Martial Nonviolence (tm)
The amazing gift brought by people who really make a difference in working toward Peace is that they do conflict well rather than avoiding it. There is a delicate balance struck between domination and surrender in the practice of conflict across its many manifestation. It seems to me there are any number of valid choices in response to conflict - from becoming limp in order to do no harm to the choice to cause pain and even damage while doing as little lasting harm as possible. The choice I have a hard time respecting is to voluntarily lack careful decisions about and practice of your choice of response.
My choices
When I was a boy I struck another boy who took the lead in a group that chose to victimize me. I struck him in the face, knocked him to the ground and saw the look on his face as he became the victim instead of me. I ran home from his house crying while they all watched dumbfounded. Thereafter I developed a willingness to allow myself to be harmed in order to model non-violence. This I practiced. Then, it became clear that there was a middle ground that would allow me to intervene when others were being victimized which the surrender method did not provide. For several years I studied what was available to me - the percussive (punching and kicking) martial arts. It became clear that this was not the middle ground I had imagined so I stopped, despite enjoying the rigor and competition. In 1990 I renewed my search for the discipline that would fit my desire for a conflict method that matched my ideology and discovered an art that has some grounds for identifying itself with peace and harmony.
Aikido as metaphor
One way, rather than The Way, I approach peace work is the practice of Aikido. Since it involves taking control of another person's balance there arises the specter of domination. Since it seeks a transformation of the conflict experience, rather than practicing total annihilation of The Enemy, practitioners run the risk of being overrun by an attacker. These are the tensions, both in the bodies and in the minds of the persons participating, that make Aikido work when it works as self defense and fail when it fails. The practice of Aikido, however, can be related to but independent of physical combat concerns, in that it shapes in the practitioner, like other martial arts, a pervasive energetic insistence on this particular being different. Combat systems rightly insist that the difference is "you thought you'd be beating me down and now the reverse will be the case". Breaking with this contemporary emphasis and historical background Aikido insists, from the philosophy through technique execution, that the unexpected shift of expectations will be "whatever you thought was going to happen, I insist that everyone, including you, be able to walk away from this when they choose and with their identity and body more or less intact."
Martial Nonviolence (tm) is the process art of conflict that honors the need to struggle while insisting that friction not be framed as a zero-sum game in which someone must become the victim.
Labels: bdwc, culture, martial, nonviolence, peace
| posted by Unknown @ 6/20/2002 01:25:00 PM
