Compassion

 

Over the past few years I’ve increasingly found my aikido practice, my life, and my relationships with myself, others, and the universe permeated by a state or condition that I’ve been calling compassion. My feeling is that this condition is ultimately the crux of aikido; that it’s both the goal of aikido and the source of aikido; that it’s the place from which Morihei Ueshiba, the founder of the art, was speaking when he said that “Aikido is not a technique to fight with or defeat the enemy; it is a way to reconcile the world and make human beings one family,” and that “In aikido... we train in hopes of being of some use, however small our role may be, in the task of bringing peace to mankind around the world.”

Naturally, I’ve been looking for ways to help my students to cultivate this state or condition in their own aikido and in their own lives. Until recently, though, I've been reluctant to explicitly speak about compassion in my teaching, because I've had no actual working definition of the word “compassion” (aside from the circular definition that “compassion is this thing I'm experincing that I call compassion,” which is useless for purposes of communicating the thing to others). Words have power and I believe in using them responsibly; I wanted a clear definition because I didn’t want to just be tossing the term “compassion” around in my teaching as a catchy but slippery and undefined buzzword, the way Republicans toss around the words “freedom” and “liberty.”

On March 10th and 11th, 2006, I attended an excellent workshop at California Institute of Integral Studies entitled "Tibetan Compassion Practices: Working with Terror, Trauma, and Transcendence," taught by Steven Goodman, Ph.D. Dr. Goodman provided me with what I was looking for - a clear, concise definition of compassion that matches my own experience of it: Compassion is the capacity to be present with trauma without succumbing to it.