Learning to Face Your Opponent
A timeless lesson about relationships from the martial arts
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Sometimes, in life, a single word or a single sentence can make a huge difference — an unexpected communication that penetrates to the core of your being and then radiates from the inside out for the rest of your life. I had one such moment 40 years ago when I was a novice Aikido student in Los Angeles.
Here’s what happened: In the dojo, while practicing a new technique with my partner, my teacher walks over to me, observes briefly, looks at me, and utters these eight words: “You have to learn to face your opponent.”
I had no idea what she was talking about and just looked at her blankly.
Then she stepped forward and gently rearranged the way I was standing, noting that I was standing a little too obliquely from my partner — a posture I had taken that was eventually going to require me to overcompensate in order to complete the move, an action that had the potential, she explained, to injure my partner and myself due to all of the unnecessary twisting and turning likely to happen.
In other words, the way in which I had positioned myself in relationship to my partner was off. I was not facing my partner head on. I was being too indirect, about 10 degrees “off to the side” and it was this indirectness, my teacher explained, that had the potential to cause injury. Whoa!
As I let her words sink in, I knew exactly what she was talking about. The wisdom embedded in her eight words cut to the core of my being.
What she observed in me at that moment was a very penetrating expression of how I had been living my life — especially my relationships. Somehow, I was a little bit off… too indirect.. a little out of whack.. skewed to the side. In other words, I wasn’t really engaging others as directly as I needed to and it was my indirectness that was contributing to a whole bunch of negative consequences — some very subtle — that I had to deal with.
This is one of the amazing things about Aikido or any inner practice that a person commits to. You get to see where you’re at and where you’re not at. The feedback is immediate. It’s humbling. It’s confronting. And it’s not always easy to take in. But if you are…
