aikido, contains its very essence: Ai = harmony or
love; Ki = universal or vital life energy; Do = way or path.
In the context of this book and my own lifelong development as a
teacher-practitioner of so-called Ki Aikido, I have explicated and explored
how the teaching/learning principles of ‘ki development’ form an expe-
riential practice for participants both on the mat and in daily life. These
principles are experienced through state-based partner exercises that help
students develop coordination of mind and body toward more stable and
relaxed posture, coincident with a relaxed and ‘extended’ mind. Let us go
back to the key points discussed earlier in this book: One, that mind and
body are inseparable; and two, that self-other-reality are interdependent,
and thus ‘knowing and being’ in this sense can be seen as achievable as
skillfulness of attunement. In this way, Ki Aikido is a direct, experiential
practice for daily life. In other words, by training together to help each
other see how the disjointedness of our (conscious, hyper-cognitive)
mind and (subconscious) body makes us unstable and reactive, and how
178 M. A. GORDON
using the principles of mind-body coordination makes us effortlessly

more stable, relaxed, and responsive, students can fulfill the spiritual
core of Aikido. This core is the readiness, attunement-in-motion, and
non-dualistic approach to the ‘attack’ of a partner on the mat—to be
in synchronous, non-reactive, harmonious timing, and respectful space
(ma ai) with our partner, such that their attack instantaneously turns
into defense and self-protection, thus resulting in its dissolution. In this
way, Aikido exemplifies two maxims of its founder. First, that this mind-
body coordination through self-study and partner training helps diminish
aggressiveness and ‘fighting mind’ toward a spirit of ‘loving protection
of all living things.’ This is the founder’s definition of true warriorship
or budo, represented in Ueshiba’s edict that ‘true victory is victory over
oneself’ (masakatsu agatsu). Secondly, that Aikido is emblematic of uni-
versal energy of love, exemplified in the dedication and result of ‘winning
without fighting.’
The idea of mastery seen in Aikido training is mastery over one’s self,
one’s habitual patterns that interfere with inner calm and peaceable inter-
relationship, in contrast with competitiveness, individualism, the violence
of defending against the illusory other. Ultimately, however, the psychos-
piritual realization achieved through Aikido training transcends any sense
of egological mastery. Training is lifelong, and one is continually devel-
oping deeper purification of spirit, toward ecological harmony (aiki) and
empathic resonance through realizing selflessness as mushin or ‘no self.’
This is learning as self-cultivation, as not merely practice of skill but as
skillfulness. It is what defines the Japanese notion of do, michi or ‘way’
(Davey, 2002). Thus, this approach to self-cultivation carries with it the
same theme and principle of inseparability running throughout this work,
such that ‘the art of the Master is no longer separated from her or his
everyday living…living itself becomes an art’ (Nakagawa, 2000, p. 204).
4. Practice not as preparation for performance, but for awakened living
What has been presented through this picture of self-cultivation
through Aikido—and in the course of this work, the uptaking of
Japanese calligraphy by the author—is that to engage in a reflective—
especially, contemplative—practice is to develop awareness that one is
always in a practice, whether consciously registered or not. Thus, it is
suggested, practice has a pedagogical effect on us if we attend to it as
self-cultivation. Further, rather than see Aikido strictly within a ‘martial
arts’ frame, we can see it’s virtue ethics-driven and soteriological aim
6 CONCLUSION 179
to lead practitioners to their enlightened selves, and beyond, toward

enlightened society. This ethos embodies the kind of budo or ‘warri-
orship’ elucidated and lived by Aikido’s founder, Morihei Ueshiba. In
broader terms of contemplative mindfulness practice beyond Aikido,
Shambhala Buddhism founder Chogyam Trungpa (1984) prescribes
a kind of ‘fearlessness’ in letting go of our conditional/conditioned
selves and moving toward who we ‘really are.’ In the first place, how-
ever, what is required—much as in psychotherapy—is to connect with
our own suffering, to develop the ‘calm abiding’ and arising compas-
sion prescribed through shamata or basic mindful awareness medita-
tion. This, says Trungpa (1984), gives birth to the warrior’s ‘sad and
tender heart.’ Then, says Trungpa: ‘[ ]for the warrior, this experience
of sad and tender heart is what gives to fearlessness…we are not talking
about street-fighter level of fearlessness. Real fearlessness is the product
of tenderness’ (Trungpa, 2013, p. 46). He continues that ‘discovering
fearlessness comes from working with the softness of the human heart’
(2013, p. 49). This ‘softness of the human heart’ is the core practice
presented in this book. It is the antennae one develops with attenua-
tion and attention, through the entire body–mind, to one’s temporal-
spatial-relational field. The learning from the Aikido context, then, in
the bigger pedagogical picture is, as Jardine (2012) puts it so poetically,
that this type of cultivational hermeneutic hinges on the insight that,
in coming to know about the world, opening free spaces, and shaping
our lives accordingly, one’s identity, one’s ‘character’ is shaped and cul-
tivated in the very act of shaping and cultivating an understanding of
the world(s) we inhabit: You become someone in the difficult cultivation
of the free spaces in teaching and learning (Jardine, 2012, p. 19).
It therefore becomes a pedagogy, Jardine (2012) goes on to say, ‘that
links my well-being to the well-being of the fields I inhabit, explore and
transform by my living’ (p. 19). The empathic sensitivity to one’s own
struggle gives us greater access to the suffering of not only others, but
also more-than-humans, to the entire ecology of life. The three-fold
understanding of teaching and learning presented in this work through
the lens of Aikido—that of practice-cultivation-relationship as a circular
process—is based on three major points: that knowing and being is (1)
embodied, (2) relational and, therefore, that (3) teaching and learning
are embodied and relational. Further to this is a second bold claim that
practice is pedagogical, and pedagogy is a practice. As regards embodi-
ment, we have seen in Merleau-Ponty’s (2012) ideas, as an elaboration of
180 M. A. GORDON
earlier phenomenology, that consciousness is inseparable from the body;

they are entangled. Therefore, counter to the Cartesian supposition, we
can never not be in our bodies! As we encounter yet again another dia-
lectic, Merleau-Ponty averts the dichotomy between, on the one hand,
perception as representation (or intellectualization) and, on the other
hand, as overly empirical, materialist, reductionistic, biologically deter-
ministic view (that we merely perceive out of sensing/sensate upwards
causation). In synchronicity with the psychosomatic self-theories of Bin
Kimura, Tetsuro Watsuji, and Kitaro Nishida, Merleau-Ponty’s work
(2012) instead focuses on the skillfulness of embodiment, rather than the
final case for what embodiment ultimately means. Being both the sens-
ing and the sensed flesh (or embodied person) in the ‘chiasmic’ entan-
glement, Merleau-Ponty (2012) regards the intersubjective space as the
‘entre-deux,’ a term that compares with Nishida’s basho or Watsuji’s aida
or ‘betweenness,’ and, in a more transcendent sense, Buber’s I-Thou rela-
tionship (Odin, 1995).
Moving forward to the next of the three-fold points mentioned ear-
lier, Naess—as covered in Essay 2: ‘Teacher as Healer’ is concerned not
with embodiment but identification and relationality. Naess (2008) says,
in alignment with the cosmological/ecological and aspirational model
of Aikido, that we need to disentangle our attachment and identifica-
tion with the ‘I’ self as a separate, substantive ego of intrinsic form, to
identification with the ‘ecological self.’ In Essay 4, ‘Moto-Morphosis,’
I write of motorcycling as a practice in the embodied skillfulness, field
awareness of basho (temporal-spatiality), and aidagara (betweenness)—
of being in the motorcycle rather than on the motorcycle. While writing
about motorsports in the context of ecological awareness is not without
its obvious contradictions, this article focuses on my own near-death
motorcycle accident as a point of reflection based on principles of Gestalt
Therapy. Riding skills, Aikido skills, and emotional/psychotherapeu-
tic understanding intersect to form vectors of awareness and thus self-
transformation within the principles of Gestalt Therapy: the figure-
ground juxtaposition and the learning to shift and adapt to one’s life.
Finally, in Essay 5: ‘The Way of the Classroom,’ I explore the import
of embodied awareness through Linden (1986), Freiler (2008), and
Shusterman’s (2012) somaesthetics or ‘thinking through the body.’ As
regards the previous points about our cultivating ourselves through
practices (such as Aikido, shodo) that transform our conditioning,
habits, or as Buddhists term it karma, I refer briefly in Essay 5 to our
6 CONCLUSION 181
‘embodied habitus’ (Inoue, 2006) toward cultivating our calm and

non-aggressive ‘inner posture.’ As Linden comments: ‘By simply execut-
ing a movement, a person is making a philosophical statement; thus, it
is possible to use movement education as a means of philosophical edu-
cation’ (Linden, 1986, p. 107). Put another way, Schatzki (as cited in
Green & Hopwood, 2015) suggests that ‘bodily doings and sayings, and
bodily sensations and feelings, are the medium in which life and mind/
action are present in the word…By way of the body, mind is present in
experience’ (Green & Hopwood, 2015, p. 20). As Green and Hopwood
(2015) suggest, as regards pedagogy and teaching, we are always in a
bodily practice, so the question is not if but how we develop awareness
and work with this. In Essay 5, I also explore the relevance of Ki Aikido
training in fostering the broader notion of education as founded in the
practice self-cultivation toward greater ecological coherence and har-
mony. This is what Zajonc (2006) calls for as an ‘epistemology of love’:
The healing of our world begins with a more humane and compassion-
ate view to educating the whole person, from the will to ‘balance[ing]
the sharpening of our intellects with the systematic cultivation of our
hearts’ (Zajonc, 2006, p. 2).
The model brought forth in this book through the self-study, reflec-
tive practice, and interpretive inquiry of my lifelong training and teach-
ing in Ki Aikido offers such a soteriological, aspirational, and ecological
view: that the cultivation of one’s integration of mind, body, and spirit
is interconnected with all of one’s relationships with their ecology, their
gestalt. That is, one’s ‘inner posture’ can be reconditioned or transmuted
through such contemplative, self-cultivation practice, through embod-
ied skillfulness, such that their ‘outer posture’ or engagement with the
world becomes more attuned and harmonious. Cultivating oneself in this
‘philosophy as a way of life’ (Hadot, 1995), or as ‘way,’ do, michi, or
‘path’ in Japanese traditions (Davey, 2002) aligns with what Nishida (in
Feenberg, 1999) describes as living in the potential of ‘absolute nothing-
ness,’ as the experience of being presented in ‘pure being.’
Sights Not Seen and Looking Ahead

While this book delved into depth psychology and psychodynamic theory
via Hillman (1990, 1998), Hillman and Ventura 1993, Butler (1997), Naess
(2008), Phillips (1998), Faggianelli and Lukoff (2006), and others, such
theories were considered through the embodied practice lens of Ki Aikido
182 M. A. GORDON
and shodo. Certainly, there is a plethora of directions to go regarding

Buddhism, psychoanalysis, and psychotherapy on the subject of the transper-
sonal Self. An entire other books could be written based on my own expe-
rience as a psychotherapist—a notion which I originally had in exploring
the ‘practices’ that informed this philosophical and self-study approach via
Aikido. Nonetheless, I contained the focus to a more Buddhist psychological
framework for the purpose of coherency to the model of self presented here
in light of classical East Asian philosophy and a body–mind, psychosomatic
definition.
Of specific note here, relating to the inclusion of Taylor’s (1992)
work on ethics is Eagleton’s The Problem with Strangers (2009), a histor-
ical exploration of ‘otherness’ through the Lacan’s imaginary-symbolic-
real triad of psychoanalytic orders of object relations theory. Eagleton’s
superb and cogent analysis of our various developmental projections and
how it problematizes ethical philosophy is fodder for more interesting
work. Similarly, certainly the work of Yalom (2013), Becker (1997), and
other existential philosophers and psychologists regarding ‘death anxiety’
as it relates to our psychological (dis)functioning and worldview would
have made a lengthy, though prudent, adjunct to Shepard’s (1998) more
anthropological, and Bauman’s (2000) more sociological views. Further
to this are connections to be made to McGilchrist’s (2009) lengthy and
fulsome neuropsychological treatise. Lastly, there is a vast array of lit-
erature related to attachment theory and interpersonal neurobiology
(Siegel, 2015) that goes into greater detail about the neurophenomenol-
ogy, only hinted at in the vignette’s about Aikido, motorcycling and so
forth in this book. On a similar note, there is a great deal of emerging
literature on somaticity, kinesthetics, and in particular—embodied cog-
nition. Again, my purpose here was to keep a psychodevelopmental and
psychospiritual focus on the notion of practice as self-cultivation and to
engage these research areas from a pragmatic and secondary, rather than
primary or theoretical, viewpoint.
Broader Implications and Further Research

Upon concluding this book I realize, I am only at the starting point in many
ways. I see the enormous potential for continued integration of neurosci-
entific research with contemplative and embodied relational practices such
as Aikido. The popularization in media and proliferation at the street-level
of yoga, meditation, and other mindfulness practices to help people with
6 CONCLUSION 183
emotional regulation, stress management, physical health and happiness and

mental well-being are very encouraging. At the same time, the corporatiza-
tion of secular mindfulness begets all manner of ethical questions, including
at the very least the implications of teaching people to be calmer and more
‘self’ regulated in the face of increasingly dehumanizing automated and
industrialized practices in a neoliberal society that undermine social equality,
other-than-human welfare, and ecological survival (Purser, 2019).
On a final note, I wish to emphasize the most recent published work
of notable Buddhist monk and ex-French national and scientist-scholar
Matthieu Ricard (2015) on altruism. Ricard notes that ‘until the 1960s,
ten times more studies were devoted to aggressiveness and other anti-
social behaviour than to help, cooperation, solidarity, and so on’ (Ricard,
2015, p. 225). He goes on to quote commentary that part of this bias
was motivated by the view that social cooperation is in direct competi-
tion with economic prosperity. However, contrary to this view, research
has proceeded to show that prosocial behavior is commonplace and per-
haps an innate trait, among many species. On this point, we return to
Fromm’s (1956) warning that the opposite is true—that anti-regulatory
practices, market-driven economies, and the hyper-competitiveness of
materialistic values are anathema to prosocial behavior! Fromm remarks:
‘I am of the conviction that the answer of the absolute incompatibility
of love and “normal” life is correct only in an abstract sense. The princi-
ple underlying capitalistic society and the principle of love are incompat-
ible’ (1956, p. 131). Departing from a strictly moral standpoint, Ricard
considers altruism—itself a core spiritual teaching of Buddhist doctrine—
through the mounting research evidence as a behavioral, social, and
psychological trait rooted in prosocial behavior, and thus one that can be
universally cultivated through habit. Ricard notes that rather than being
a lofty moral goal or ideal, altruism is a further extension of compassion
to others, one that transcends the risk and pitfall of ‘empathic distress’—
the phenomena where, at a pivotal moment, we shut down, avoid, and
withdraw from helping others due to overwhelm or overload.
I have put forward here through my lifelong experience in Aikido, as
well in my professional practice as a psychotherapist, both theoretically
and pragmatically, that the cultivation of one’s embodied awareness of—
and attunement to—their ‘field,’ environment or gestalt through prac-
tice can facilitate and lead to the realization of non-dualistic experience.
Going beyond Lacan’s early infantile transitivism (cited in Eagleton,
2009), the early-development stage of place-holding or mistaking others
184 M. A. GORDON
as ourselves in object relations formation, contemplative, relational prac-

tices such as Aikido foster the cultivation of altruism in the manner to
which Ricard gestures. In other words, in accord with the Four Noble
Truths of Buddhism, the basic contemplative practice of recognizing and
identifying with our suffering connects us with the quality of equanimity
and to compassionate awareness and attunement to the suffering of oth-
ers. Critically, though, what is required to fulfill the ‘cessation of suffer-
ing of all beings’ is action. As Zajonc (2006) encourages us, the call to
educators is to see our own liberation intertwined with the mission of
pedagogy as an act of love—to focus on education rather than the acqui-
sition of skill or the delivery of instrumental knowledge, as the wholly
human development of mind-heart skillfulness. In closing, I once again
invoke Chogyam Trungpa’s (1984) ‘tender-hearted warriorship’ and
Aikido’s ‘art of peace.’
Notes
1. Returning to the Chapter 1 with the Triangle, Circle, and Square, this
would represent the sequence of (1) ready posture (Triangle, openness);
(2) moving into connection (Circle, engagement); and (3) applied control
(Square, resolution).
2. Fromm’s driving analogy here echoes Merleau-Ponty’s unilateral incorpo-
ration (2012) in which the latter extends the notion of embodiment to
include the ‘bumper-to-bumper’ incorporation of the car as an extension
of one’s own body.
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Index
A 122, 128, 134, 156, 157, 165,

aesthesis, 4, 5, 10, 13, 77 168–170, 174, 177, 183, 184
aidagara. See basho authenticity. See Taylor, Charles
aiki, 9, 10, 14–16, 20, 22, 31, 32, 42,
44, 45, 53, 96, 100, 101, 119,
146, 147, 153, 156, 173, 178. B
See also ki basho, 97, 106, 109, 115, 170,
Aikido, 4–10, 12–18, 20–25, 27, 28, 180
30–39, 41–53, 89–107, 109, Bateson, Gregory, 50, 58, 61, 65, 71–
110, 112–127, 129, 131–134, 73, 75, 78. See also double-bind
139, 140, 142–144, 146–158, betweenness, 18, 23, 51, 93, 97, 98,
166–174, 177–180, 182–184 106, 115, 122, 125, 134, 174,
altruism, 31, 48, 52, 59, 68, 139, 176, 180
183, 184 Bowlby, John. See attachment theory
anima mundi. See Hillman, James Buber, Martin, 23, 51, 104, 109, 115,
anthrocentrism, 60 122, 180
aspirational, 6, 9, 11, 13, 23, 46, 48, Buddhism, 11, 12, 14, 23, 28, 39–44,
52, 89, 124, 134, 141–143, 174, 93, 97, 98, 103, 104, 107, 117,
176, 180, 181 122–124, 132, 134, 142, 167,
attachment, 26, 29, 58–60, 65, 71–74, 177, 179, 182, 184
78, 83, 133, 164, 165, 168, 180 budo, 7–9, 12, 31–34, 53, 92, 93, 96,
attachment theory, 59, 65, 71, 182 100, 117, 146, 148, 157, 171,
attunement, 17, 19, 24, 28–30, 178, 179
32–34, 48, 65, 83, 89, 113, 114, bushido. See budo
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), 187

under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2019
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-23953-4
188 Index
C embodiment, 24, 42, 107, 113, 123,

Cartesian, 5, 6, 14, 58, 64, 66, 67, 69, 124, 143, 179, 180, 184
170, 180 emotions, 35, 97, 135, 167
Cartesianism, 67 empathy, 29, 33, 46, 93, 172
compassion, 11, 12, 31, 40, 93, 131, epistemological error. See Bateson,
132, 145, 158, 175, 179, 183 Gregory
conscious, 6, 7, 15, 16, 20, 35, 79, epistemology, 9, 29, 59, 60, 62, 75,
94, 103, 112, 119, 120, 129, 76, 80, 83, 104, 140, 156, 157,
143, 152, 154, 156, 158, 177 181
contemplative, 12, 30, 59, 62, 76, epistemology of love. See Zajonc,
77, 89, 90, 92–94, 97, 98, 102, Arthur
104, 105, 131, 132, 139–145, Eros. See Hillman, James, 77–80, 82,
150, 151, 153–157, 168, 169, 83, 165
177–179, 181, 182, 184 experiential, 5–8, 16, 17, 19–21, 27,
cycle of learning, 34, 44 28, 35, 39, 50, 51, 90, 92–94,
97, 98, 111, 143, 169, 171, 177
Eye Movement Desensitization and
D Reprocessing (EMDR), 24, 25,
Davey, H.E., 15–20, 22, 28, 31, 112, 135
113, 143, 158, 178, 181
de-ai. See ma-ai
death, 3–6, 8, 10, 18, 20, 26, 79, 99, F
100, 107, 112, 117, 119, 121, field, 14, 24, 26, 27, 29, 30, 37, 45,
122, 166–168 46, 52, 63, 65, 66, 69, 70, 94,
Descartes, René. See Cartesianism 97, 98, 100, 106, 115, 120, 126,
dialogic, 21, 39, 58, 59, 76, 90, 91, 129, 130, 132–134, 169, 177,
93, 122 179, 183
dis-integration. See Spiegel, Berndt flow, 3, 9, 14, 15, 18, 20, 22, 28, 34,
dissociation, 63, 64, 67, 73 43, 72, 98, 105, 107, 123, 147,
double-bind, 65, 71–74, 81, 89, 90 148, 155
dualism, 9, 15, 41, 63, 66, 90, 98, Foucault, Michel, 59, 60, 64, 68, 74,
100, 117, 154, 168 105
Four Noble Truths. See Buddhism
Freire, Paulo, 58, 59, 62, 76, 79, 80,
E 104, 144
ecology, 9, 11, 27, 31, 46, 58, 64, Freud, S., 27, 78, 79, 81, 82, 165,
66–71, 73, 78, 80, 109, 113, 166, 168
115, 120, 123, 130, 134, 141, Fromm, E., 12, 13, 33, 166, 173–175,
174, 179, 181 183, 184
ecopsychology, 64, 76 fruition. See ground, path, fruition
ecosophy, 65, 76 fudoshin, 95, 99, 124, 153
Index 189
G I
gestalt, 7, 12, 13, 26–28, 32, 34, 39, ichi go ichi e, 100, 119
45–47, 75, 109–113, 120, 133, ichi go, ichi go-e, 7
164, 181, 183 interbeing, 51, 72
Gestalt Therapy, 7, 21, 26, 27, 45, 48, interconnectedness, 12, 52, 78, 90,
109–111, 114, 115, 120, 125, 96, 105, 139
126, 129–132, 134, 180 intercorporeality, 109, 112, 114, 123,
gestalt, 7, 21, 26, 111, 115 124, 134, 174
ground, path, fruition, 40, 41, 43–45, interdependence, 11, 23, 28, 34,
49, 93 42, 51, 61, 62, 64, 69, 83, 89,
three-fold logic, 40, 43, 51 91–93, 97, 122, 141, 177
interpsychic, 26, 35, 58, 69, 70
inter-psychic. See interpsychic
H intrapsychic, 23, 26, 28, 49, 58,
Hanh, Thich Nhat, 51, 62, 72, 80 69–71, 94, 164, 167
hara, 16, 20, 42, 149
harmony, 8, 10, 12, 15, 31, 32, 42,
45, 47, 53, 92, 96, 98, 100, 102, J
105, 112, 117, 119, 130, 146, James, William, 52, 114, 166
148, 150, 154, 157, 168, 169, Jung, Carl, 6–8, 19, 26, 27, 52, 110,
173, 174, 177, 178, 181 168. See also Jungian
healing, 11, 13, 26–28, 34, 36, 37, Jungian, 4, 34, 37, 49, 64, 133
39, 49, 58, 60, 61, 64, 65, 74,
78, 82, 83, 120, 145, 154, 164,
173, 181 K
Heidegger, Martin, 4, 79, 111, 127 keiko. See shugyo
hermeneutic, 21, 36, 50, 62, 70, 77, ki, 5–10, 12–20, 22, 23, 25, 31, 34,
175, 179 35, 43, 89, 90, 92, 94–96, 98–
heuristic, 30, 36, 37, 45, 50 101, 103, 104, 107, 109, 112,
hidden curriculum, 80, 144 115, 117–119, 124, 126, 133,
Hillman, James, 4, 28, 37, 49, 50, 58, 134, 146–153, 156, 169–172
64–66, 69–71, 73, 75, 77, 78, ki aikido, 5, 20, 22, 24, 35, 52, 90,
80, 81, 165, 181 96, 99, 107, 112, 113, 124, 126,
holarchy, 68 147–149, 172, 173, 177, 181
holistic, 7, 9, 13, 16, 22, 23, 29, 30, ki development, 16, 18, 20, 22, 24,
33, 39, 43, 44, 47–50, 60–62, 35, 90, 98, 99, 112, 148, 151,
65, 114, 120, 134, 139, 141, 172, 177
144, 173, 176 kinesthetic, 4, 9, 17, 19, 51, 90, 109,
Hooks, Bell, 58, 59, 61, 62, 64–66, 111, 112, 134, 148, 182
79, 80, 145 kokoro, 90, 157
horizon of significance. See Taylor, kokyu, 16, 22, 149
Charles kotodama. See Aikido
190 Index
L 119–122, 124–126, 128, 129,

Logos, 28, 50, 64, 79 132, 134, 168, 170, 180, 182
love, 9, 10, 12, 13, 20, 22, 28, 30, mushin, 15, 16, 178. See also fudoshin
31, 33–35, 45–47, 53, 59–62, musubi. See Aikido
71, 76, 78, 80, 83, 90, 99, 107,
146, 157, 173, 174, 177, 178,
183, 184 N
Naess, Arne, 58, 65, 66, 72, 75, 76,
82, 83, 180, 181
M nage, 95, 96, 98, 101, 103, 106, 107,
ma-ai, 9, 95, 96, 118, 149 115, 117–119, 121, 148, 149. See
martial, 4, 7, 8, 12, 31, 33, 41, 44, also uke
52, 53, 92, 98, 100, 107, 112, narcissism, 68, 173
113, 117, 134, 140, 146–148, nature. See ecology
151, 157, 167, 172, 177, 178 near-death. See death
masakatsu agatsu, 28, 149, 178 Nishida, Kitaro, 23, 51, 92, 97, 106,
McGilchrist, Ian, 52, 139, 140, 157, 109, 115, 122, 175, 180, 181
182 non-dissention. See aiki
Mead, G.H., 23, 51, 109, 115, 122, non-dualism, 11, 15, 131
175
meditation, 11, 24, 39–41, 51, 53, 89,
92–94, 102, 127, 131, 151, 153, O
158, 167, 168, 177, 179, 182 objective, 69, 72, 105, 141, 156, 173
Merleau-Ponty, M., 14, 51, 104, 109, objectivist, 5, 66, 67, 104
111, 114, 123, 126, 127, 171, Odin, P.S., 23, 109, 115, 122–124,
174, 179, 180, 184 175, 180
michi, 15, 16, 23, 28, 31, 52, 93, 113, one point. See hara
122, 143, 154, 173, 178, 181 ontology, 4, 16, 30, 46, 49, 50, 64,
mind-body, 5, 9, 12, 14–16, 18, 20, 97, 104, 109, 115, 132, 143,
22–25, 32, 35, 51, 89, 91, 98– 173, 174, 177
100, 103, 107, 110, 112, 113, O Sensei, 8, 31, 33, 34, 37, 41, 42,
117, 119, 122–124, 133–135, 44, 52, 53, 102, 117, 146, 149,
143, 150, 151, 153, 154, 170, 152, 168, 172
177, 178
mind-body unification, 90, 92, 102,
107, 152, 170 P
mindfulness, 24, 29, 31, 39, 40, 89, phenomenology, 13, 50, 51, 97, 104,
93, 97, 131, 145, 151, 167, 168, 109, 111, 134, 167, 174, 180,
179, 182 182
misogi, 33, 93 posture, 4, 19, 38, 43, 45, 95, 98, 99,
‘missing curriculum’. See hidden 101, 113, 144, 149, 151, 153,
curriculum 156, 158, 170, 172, 177, 184
motorcycling, 5, 13, 32, 39, 47, practice, 4–6, 8, 9, 11–18, 20–26,
49, 51, 109, 111–113, 117, 28–34, 39–41, 43, 44, 48, 51,
Index 191
52, 59–65, 74–76, 80, 89–94, 97, self-cultivation, 5, 6, 9–19, 22, 25, 28,
98, 102–105, 109–115, 120–127, 30, 32, 37, 39, 49, 51, 60, 112,
129, 131, 132, 134, 139–145, 113, 120, 122, 126, 139–141,
150, 151, 153–158, 165, 166, 143, 146, 150, 168, 176, 178,
168, 169, 172, 174, 176–184 181, 182
‘practice of freedom’. See Foucault, self-inquiry. See heuristic
Michel selflessness, 12, 178
praxis, 28, 45, 47–49, 58, 59, 62, 64, self-reflection, 17, 22, 112, 157, 166
76, 89, 91, 94, 96, 104, 105, self-regulation, 29, 93
122, 141 Shepard, Paul, 58, 60, 66, 83, 165,
Psyche. See Eros 182
psychodynamic, 70–72, 81, 132, 181 Shinto. See Ueshiba, Morehei
psycho-emotional, 11, 26, 59, 71, 72, shodo, 5, 13, 16–18, 22, 28, 34, 39,
110, 120, 121, 131, 132, 145 51, 154, 155, 164, 180, 182
psychosomatic, 18, 23, 25, 111–113, shugyo, 32, 93, 100, 117
122, 123, 134, 180, 182 skillfulness, 15, 17, 23, 32, 33, 52,
psychospiritual, 4, 6, 11, 12, 15, 22, 110, 113, 117, 120, 121, 126,
27, 32, 36, 37, 39, 49, 50, 59, 129, 133, 134, 156, 174, 177,
60, 63, 110, 117, 120, 126, 131, 178, 180, 181, 184
139–141, 143, 164, 178, 182 soteriological, 12, 41, 102, 104, 122,
psychotherapy, 5, 13, 21, 25–27, 29, 178, 181
33, 36, 39, 47, 49, 51, 70, 77, soul, 28, 36, 42, 50, 58, 64, 65, 69,
110, 133, 158, 165, 166, 179, 182 70, 78, 81, 83
Spiegel, Bernt, 109, 111, 121,
127–129, 132, 134
R subjective. See objective
rationalism. See objectivist subjectivization, 60, 67, 68
recursive, 6, 17, 22, 23, 32, 113, 144 synchronization, 7–10, 19, 149
relational, 4, 6, 9, 11, 12, 15, 17, 23,
28, 29, 31, 33, 34, 39, 48, 51,
52, 58, 59, 65, 72, 76, 89, 92, T
93, 99, 100, 102–105, 111, 112, takemusi aiki. See Aikido
122, 123, 131, 139, 140, 143, Taylor, Charles, 59, 67, 68, 70, 176,
145, 150, 151, 153, 157, 165, 182
169, 179, 182, 184 teleology, 5, 12
responsiveness, 4, 24, 25, 92, 102, 142, temporal-spatial, 10, 24, 91, 109, 112,
148, 151, 152, 155, 168, 169 113, 115, 133, 180
rider-bike unity. See Spiegel, Bernt Tohei, Koichi, 16, 20, 52, 72, 99,
106, 107, 112, 113, 147, 148.
See also ki aikido
S transformation, 12, 15, 16, 23, 26, 31,
Sangen. Seetriangle, circle and square 33, 37, 52, 53, 76, 79, 93, 112,
self-actualization, 29, 62, 65, 80, 92, 117, 139–142, 146, 156, 157,
114, 175 164, 180
192 Index
transhuman, 17, 33, 111, 114 W

transmutation. See warriorship. See budo
emotions;transformation Watsuji, Tetsuro, 23, 51, 98, 109,
transpersonal, 10, 12, 13, 17, 24–26, 115, 122, 174, 175, 180
34, 35, 37, 49, 52, 75, 94, 164, way. See michi
175, 176, 182 Winnicott, D.W., 59, 72, 78, 81, 168
trauma, 4, 24, 26, 37, 66, 111, 116,
120, 133, 135, 164–166
triangle, circle and square, 37, 38, Y
41–43, 48, 120, 184 Yalom, I., 21, 32, 49, 111, 166, 167,
Trungpa, Chogyam, 39, 40, 179, 184 182
Yuasa, Y., 5–10, 14, 15, 17–20, 22,
23, 28, 35, 39, 41, 92, 93, 98,
U 104, 106, 112, 122, 141, 148,
Ueshiba, Morehei, 8, 9, 12, 16–18, 170, 171, 175
20, 23, 28, 31–33, 37, 41, 43,
92–94, 97–99, 102, 106, 107,
112, 117, 120, 124, 146, 148, Z
150, 152, 177–179. See also O Zajonc, Arthur, 59, 62, 76, 77, 80,
Sensei 156, 157, 181, 184
uke, 95, 98, 103, 106, 107, 115, 117,
118, 121, 149
unconscious. See conscious
V
virtue ethics, 11–13, 23, 28, 32, 48,
122, 169, 176

Aikido As Transformer

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Aikido As Transformer

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Aikido as Transformative

and Embodied Pedagogy

ISBN 978-3-030-23952-7 ISBN 978-3-030-23953-4 (eBook)

underway, a shift toward a more interdependent, integrated, systemic,

world, touched by currents seen and unseen. Foremost, it is embodied,

Carrollton, Georgia, USA Tobin Hart Ph.D.

Vancouver, Canada Michael A. Gordon Ph.D.

I wish to express my sincere gratitude to my partner Helena for her inex-

Part I A Psychospiritual View of Self-Cultivation

1 Introduction: Practice as Transformative Wholeness 3

2 Teacher as Healer: Animating the ‘Ecological Self’

Part II An Intersubjective View of Knowing and Being

3 Awakening to Wholeness: Aikido as an Embodied

4 Moto-Morphosis: The Gestalt of Aikido

Part III A Relational View of Practice

5 The Way of the Classroom: Aikido as Transformative

Fig. 1.1 Triangle, Circle, Square: Sangen. Brushwork, Zen

Illustration I.1 Sai Sei “reborn” 1

Table 1.1 The eightfold path and its three divisions 40

Illustration I.1 Sai Sei “reborn”

Introduction: Practice as Transformative

I Did Not Die Today…

© The Author(s) 2019 3

awakeness’ takes place primarily through my lifelong study of ki-energy

The Teleology of ‘Way’ as Self-Cultivation

Yuasa contends, then, is that the phenomena of ki, measurable as it

two acquaintances—that I was not yet meant to leave this life—gave me

either being aligned or misaligned with the overarching meaning, value,

arts—Aikido teaches practitioners to respond calmly to threat through

stated, harmonization through aiki also transcends mere non-combative

commonly lead people to reconsider their position in life. In view of

Love as a Practice

standpoint within this gestalt view—unfolds teleologically. The under-

• autobiographical source material as ‘ground zero’ of my subjective

These thematic, methodological, and theoretical elements unfold with

Essay 2: Pedagogy as practice of love (healing, holistic)

human being qua microcosm is correlative with the physical universe

practice—this process as achieved mastery or ‘enlightenment’—as

(Japanese calligraphy, which I took up as a self-study practice for this

Self-Study Through Shodo: Japanese Calligraphy

We begin to see then a continuity in the Japanese ‘ways’—two of which

Ki Development Vignette: One

Theory as Practice in the ‘Here-and-Now’

contrast to the ‘there-and-then’ of past issues. Along with theoretical

As we shall see, this view of ontological wholeness is rooted in Buddhist

learning-in-relationship is emphasized over the what we are doing. Using

Toward Full Awareness: Working with the Source

ability to naturally withstand attempted provocation or stressors—what

divorce when I was ten years old. In my own years of psychotherapy to

Gestalt as Wholeness and Context

In contrast to Freud’s psychoanalytic theories and diagnostic psychia-

to take the dynamic structure of experience not as a clue to some uncon-

of Ueshiba’s Aikido—battling one’s own psychic demons, developing vir-

Why Is Relationship Central to Holistic Education?

this book is that all relationships—particularly pedagogical ones—are

Aikido and Shodo: Embodied Practice as Skillful ‘Way’

arrangement, dance) or martial arts training (Davey, 2002). One way of

aggressiveness and illusory separateness to be in harmony with the

Again, skillfulness, in the conceptual model of this book, is the ‘fruition’

referring to the four virtues of keiko taught by Morihei Ueshiba: bravery,

The Practice of Love Through Embodied Attunement

Ki Development Vignette: Two

Experiential Training in ‘Teleological Intentionality’ or Love

Fig. 1.1 Triangle, Circle, Square: Sangen. Brushwork, Zen

Illustration I.1 Sai Sei “reborn” 1

Table 1.1 The eightfold path and its three divisions 40

Introduction: Practice as Transformative

The Teleology of ‘Way’ as Self-Cultivation

Love as a Practice

Theory as Practice in the ‘Here-and-Now’

Toward Full Awareness: Working with the Source

Gestalt as Wholeness and Context

Why Is Relationship Central to Holistic Education?

Aikido and Shodo: Embodied Practice as Skillful ‘Way’

The Practice of Love Through Embodied Attunement

Experiential Training in ‘Teleological Intentionality’ or Love

Methodology: Listening for the Question

Theory, Design, and Methodology Within Aikido’s

Fig. 1.1 Triangle, Circle, Square: Sangen. Brushwork, Zen Master Sengai

Methodology and Conceptual Model: ‘Three-Fold’

Threefold Buddhist Model of Transformation

Table 1.1 The eightfold path and its three divisions

Table 1.2 Ground, path, fruition (conditional view)

Sangen as the Foundation of the Universe: Triangle, Circle, Square

Table 1.3 Ground, path, fruition (unconditional view)

A New Gestalt: Pedagogy as Transformational

1. Ground, Path Fruition (Mahayana Buddhism)

A Holistic and Integral Model of Self-Development

Table 1.4 Ground, path, fruition via Aikido and Gestalt Therapy

Table 1.5 The cycle is the whole: learning as ontology

Synopsis of Part III

Teacher as Healer: Animating

Illustration 2.1 Ai ‘harmony’ or ‘love’

The Disengaged ‘Rational’ and ‘Liquid’ Self

Detachment from Nature as Attachment Wound:

The Bigger Picture: Political Subject as the ‘Child’