Darrell Bluhm
I was at a seminar at Multnomah Aikikai with Chiba Sensei in Portland in the late 90s, or early 2000s. Aki Fleshler was the chief instructor then. At this particular seminar, Sensei used Aki and me almost exclusively for ukemi, which was unusual, because both of us at that time were in our fifties, and he hadn’t used either one of us as an uke in a really long period of time. So we were happy to be able to do it, but it also was sort of difficult—and it was ridiculously hot. Then, during a break, Sensei had us come into Aki’s office, and he said to us, “When you take my ukemi, you have to meet me as my equal. Otherwise, I have to control you, or dominate you, and that’s not Aikido.”
First of all, I had never thought of any way I could meet him as his equal, because I was just so in awe of his physical abilities and his depth of understanding. But in that context, it was kind of an awakening for me. We may not be of equal skill, but we have to be of equal commitment to this encounter.
And then the line that really stuck out to me was, “If I have to dominate you, it’s not Aikido.” The writer/activist bell hooks has commented in her writing (and I’m paraphrasing): The will to dominate and the capacity to love are mutually exclusive. You can’t love somebody if your intention is to dominate them, because the foundation of love is acceptance. And if your relationship is one of dominance, it’s not love, it’s something else—it’s control, it’s whatever. O-Sensei, the founder of Aikido, is often quoted as saying Aikido is love, emphasizing that the ai of Aikido, which is to harmonize, is related to the ai of love, (not romantic love, more like agape, parental love or societal love.) In order for us to learn how to love, if that’s what our practice is, we have to give up this desire to dominate or control and find ways to engage each other honestly, with a mutual commitment to one another and to the principles and the forms of Aikido.
Sensei often said his mission was to nourish the roots of Aikido. And for him, that meant Aikido as budo, as a martial art. So maintaining the martial integrity of the art was central to his teaching, but he was also very committed to O-Sensei’s vision of Aikido as what Sensei would call “budo with a heart”—a discipline inviting us to perceive the world in a non-dualistic way, to understand the inherent interdependency with all of life while simultaneously recognizing that each one of us is an absolutely unique individual. So there’s this tension between recognizing our unique individuality, and simultaneously understanding that we’re completely interdependent, not just within our own community, but in the more than human world as well.
The David Budbill poem The Three Goals speaks to this paradox:
The Three Goals
The first goal is to see the thing in itself
in and for itself, to see it simply and clearly
for what it is.
No symbolism, please.
The second goal is to see each individual thing as unified, as one, with all the other
ten thousand things.
In this regard, a little wine helps a lot.
The third goal is to grasp the first and the second goals, to see the universal in the particular, simultaneously.
Regarding this one, call me when you get it.
One more short story that is significant for me: I had a student who came to practice with me who was young, very physically talented. He came from a school where his teacher had more of a mixed martial-arts background, and placed more emphasis on street fighting. So his idea of “martial” was very much about how to hurt somebody. He went to a seminar with Sensei—I wasn’t there—and asked Sensei, “How is Aikido martial?” As was typical for Sensei, he replied, “What do you mean by martial?” And so this guy says, “Well, ‘martial’ has to do with the god Mars, and combat, and the ability to be successful on the field of combat.” And Chiba Sensei answered, saying, “That’s where we disagree. For me, the martial element of any organism lies in its ability to fit in its niche in its environment, its capacity to adapt. That’s what martial is. It has nothing to do with fighting.”
Hearing this from my student, I became curious. Some time later, I was able to ask Sensei, after a really wonderful day of fishing on the Rogue River (always a good time to draw him out), “Can I talk to you more about your definition of martial as adaptive capacity?” He said “Sure. And if you want to explore a martial system, try and understand your own immune system.”
This is something I think demands deep investigation. Our immune system is a selectional system. It functions the way that evolution functions. How we maintain balance in the world, how we deal with the invasion of microorganisms or forms of cancer, the ways that our immune system mobilizes to protect us in certain circumstances—these kinds of things make it a useful model for what is martial.
Editor’s note: this article originally appeared in Remembering Chiba Sensei, the chapbook given out at Summer Camp 2025.
Bluhm Sensei will be teaching a seminar, “Orientation, Openness and Connection”featuring Feldenkrais classes in addition to Aikido, September 19th & 20th at Aikido Institute of San Francisco.
