Galen's Aikido Origin

tl:dr — I’ve come and gone from regular training at many dojo, many times.

Well, we’ve been home for a week. This new schedule is all messed up—I haven’t been to the dojo in over two weeks. Actually there are only shreds of a new schedule, but actually nothing makes much sense yet. For example I have been teaching class 6 days a week this year, up from five days a week since the dojo opened. Not since March 5th now.

Regardless of my mood, my state, my desire, my lack of desire, fatigue, exuberance...regardless. To be there and dressed for class, to have the bell ring, to bow in, warm up and proceed. I can recognize life without this daily practice, but not the life I have spent the last decade building towards since arriving in Minneapolis.

I first went to an aikido dojo in 2001, on Manhattan the month after 9/11. At that point I had been in New York for only two months and was witness to some radical transitions. As life returned to back to normal I began to have significant, seismic embodied experiences walking after class down the now crowded to the brim again avenues. These brief moments were certainly part of what kept me from not stepping in front of a bus. It was a dark time, and little light shone in for me.

Some strange way I ended up less than a year later living in Vermont. I’d also at some point stopped training, I don’t even remember when or why. I took a tai chi class, which sad to say was dull. But on the other side of the wall was Aikido of Champlain Valley where Benjamin Pincus Sensei was teaching class. Listening to the slapping of the mats I felt I should be there. So my training began in earnest.

Of course, being the person I was then I came and went. I progressed I’m sure. Began to say hello to people in the changing room, mostly that kind of thing. At some point I moved to Boulder and experienced their strange aikido where we addressed people needing to cry on the mat because of the emotional intensity of simulating violence. Though I missed the vigorous movement I found some other part of myself affirmed.

I returned to Vermont again, finished college. Spent a winter working and training in Santa Fe with Hauer Sensei before moving back to Boulder so my girlfriend could finish her degree. I trained full time there for almost three years though it took me most of the first year to find the two or three people whose practice was compelling enough to ground me. Two years later as it came time to leave Boulder to an indeterminate future, but with the distinct likely-hood of being on the road for 5 or 6 months, I asked each of them what they would do in my position, with an extended absence from regular practice.

Dan Nishina (who oddly just now moved back to the States after being in Japan for another 10 years with his teacher) gave me an answer that still stands out in my mind. Befitting how I perceived his character at the time, he actually responded somewhat incredulously. As if the question were mildly absurd. What would one even consider doing other than to continue observing oneself in each moment, moving through the world—seeming to imply that this quality was perhaps lacking in my current practice.

Skipping over some adventurous pilgrimages I somehow found myself back in Vermont for a period of intensive study in preparation for settling to the Midwest (Viroqua, WI) to teach painting and aikido. And/or harboring the still unexamined fantasy of being a professional fine artist. On the way I also made the (absurdly privileged) plan to come to MCAD for credentialing to teach visual arts. Quite shockingly, and at the very last minute, I ended up in Minneapolis alone and heartbroken.

I took a few classes here across the river, and delightedly attended TCAC’s first Waite Sensei seminar. After connecting with him there and resuming regular practice I realized it was not possible for me to continue my training there, at that time. I threw myself into my studio practice and besides spending 60 hours a week painting (and or drinking beer with studio mates) I studied yoga intensively and spend a lot of time rolling on the cement floor of my studio.

I completed my training at MCAD knowing that I would retire as a painter. My thesis piece was a 9 by 60 foot painting (currently folded up in a suitcase in my garage) that expressed some significant piece of what I had seen and felt in the confusion grief. But in making it I’d come to realize that the image was not what motivated me, it was the action of making it. It was being a person, not describing them. I was finished painting other people’s pain to express my own, or certainly saw this as a confused enough way to try and earn a living, and had the better sense not to.

Maybe some of you know, I tried to leave Minneapolis then to go back to Santa Fe and resume my aikido training there (after a now 18 month hiatus from regular practice and with a sharp burning hunger). On my way out the door I predictably stopped to have a drink with the elusive Hannah Kramer. Blah blah blah, a month became a summer became a career and a home with family and now this dojo, these people with whom to explore being a person.