It’s always easy to stick labels on things – and we do it all the time. The need to define something – or someone – arises from the need to understand its meaning, its perspective.

Thus, defining Aikido as the Art of Peace places those who practice it within a specific perspective -one that is ethically clear in its framework.

Partly because Morihei Ueshiba suggested it, and partly because of John Stevens’ fortunate intuition in translating Aikido as the Art of Peace, the idea of combat has been increasingly pushed to the margins of practice. Along with that, any notion related to competition or the sportification of movement has also been set aside.

Common experiences for everybody -such as winning or losing– have therefore become increasingly foreign to the world of Aikido, which has often been so worried with preserving the original message of its founder that it has at times grown rigidly dogmatic.

The issue, in fact, is not about whether or under what conditions Aikido practice can include competitions. However, it seems odd that a child or a young person -who constantly experiences winning and losing through play and grows constructively in his/her relationships thanks to those simple experiences, if properly guide- should be denied the same opportunity just because he/she steps onto a mat to practice Aikido. But that is another story, and time itself will carry Aikido where it needs to go.

The point here is to realize that if a martial discipline is meant to support personal growth, then it cannot turn away from the topic of defeat -of imperfection, of limitation.

And it certainly cannot do so while hiding behind the excuse of “Hey, I practice a non-competitive art” expressed with a presumed ethical or moral superiority over those who, surprisingly!, do compete- and still manage to become good people. Perhaps even because of those experiences.

There’s a huge difference between studying defeat and running away from it. Or denying it.

You can study defeat -one of the most statistically obvious outcomes of any conflict- even without competing. But only with rigorous commitment to training and sincere technical exchange with your partners.

Recognizing ourselves as fragile, incapable, and limited is the condition necessary to fall -and rise up. Not as a mechanical gesture, but as a constant push toward improvement that becomes a moral imperative. For ourselves and for others.

Or, one can deny all this and settle for being a perfect robot. After all, experience shows that behind technical mastery often hides a person who, rather than striving to evolve, builds armor and pours immense energy into maintaining a self-image that age and wear make harder and harder to sustain.

We need the courage to speak again about finality – about victory and defeat.
Because transcending dualism and opposites can only arise from a healthy experience of polarity.
To make mistakes and be lucky enough to be guided by teachers who point them out and give you tools to improve…

To be completely dominated, overwhelmed by a technique executed so perfectly that there’s no room for response…

To perform a move and be entirely overturned by a counter-technique…

To recover a purely geometrical sense of technical exercises -for instance, in weapons work and kata – in order to objectify, if not right and wrong, then at least worse and less worse…

It was recently said during a Dojo training session that in order to grow, we must be able to see something new even in the techniques we believe we’ve already mastered. That “something new” is precisely the imperfection within us that takes on ever-changing expressive forms.

A sort of symbiote, without which there would be no joy in progression.

Only when defeat is seen, accepted, and studied will it be possible to build Peace -and speak of the Art by which we might try to spread it.

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