Life Examples
Sex In The Dojo
09 November 2005 12:12 AM
Ethics are guidelines for human behavior for all those who live within a society.
If it can be done it will be done.
What will be done is not necessarily good for the individual or for the community. However, how do you evaluate what is good in behavior and in society?
Without a foundation in the fundamental principles that act as the context within which you live life, you have no foundation ground from which to live. You have a life being lived from chaos and lack of purpose. You are unpredictable.
In the example I have given elsewhere the head instructor of an organizationally approved, Aikido dojo in a certain country regularly dates and seduces the new pretty women who enter his dojo. We can assume that such practice is done elsewhere also. I have a more extreme life example I may analyze someday.
What should we do about such a situation, if anything?
It is generally assumed that a woman over the age of eighteen should be able to take care of herself sexually. Women who are twelve may want sexual experience but this is not approved by societies who hold to the age eighteen rule. So all those wonderful teenage years with mature genitals are not made public within the group and society and dealt with in the open where young people can receive advice and experience regarding their sexual lives.
At age eighteen a woman is now suddenly supposed to be mature sexually when she has not been allowed to have sex with more mature and older men and women to build up her experience and confidence?
It does not make sense, does it?
The best love you can give a person is to introduce them to new life in a way that they can accept it and integrate it into their being.
Thus, one problem is that we do not give our teenagers open support in handling their new sexuality. It is obvious that groups are needed to impart life skills and experience. The family unit is too small and certainly not well trained usually to impart life skills in an objective and effective way.
Thus in our example we have young women, eighteen to twenty-five, entering an Aikido dojo where the head instructor then seduces them.
Are these women equipped to handle a powerful male in his thirties with years of Aikido training and development?
First, since Dojo Aikido as it is today does not deal openly with sexual issues, then it is not clear to new students "what the rules are" so to speak.
In the Aikido dojo the culture is imparted in little remarks and behaviors, all involving another fundamental human instinct, aggression.
One dojo instructor has claimed that Aikido practice is all about sex in the energy forms of blending as in sexual love making.
However, closer to the truth is that Aikido practice is quite aggressive. You attack and defend. You do not blend in a unity as you do in sex. When tori has uki in a wrist grip and uki goes flying through the air, that is a transfer of motion and energy.
Aggression is the transfer of motion and energy from one person to another.
Sexuality is the mutual enhancing through motion of energy.
It is easy to see how one can confuse one with the other. In both is the expression of energy. However, in good unity sex there is a buildup of energy through mutual blending and enhancement.
Surely in sexual mating you do not throw your partner away! In Aikido you do! In Aikido your uki must learn to fall and pick herself up. The tori does not mutually enhance you. The tori, the thrower, gives you away to yourself.
Well, you can see distinctions here but also some similarities.
We can ask, is the sexual expression of mature Aikido practitioners also like their Aikido practice? Do they tend to throw their sexual partners away? Do they come together with them but don't stay locked in mutual embrace?
Using myself as an example, I have had many sexual partners over the years, and, yes, there is a tendency in me "to move on." It has taken real courage and a counter move on my part to stay with one partner a long time. I have chosen sometimes well and sometimes not well. Here is a famous story about someone else I knew.
A talented Aikido Instructor and psychologist was partnered with an equally talented Aikido practitioner and psychologist. But she left him and when asked why, she said she wanted to have children and for that she needed a different man. She married a lawyer who was a warm father to their children and protective of her and his family as well.
Talk about the archetypes! Talk about energy flow! She may have been right.
Our thinking and real life examples are used to make us aware of Spiritual Aikido, the practice of the fundamental energy principles that underlie the Universe.
For our Aikido dojo head, who practices a beautiful Aikido, we can also say that the young women students he has sex with have a right to experience sex with him, and to learn that "the Aikido Way" does not involve permanent relating through time but is only for practice in expressing the Life Force in the moment.
All fine and good. Unfortunately, Aikido, as an international movement in personal development, does not make sexual practice for Aikido students overt.
This is some of the most challenging evidence that Physical, Ueshiba Aikido does not, does not, teach the energy principles of Spiritual Aikido, or they would surely apply them to life, practice them and talk about how they are doing in their practice.
Human talk is for sharing and learning about life. Can it really be true that sex, one of the great energy forms of expression, is not freely talked about in and out of the Aikido dojo?
As we have seen from the above analysis, Aggression and Sex can seem very close together, so much so that one instructor said "Aikido is sex."
Well? Cannot we better say, "Energy is energy, and there are many forms in which to express energy?"
Sex and Aggression are two fundamentals. Let's keep working to become clear about them.
For a courageous article on sex by an Aikido instructor, with comments from readers, see:
Penetrating the Heart of Aikido by Ross Robertson
: http://www.aikiweb.com/columns/rrobertson/2005_02.html |