Learning to Face Your Opponent
A timeless lesson about relationships from the martial arts
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…
