There were four of us, three men and a woman, who shared an ordeal, a rite of passage. In a culture that has turned its eyes from challenge and chance and possible tragedy, this was a rare gift indeed. We were up for black belt in Aikido — Richard, Lawrence, Wendy, and I — and over a period of about a year each of us in our separate ways confronted injury, exhaustion, humiliation, and despair. Our list of injuries alone suggested the severity of the ordeal. In addition to numerous bumps, bruises, and abrasions, we suffered a broken foot (Lawrence), a sprained neck and torn ligaments of the elbow (Wendy), a fracture of the cheekbone and a multiple fracture of the arm (Richard), and a dislocated shoulder (me). These injuries might seem excessive in an art that so often has the effortless quality of a dance or a dream. But in Aikido no punches are pulled, and each attack proceeds to its logical conclusion, with the attacker pinned or thrown through the air. Thus, the Aikidoist must practice hard and long to transform the fear of falling into the joy of flying — an unforgiving if ecstatic practice.
But we should not linger over injuries, for that would only distract us from the true significance of what we faced. Our teacher, Robert Nadeau, is not your run-of-the-mill martial artist. Though skilled in Judo and Karate as well as Aikido (and, we all agree, a formidable man to meet in a dark alley), he views himself as primarily a teacher of meditation and alternative ways of handling life’s pressures. For Nadeau, the mat is the world. Thus, he teaches us not to deny or avoid tensions and problems and pain in our practice but to welcome them as treasured gifts, as opportunities for transforming our lives. Far from working around our weaknesses, Nadeau zeroes in on every divided motive, every pretense, every secret, well-guarded flaw. If the mat is the world, it is the world beneath a magnifying glass, where nothing can remain long hidden. In this setting, self-examination is not mandatory; it is unavoidable.
All of this comes to a painfully sharp focus during the three-month period leading up to the black belt examination. Nadeau uses this period not only as an intensive cram course in advanced techniques, but also as a physical and psychological trial by fire. Anywhere from three and a half to ten years of practice might precede this ordeal. During this period, the candidate is expected to attend all of Nadeau’s classes. For the first hour of training each night, which is devoted to basics, the candidate or candidates practice along with all the other students. When the second hour begins, devoted to advanced training, Nadeau sends the candidates to the back mat. While the other advanced students go on with their regular training, the candidates practice the specific techniques that might be expected during the exam.
Fifteen minutes before the end of class, Nadeau seats the advanced students in the traditional Japanese meditation position around the edges of the main mat and calls the candidates front and center. He puts them through their paces, one by one, as the others watch. At the end, Nadeau arranges for a series of multiple attacks. First one, then two, then three, and even up to seven advanced students are directed to attack the candidate again and again. This goes on until the candidate is reduced to total exhaustion and either trapped or felled by the attackers.
Nadeau has a remarkable ability to know exactly in what technique each candidate is unprepared. On one occasion during my own ordeal, he told me to spend the entire advanced class practicing a technique called irimi-nage (entering throw). After forty-five minutes on the back mat, I was called front and center with the full expectation of demonstrating my well practiced irimi-nage. As I stood there waiting for the attack, however, I made the mistake of saying to myself, “I hope he doesn’t ask me for koshi-nage (waist-throw).” As if in response to my unspoken words, Nadeau said, “OK, George, let’s see your koshi-nage,” after which he let me flub one waist-throw after another until everyone present was painfully aware of my unpreparedness.
Over a period of nine months, Lawrence, then I, then Wendy faced our separate ordeals. Under physical and psychological attack, we discovered that a flaw is corrected only by being revealed, and that the true opponent is the one who resides within. Each of the three ordeals contained the tension and danger, the dark despair, the ironic twist, and the happy completion of which our most ancient and cherished tales are made. But it was Richard’s experience that seemed to draw us into other worlds, joining us with the immense and the infinite.
In his early thirties, at the very prime and glow of life, Richard might have been a figure from the Elgin Marbles. With his finely muscled, perfectly balanced body and handsome face, he seemed a modern counterpart of the classic Greek ideal of physical beauty, and indeed he had been an Olympic athlete in his college days. Nor were Richard’s gifts merely physical. He held a Ph.D. in psychology and was co-founder of a respected school of meditation, body work, diet, and interpersonal relations. He was a superb Aikidoist.
Dazzled by his gifts and grace, we might have found it hard to discover any flaws in this man, and sometimes Richard did seem almost too good to be true. But eventually a certain quality of calculation emerged, summed up in a phrase from gestalt therapy often used by Richard himself: “Taking care of myself.” The phrase was not meant to imply selfishness, but simply to clarify the healthy, openly expressed self-interest that can save you from dependency and the victim’s role. Still, you couldn’t help noticing that Richard wouldn’t accept any invitation until he had carefully calculated what he would get out of it; then he would accept only if, on balance, he figured he would come out on the plus side. Richard rarely did anything on speculation. He took good care of himself.
There was, as well, the matter of name. Richard had contributed a great deal to the field of human growth. Yet a number of other people who had made lesser contributions had become better known. Richard was aware of this and, it seemed to me, had a burning if rarely expressed desire to make a name for himself.
I doubt very much if our teacher involved himself in this sort of analysis. He simply intuited, then acted: when he had told Wendy she would be going up for her test in three months, he had told Richard that he didn’t know whether he would be going up or not. Richard could go through the three months of preparation if he wished. On the day of the exam, said Nadeau, he would let him know whether or not he would take it.
For Richard, this was like a slap in the face. He would have to endure a three-month-long ordeal with no assurance of any reward at the end. When fellow students would ask him if he was going up for black belt, he would have to say — though he would obviously be practicing hard for the event — that he didn’t know. Not a very good plan for someone used to taking care of himself. Already, he had suffered the most serious injuries of anyone in the school. After breaking his arm (during a strenuous throw), he had continued practicing while wearing a cast. Later, a break in his cheekbone (he had been kicked accidentally while down) had temporarily affected an eye muscle, and still he had continued practicing. Surely he had paid his dues in full.
Yet there he was on the back mat night after night, driving himself to exhaustion in the face of uncertain odds. As the weeks passed, Nadeau paid less and less attention to him. One night two weeks before the exam, I happened to be sitting next to Richard at the edge of the main mat at the end of class as Nadeau put the candidates through their paces.
“Is there anyone else?” Nadeau said, looking right past Richard.
Richard said nothing, and I heard myself answering for him. “There’s Richard here. You forgot him.”
“Oh yeah,” Nadeau said dryly. “What’s-his-name. OK, let’s see what he’s got.”
From this moment until after the exam, Nadeau never looked at Richard or called him by name. Occasionally, he would summon “what’s-his-name” to the center mat, and then make no comment about his performance. In the shower room three days before the exam, I asked Richard what he thought was going on.
“I don’t know. I can’t tell exactly. Something’s happening to me. I’m beginning to feel some kind of transformation.”
As is the custom, the exam was scheduled on a Sunday at 1 o’clock. It was a beautiful, cloudless June day. People began gathering early: Aikidoists from miles around, hundreds of spectators. An examining board of five ranking black belts would be convened to pass on the candidates’ performances.
“Well, are you going up?” I asked Richard when he appeared on the mat.
“I don’t know. Nadeau still won’t speak to me.”
The dojo had the feeling of a church before a wedding. Some people were meditating. Others were talking in hushed tones. Richard went into the office and came out with a strange look on his face.
“I guess I’m going to take it,” he said. “I saw my name on the schedule. Nadeau still hasn’t said anything.”
To begin the ceremony, all the Aikidoists bowed to the portrait of a venerable Japanese warrior on the front wall. This was Morihei Ueshiba, the legendary founder of Aikido known to all as O Sensei, the greatest of all teachers, whose seemingly miraculous feats in his old age had been photographed, filmed, and confirmed by respected witnesses. Five candidates had already been examined when Richard was called to the center of the mat. With his uke (oo-kay, “attacker”) he moved out in the graceful kneewalk common to the art. The two of them bowed first to O Sensei, then to the five examiners, then to each other. Nadeau called out the first series of techniques, and the exam began.
From the very beginning, it was apparent that something extraordinary was occurring. It was like one of those sporting events that are later memorialized, perhaps a World Series game or a bullfight, during which every last spectator realizes at some level that what is happening out on the field is more than a game, but rather something achingly beautiful and inevitable, an enactment in space and time of how the universe works, how things are. As Richard and his uke, still on their knees, glided through a series of attacks and pins as precise and formal as a tea ceremony, the silence in the dojo became deeper and more vibrant. Nadeau called for the next series of techniques. The uke rose and attacked the still-kneeling Richard, who moved in sweeping circular motions to embrace the attack. So gentle and coherent were his movements that they seemed to capture time itself and slow it to a more stately pace. Sometimes when Richard pinned his attacker with one hand, he reached out with the other in a gesture of balance that I had never seen him use in practice. This supple, rather androgynous movement was obviously not needed for balancing the physical body. It was as if Richard’s hand were reaching beyond the four walls of the dojo to a point of balance in the cosmos.
Nadeau called for the next series of techniques, which would have both attacker and defender standing. When Richard rose to his feet, there was a slight stir in the room; people here and there glanced up at the windows or the lights. What had happened, inexplicably, was that the room had suddenly become appreciably lighter.
From this point to the end of the story, I am relying, not just on my perceptions, but on those of several other people, including Richard, all of whom I phoned the next morning. Without telling any of them what the others had said, I began to piece together a coherent account of the previous afternoon’s events. My informants did not agree in every particular, but there was more agreement than disagreement, and a clear general picture emerged. I present it here simply as a consensus of subjective reports.
Everyone I contacted noticed the shift of illumination when Richard rose to a standing position. Some people also began seeing an aura — some described it as “golden,” others as “clear plastic” — around his entire body. As the exam continued, the speed and intensity of the attacks increased, and yet there was still a general sense of time’s moving slowly, at an unhurried, dreamlike pace. The spacious dojo began to seem smaller; an unfamiliar feeling of intimacy came over the Aikidoists and spectators around the mat, as if we were involved together in something usually reserved for our most private moments. During one swift attack, a hard strike to the belly, Richard slipped quickly to the side and made a bewildering gesture that none of us had previously seen. The uke, without having been touched, went down with a loud crash. This rather formal young man, a stickler for decorum, lay there for a moment looking up at Richard in astonishment, then laughed aloud. Later, Richard could not recall or reconstruct this remarkable technique. For his part, Richard was beginning to get the feeling that he was not “doing” anything at all, that the movements of his body were “just happening” without thought or effort.
The exam continued in this spirit, like a long, hypnotic phrase of music, through the body throws and defense against knife. Then, when Nadeau called for the uke to attack free-style, the illumination of the room seemed to go up another notch and the boundary of light surrounding Richard seemed to become denser, brighter, and unmistakably golden. The genius of Aikido is to transform the most violent attack, by embracing it, into a dance, and it was the essence of dance we saw there on the mat — neither powerful nor delicate, neither destructive nor creative, neither masculine nor feminine, but all such seeming opposites connected and drawn to a point of balance.
At a particularly radiant moment, Nadeau stopped the free-style attacks and gave Richard a minute to catch his breath before the climactic randori, the multiple attack. Richard turned away from the audience, in accordance with dojo etiquette, to straighten his gi uniform. As he did so, he glanced up at the portrait of O Sensei. A powerful arc of golden light seemed to be streaming from the eyebrows on the picture toward Richard’s head, covering him, suffusing him with gold. At this moment, we in the dojo experienced a third brightening of the room. By the time the three-man attack was in full swing, the whole place was alight as if from within with the most delicious, joyful, almost palpable illumination.
To a first-time spectator, the rushing, swirling, tumbling, crashing motion of a randori is simply overwhelming; the senses cannot handle it. An expert Aikidoist observes techniques and moves, watches for breaks in the energy field that subsumes both defender and attackers. But on this day spectators and experts alike saw Richard’s randori as harmony, the promise of reconciliation. No matter how hard or swift the blow, he was not there to receive it, but always at the moving center that holds all opposites in perfect tension. As for Richard, he experienced no effort or strain whatever; only a voice in his head, repeating, “This isn’t Richard. This isn’t Richard.” There, in the eye of the storm, stripped of the certainty he had always deemed necessary for survival, denied the support of his teacher, divested even of his name, Richard found the deliverance he had not known he was searching for. He had no question that he would be hit or trapped. If need be, he could go on forever, realizing all the while that “he” was not doing it. The voice in his head was clear: “This isn’t Richard. This isn’t Richard.”
“After the randori,” one of the people I called the following day told me, “I just sat there stunned. I couldn’t even move. It was only when the next exam started and the guy’s technique was so crude compared to Richard’s that I was shaken to the realization of what was going on — and that was really awesome. O Sensei was in that room. I knew it. I could feel the presence. Those crude techniques gave me the contrast I needed to sense it. O Sensei had been there all during Richard’s exam.”
“This Isn’t Richard” originally appeared in The Silent Pulse: A Search for the Perfect Rhythm That Exists in Each of Us, copyright © 1978 by George Leonard. Reprinted by permission of the publisher, E.P. Dutton, a division of New American Library.
Our thanks for permission to reprint this excerpt. Aikido and the New Warrior is published by North Atlantic Books, 2320 Blake Street, Berkeley, CA 94704 ($12.95 paperback).
— Ed.
For the related article “The Opponent Is Within” click here.
For the related article “A Kind Word Turneth Away Wrath” click here.
