To someone who has never met a martial artist, it would be natural to expect the typical specimen to be more violent than average. After all, studying a subject is a sign one enjoys it, and martial artists - at a surface level at least - study violence. Talk to a fair sample of martial artists and you'll find the opposite trend holds true. I've heard several theories why - one I think has a lot of substance is the idea that most conflicts originate in fear. Some violence happens over resources, but the majority of violence happens over image. We wish to avoid having our scarce resources taken, so we try to cultivate an image of being capable of defending them - ironically, that leads to more conflict than the scarcity itself. Someone truly capable of mayhem has no curiosity or fear of it, hence no need to fight for egoic reasons. The only fights they get into are out of genuine necessity, which is a rare occurrence.
Much conflict today is waged not with kinetic but with verbal means, and I believe the same principle holds true in that realm. That is why my latest book project, Verbal Aiki, approaches nonviolence in the verbal realm as a martial arts challenge, a subject I'll explore on this blog as well. Many principles can be ported between these realms, and one I've been thinking about lately is the complementary nature of conditioning and sparring in martial arts.
There is a story about a village that needed rain, so they called a shaman known for solving that problem. Upon arriving, he asked for a hut on the edge of town where he could be alone, something the village elders duly provided. He went into isolation there for several days, emerging slightly after the rain began falling. When the villagers asked how he brought about the rain without the usual song and dance he replied, "When I came to your village, I immediately felt unsettled in my inner self. That's why I had to isolate myself, so I could rebalance. Once my inner self was in harmony, bringing harmony to the rest of the village was easy".
A strange story, right? Here's a stranger one:
A man grows up in a land occupied by foreign invaders. In a bid for social mobility his parents have him educated in their system of governance and thought. Though their rule is competent at first, corruption and incompetence set in over time, and he aligns with a movement to achieve self-governance in his country of origin. The invaders are gaining too much wealth to let his country go easily, and are too technologically advanced to remove by conventional arms. However, he has studied their ways: he knows their moral codes and self-image. Preaching a message of nonviolent civil disobedience, he leads unarmed people against the full military might of the occupation. The resulting repressions are so unpalatable to the invaders' citizenry that they withdraw, preferring the loss of wealth as his country achieves self-governance over the loss of self-image it would take to keep it.
Both are stories of peace, inner and intrapersonal respectively. If these were martial artists, we would say one emphasized strength and conditioning while the other emphasized sparring. Both are important to being competent in one's field. Too little interpersonal peace will make us lose our carefully cultivated composure at the first sign of trouble, while too little inner peace will make the peace we do bring to interpersonal exchanges shallow and fragile. It can be good to evaluate our practice, to see if we are neglecting one of these important areas.
Gracie Jiujitsu revolutionized martial arts because it spent the majority of training time on sparring rather than conditioning. It did this by avoiding techniques that caused injury quickly - deliberately making itself less harmful to spend more time dancing at the edge of harm, with impressive results. The Verbal Aiki system attempts something similar by introducing an element of interpersonal peace to a space where most effort up to now has been around cultivating inner peace. While this space is likely not as ripe for disruption as martial arts schools in the mid nineties, it could use some more understanding of interpersonal peace. I'd go so far as to say this will become a vital skill in the challenges shaping the coming decade.
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