A recent study by psychologists from the University of Chicago found that not only those who were fluent in another language, but that those who were merely “exposed” to one in early life showed better understanding of others.

They tested their theory by asking different sets of children – bilingual, exposed and monolingual – to move an object from an adult’s eye line.  In the test, there were three toy cars – a large, medium and small one – with the smallest being clearly hidden from the adult.  When the adult said to the child, “I see a small car” and asked them to move it, 75 per cent of the bilingual or exposed groups moved the medium car – the smallest the adult could see – compared to just half of the monolingual group.

The study seems to suggest that in order to understand a speaker’s intention, one must take the speaker’s perspective. Multilingual exposure may promote effective communication by enhancing perspective taking.

Simply put, learning something doesn’t just expand our horizons, it expands us.

I have written elsewhere of my antipathy to sports.  My upbringing just did not encourage an interest in it.  I learned to look down my nose at the “muddied oafs” who played and the fans who watched them.  I certainly didn’t engage actively in sport myself.  For a time, I believe I held the record for avoiding games lessons at my school.

As I got older, like most teens, I did judo for a while.  This was in the 1960s and we all thought we would be James Bond or Batman after three lessons.  I came back to Judo in my early twenties, but I can’t say I enjoyed it any more.  It was still all a little to Saturday afternoon sport for me, followed by a drink down the pub.  Of course, the fact I broke my collar bone twice in six months may have had something to do with it.

It was around this time that I ran across aikido (in the form of the book “Aikido” by Kisshomaru Ueshiba) and I knew this was something different than “sport” and that it was for me.  Later I was fortunate to find a class with an excellent teacher, and what it has done for me over the years, apart from giving me a little skill in aikido, is to broaden my horizons, which is to say, broaden me.  It has made me more appreciative of sport.

For a while I became quite the basketball fan; in fact, I was one of those fans I used to despise, roaring on my own team, disparaging their opponents and fans, and, of course, abusing the referees.  In my defence, I would say, it was always good humoured – well almost always – and during the bad seasons with a poor team, it was the banter that kept us going.

At the most basic level, doing aikido made me appreciative of physical prowess (and the pleasure of working hard at something and making progress, albeit slowly in my case).  And it taught me to enjoy the pleasure of a drink in the pub after a physically demanding session.

So what I’m saying is I was raised in a culturally monolingual way.  That is to say, that I was taught to regard mental effort as better than physical effort, or rather, physical effort for fun and/or competition.  You could argue that it was a class thing.   My world view was white and middle class.  As I grew older, left home and went to college, obviously my perspective changed as I was exposed to people of different political persuasions, religions and ethnicities.  I became more left wing and more inclusive, but I would argue that it was largely an intellectual change.

It was aikido that was responsible for completing the change, because it involved not just the mind, but also the heart and the gut: the three tantien of Chinese medicine, the intellectual, the emotional and the instinctive.  The lowest, physically speaking exists slightly below and in from the navel, is the “ocean of vitality” and changes chi, the life force that permeates and links everything, into physical strength.  The “crimson palace” situated in the centre of the chest at the level of the heart changes energy into passion and emotions, like love and hate.  It is what makes us human.  Finally, the “cave of the original spirit”, situated in the middle of the head is responsible changing life energy into thought processes.

You don’t have to believe in these concepts, but the idea behind them makes perfect sense; when your intellect, emotions and instincts are working in perfect harmony, you tend to feel better.

Aikido encourages you to do this.  I would like to return to Terry Dobson’s translation of awase, which we usually refer to as “blending.” He says “agreeing”.  Receiving uke with kaiten (shifting the hips to avoid attack) or tenkan (pivoting 180 degrees to avoid attack), both involve the same thing – turning to look in the same direction as your attacker and aligning your centre with theirs.

This is physically doing what I experienced when I was eighteen, appreciating that other people looked at the world with a different point of view.  But this time it is not merely an intellectual experience, my whole body is engaged.  However, if my emotions are out of control (if I am scared, or angry) or if my mind is elsewhere, the technique is never perfect.

So to me, the essence of aikido is how it broadens the people who practise it.  It gives us a whole new language to use in our relationships with other people.  It teaches us not to think of people as opponents, or to respond to them aggressively.  It doesn’t ask us to appreciate their situation intellectually, it literally shows us to see what they see and to treat them with the same kindness we treat ourselves.

Aikido may not be another language in the normal sense of the word, but it is a language the whole world should learn to speak.

Robert Frager is one of the founding fathers of aikido in America.  He was a direct student of O’Sensei, living and studying in Tokyo in the 1960s and one of the few non-Japanese students at the original Aikido dojo.  He is an interesting man, a professor of psychology, a former Jew, a new Muslim and a sheikh in the Halveti-Jerrahi Sufi Order.

I have been reading a piece he wrote in “Aikido in America”, a compilation of writings about aikido by some of the people who had the greatest influence on the development of aikido in the States, people like Terry Dobson, Mary Heiny, Robert Nadeau and Wendy Palmer.

I was particularly taken by one thing he wrote:

I learned what aikido was all about from who O’Sensei was, not from what he did.  I also had the feeling that you could take O’Sensei’s aikido away from him, you could take his skill at the techniques of aikido, and he would still be O’Sensei, because what O’Sensei was for me was what he had become inside, the inner self.

It seems to me that the question he is asking is “Why do we practise aikido?”  Are we primarily studying a martial art to learn to defend ourselves or is something else going on?

Frager goes on to say that O’Sensei said that it was wrong to view the person we were practising with as an opponent instead of a partner because you don’t learn the qualities of blending, sensitivity and empathy if you’re training as if you are always in a fight.

I think people come to the martial arts for a variety of reasons, but the one that gets quoted most often is “to learn to defend myself,” and I believe that is a valid reason to practise aikido.  But it’s not the only reason, and certainly not the most important reason.

It is a good thing that people should feel more confident, fitter, more secure in themselves, physically and mentally, but if that security is won at the expense of someone else, then it exists only so long as you are stronger and someone else is weaker.  And this oppositional view of aikido means that you are always unsatisfied, because you’re always worried about your enemy.

Look how the Cold War developed, with America and Russia developing more and more nuclear weapons to defend themselves, until between them they had enough to destroy the world many times over.  And yet even then they did not feel secure.

Richard Moon 6^th dan is an instructor at City Aikido of San Francisco, which was founded by Robert Nadeau, another of those Americans who travelled to Japan in the 1960s to study with O’Sensei.  He argues that the martial arts in general that they are competitive, and therefore are contests about who is best and set us up in opposition to each other.  In an article for Aikido Journal he writes:

I see studying a “way of being” very different from learning the skills of the art whether it be war or dance, painting, pottery or fighting. Developing one’s self for ‘the completion of the universe’ has a different flavour, different intent and ultimately a different outcome, from a competitive approach in which people are trying to conquer or defeat others.

He talks of aikido as a study for the mutual benefit of the community and adds:

It seems people often have a hard time understanding that distinction and so don’t see a value in the practice of harmony.   As such, they miss the value in the practice because they are studying fighting and winning over others.  O’Sensei said, “Winning means winning over the discord in your own mind.”

Frager defines the martial attitude as “the warrior archetype”:

Someone who reveres life but not out of fear.

But he goes on to say that this is not enough, and refers to two further archetypes: the healer and the magician.  The healer is one who works to heal inner fears, to heal oneself, and the magician works on change, on transformation.

The point being that being a warrior is only a small part of the picture.  It is about being comfortable with violence and aggression in other people and in ourselves, but if we can’t transform that energy then we are in danger of being stuck in the technique.

Now I’m not saying that there is anything wrong with technique.  My favourite sensei, Morihiro Saito, was very precise in his teachings of technique.  You had to get used to the word “dame” at his seminars as he produced a book of photographs of Morihei Ueshiba as examples of how you should be doing the technique.

But even he says in his book “Aikido – Its Heart and Appearance”:

If one examines Aikido patiently for a long time, something is bound to touch your heartstrings.

That isn’t something you would generally expect to read in a martial arts!

Terry Dobson, another of American aikido’s founding fathers is quoted in “Aikido in America” as saying:

… so for me learning takes place in just looking at the students, just learning to look at people … to just notice what people show you instead of looking over their heads and being lost in the technique.  I’m starting to look at real small details, to see that person as a person.

These are important statements by people who learned from O’Sensei himself, and they all point to the fact that aikido should develop us, we should not develop aikido.

Or to quote O’Sensei:

Your attitude should be that of a parent to a child.

This is not a soft thing – it can be firm and authoritative, but it is always nurturing and caring.  There can’t be a parent reading this who doesn’t understand that statement.  Our children change us as much as we develop them.

It means that if for whatever reason we can’t be a warrior in the dojo, we can still be remarkable.