Aikido & The Spiritual Path

Nothing makes life more meaningful than committing yourself to something greater than yourself.

A real commitment changes you.

It asks more of you than preference, curiosity, or occasional enthusiasm.

It draws out capacities you may not have known were there.

For decades, two long-term practice commitments have shaped my life in this way:

Aikido and the spiritual Path.

They have often overlapped.

At times they have reinforced one another beautifully.

At other times they have revealed each other’s limitations.

And that tension has been part of the learning.

The Iwama Dialogues

In July 2020, my old friend Bjorn Saw Sensei invited me into a conversation for a series he was producing called The Iwama Dialogues.

Bjorn and I have known each other for more than 30 years.

We share a history of practicing Aikido in Iwama, Japan, during formative years of our lives.

We also share a long-standing commitment to spiritual awakening, although our paths have unfolded in different ways.

That combination has always made our conversations interesting.

We can speak from a shared martial background while also examining Aikido from a wider spiritual perspective.

Not merely asking:

What can Aikido teach us?

But also:

Where does Aikido stop being enough?

The Value Of Single-Minded Commitment

There is great value in giving yourself deeply to one practice.

A serious commitment creates depth.

It forces you beyond the stage where novelty carries you.

You encounter repetition.

Difficulty.

Plateaus.

Doubt.

Resistance.

And eventually, if you stay with it, the practice begins to shape you.

This is certainly what happened for me in Aikido.

The years in Iwama were formative in the deepest sense.

The intensity of training, the structure of the dojo, and the influence of Morihiro Saito Sensei created a powerful container for development.

The practice was not merely something I did.

It became an organizing principle in my life.

The Genius Of Saito Sensei

Saito Sensei had an extraordinary ability to transmit Aikido in a clear, structured, progressive way.

He emphasized the importance of fundamentals.

Form.

Precision.

Repetition.

Weapons.

Body mechanics.

Connection.

The relationship between basic practice and freer expression.

There was tremendous depth in that method.

And there is something spiritually important about submitting yourself to a discipline with that degree of seriousness.

Practice strips away fantasy.

It reveals impatience.

Ego.

Avoidance.

Pride.

The desire to be better than we are.

If we stay honest, all of that becomes material for development.

But Aikido Has Limits

One of the central themes Bjorn and I explored was something that may be uncomfortable for committed martial artists:

Aikido has limitations as a spiritual path.

Aikido can be transformative.

It can develop presence.

Sensitivity.

Discipline.

Embodied awareness.

Relational intelligence.

The ability to remain centered under pressure.

But that does not mean Aikido automatically develops every dimension of spiritual maturity.

Technical skill is not the same as awakening.

Martial competence is not the same as psychological integration.

Years on the mat do not guarantee freedom from self-deception.

A beautiful philosophy does not automatically become embodied realization.

This is where loyalty to a practice can become limiting if it turns into exclusivity.

Seeking Beyond Aikido

At a certain point in my own development, I needed to look outside Aikido.

That search eventually led me more deeply into Buddhist meditation practice and to my teacher U Pandita.

This did not require me to reject Aikido.

It required me to recognize what Aikido could do well and what it could not do for me by itself.

That distinction matters.

A practice can be profound without being complete.

A teacher can be extraordinary without being the answer to every developmental question.

A lineage can be worthy of deep commitment without needing to become an all-encompassing worldview.

Maturity sometimes requires remaining devoted while also seeing clearly.

Spiritual Protection And Martial Protection

Another theme in our conversation was the difference between martial protection and spiritual protection.

Martial practice develops our capacity to respond to threat in the relative world.

It trains perception, timing, posture, movement, awareness, and relationship.

All of that matters.

But spiritual practice asks a different question.

Not only:

How do I protect myself?

But:

What is the self I am trying to protect?

At some point, spiritual practice turns attention toward identity itself.

Toward fear.

Attachment.

Mortality.

The structures through which we organize the sense of “me.”

That inquiry leads somewhere martial training alone may not.

The Promise And Peril Of A Higher Path

Any serious Path carries both promise and peril.

The promise is transformation.

The peril is identification.

We begin practicing in order to become freer, but over time we may become identified with the practice itself.

With the role.

The lineage.

The teacher.

The culture.

The identity of being an Aikido practitioner.

A spiritual path can fall into the same trap.

The form that once liberated us can eventually become another structure we cling to.

This is why mature practice requires ongoing discernment.

We must keep asking:

Is this practice still serving awakening?

Or:

Has my identity become organized around protecting the practice itself?

Practice As A Living Path

For me, Aikido remains part of the Path.

But I no longer need it to be the whole Path.

Its value is not diminished by acknowledging its limits.

In fact, its value becomes clearer.

Aikido has given me a profound embodied education in relationship, timing, structure, conflict, adaptation, and freedom through form.

Meditation has opened other dimensions.

Other teachers and disciplines have revealed things Aikido could not.

Over time, these streams of practice have become less like competing systems and more like different lenses on the same fundamental question:

How do we become more awake, more free, and more capable of meeting life as it is?

Commitment Without Captivity

There is a mature form of devotion that does not require blindness.

We can love a practice without idealizing it.

We can honor a teacher without projecting perfection.

We can enter deeply into a lineage without becoming trapped inside it.

We can allow one Path to lead us toward another.

And we can recognize that sometimes the deepest loyalty to practice is the willingness to keep growing beyond the identity the practice first gave us.

That is one of the lessons Aikido and spiritual practice continue to teach me.