We asked some of our newer aikido students at the Aiki Arts Center if they had any questions about practice for the yudansha (black belts), and then we passed those questions along to the yudansha to get their answers. The result is this series of posts we call “Insights for Beginners.”
This fifth and final post in the series features answers from Nick Walker Sensei, co-founder and senior instructor of the Aiki Arts Center, who currently holds a 7th degree black belt.
Why Aikido? Something about the art struck you in a way strong enough to keep you around all the way to a black belt (and beyond). What was it?
Here’s a secret from someone who’s stuck with aikido for close to half a century so far and made it to 7th degree black belt: there’s no one thing about this art or any other art that would be enough to keep most folks around that long. Motivations expire, and new motivations come along if you keep training and stay open.
When I first started training, I stuck with it because I was 12 years old and the instructors had a certain quality to their characters, an awakeness and clarity of presence, that I hadn’t encountered in adults before. It was the first time I’d met anyone who I could stand the thought of being like when I grew up.
But admiration for one’s instructors isn’t a sustainable motivation. Unless you’re prone to the kind of delusional mindset that turns people into cultists, sooner or later you figure out that your instructors, whatever admirable qualities they may have acquired through their practice, are deeply flawed human beings just like everyone else. Fortunately, by the time I figured that out at the age of 16, I’d already found a new motivation: training made me feel more alive, made being a body in this world into a dance.
Over the years, my reasons for training have continued to change. One of my reasons now is that aikido has given me so much that I feel called to pay it forward, which I’m only qualified to do if I keep developing my own practice. But my biggest reason is curiosity: where will the art take me next; what’s the next breakthrough in my practice that will surprise me; what sort of person will another decade of aikido turn me into; what levels of harmony might still await me further down this road?
But this is the point I want to emphasize: new motivations will keep coming along. And the people who stay with their aikido training long enough to experience its most profound benefits are the people who keep showing up to class and training even during the periods when the art doesn’t excite them and their motivations are unclear. New motivations and excitements emerge as one continues to train, and no one gets far in this art, or in any other worthwhile practice, unless they have the grit and patience to keep at it steadily while the motivations and excitements come and go.
What does it feel like for you to connect with your Aikido partner? Is it intimate?
In my experience, the longer and more deeply one trains, and the more one allows one’s practice to open one’s heart, the more deeply one learns to connect and the more intimate one’s connections can become.
A fundamental principle of aikido—or at least of aikido as I practice and teach it—is that the more we can maintain a state of centered presence, openness, and relaxation during our interactions, the more effectively we can tune in to what’s happening in the bodies of those with whom we’re interacting. After so many years of working at this, I can sense a whole lot about a person when we’re in physical contact, or even when I’m just watching them move. That feels intimate to me; I find that the more attuned I am to other people’s bodily states, the more care I feel for them.
From reading Journey to the Heart of Aikido, my understanding is that Aikido, as originally pursued by O-Sensei, was not just a martial art but an entire way of being, applicable in every moment. Does this align with your experience of the art?
Yes, very much so. But here’s an important thing I’ve learned over the years: aikido can become a whole way of being, but only to the extent that one works at it. Ongoing training at the dojo is the indispensable foundation for cultivating this way of being, but it’s not enough. There are plenty of people in the world of aikido who have become highly advanced practitioners and teachers of the physical techniques of the art, but who don’t consistently act with integrity in their dealings with others when they’re not on the mat.
The positive transformations of character which aikido can help bring into manifestation don’t happen automatically. One must actively work to embody and apply the principles of aikido in one’s daily life, especially in the situations and contexts in which doing so is most difficult. This requires a lifelong commitment to honest self-reflection, self-awareness, and self-correction.
To put it another way, your training in the dojo provides you with a set of tools for transformation. Making the choice to use those tools outside the dojo, and figuring out how to apply them in a given context, is up to you—though of course your teachers are always happy to offer whatever insight we can, if there’s a specific context in which you’re having a hard time seeing how aikido can be applied.
How do you recognize your Aikido practice affecting and transforming your life outside of the dojo?
For me, the transformation of my life has rarely been a passive process; it’s generally been about making active choices to apply the lessons of my aikido training toward the task of improving the way I conduct myself. But occasionally I notice that bit by bit, slowly and gradually, I’ve become more open, more resilient, more joyful, and more capable of sustaining equanimity.
What is your current edge in practice? What are you grappling with in practice at this time?
Gratitude.
The most profoundly influential teacher I’ve had in my life, Antero Alli, died in late 2023. He was diagnosed with lymphoma, decided not to accept treatment, and his health slowly declined over the course of a year or so before the end came. And in between the time of his diagnosis and the time of his death, he got happier and happier. He told me that what he was experiencing, or what he was cultivating, was an ever-increasing sense of gratitude. In his final year, gratitude was the main focus of his life, and it was beautiful and humbling to witness.
So that’s what set me on my current path of trying to cultivate my own capacity for gratitude. I’m not good at it yet. Over the course of my life I’ve developed reasonably good capacities for love, care, devotion, respect, appreciation, and reverence, but gratitude is something different and listening to Antero talk about it during his final year helped me to realize it was a capacity that was underdeveloped in me. So now I’m working on developing it, and it’s quite the challenge for me.
In my experience so far, coming in routinely is supportive for me because it constructs consistency; however, it can dull my practice in the way routines tend to do. How do you reconcile consistency with aliveness?
A consistent training routine is an essential foundation for cultivating any substantial depth in one’s aikido practice. Without a consistent training routine, you may feel a sense of aliveness in your practice, but it will tend to be superficial and fleeting compared to the richer and more profound experiences of aliveness that emerge through consistent practice over a long period of time.
As for the problem of dullness: a routine is dull to the extent that one is just going through the motions of it, and alive to the extent that one continues to find ways to invest it with more life by continually setting challenges for oneself. When I find my practice getting dull, I challenge myself to do something like pay more attention to keeping my heart open, or to how I breathe, or how much sense of spaciousness and connection I can cultivate, or the level of commitment I can bring to my attacks and my falls. It’s up to each one of us to continually find ways to push the edges of our aikido within the context of our training routines.
What is the most important advice you would give to an Aikido practitioner who is early on their journey of practice?
First: Establish as consistent and frequent a training schedule as you can, stick to it as best you can, and return to it as soon as you can if it gets interrupted.
Second: Learn and consistently follow the formal etiquette of the dojo; it’s the foundation of mindful practice and in the long run is more transformative than might initially be apparent.
Third: Stick with your practice regardless of your emotional state. Intense feelings and discordant thoughts will arise in the course of your practice, including feelings of shame, anger, inadequacy, or frustration that are often the result of old wounds—for instance, a student who was subjected to shaming by authority figures as a child may feel surges of shame and anger when corrected by an aikido teacher, even though correction is a necessary part of the instruction process and in a good aikido dojo is offered in a spirit of care. The correct way to deal with all of these thoughts and feelings is to relax your body, slow your breathing, and redouble your focus on your training.
Fourth: Never allow yourself to fall into the self-centered and self-defeating delusion that the difficulties you face in your practice are greater than the difficulties that have been faced and overcome by others, or that you are inadequate in some special and unique way. No matter how inept at aikido you might feel, I guarantee that you’re not more inept than I was when I started. Your teachers got good at aikido through hard work, not natural talent, and so can you.
