About Our Practice

I hesitate to write this section. I could only hope to give you a pale representation of what Aikido practice might be for you, like a menu description of a fine meal. But you've come this far already, and I wouldn't expect you to order the dish without getting to read the menu.  -David Zeger

Everybody comes to and continues with Aikido practice for their own reasons. Within the first few practices some excellent benefits of training begin to surface. Improved fitness, balance, coordination, awareness, calmness and self defense skills would certainly be included in the list. Additionally, training is shared with a diverse community of practitioners in a fun environment. If this is what you're seeking from martial arts practice, you will surely find it here.

Kokikai Aikido practice teaches powerful self defense. Through the study of basic principles you can experience a natural and powerful way of being, often times more powerful than you expected you could be. At the same time you can learn to reduce a would-be attackers desire and ability to do harm. This approach can apply to a wide range of possible conflicts or challenges, both physical and non-physical, and also allows for a wide variety of possible, successful outcomes.

Although our practice will help you learn to protect yourself, we don't train to be champions or warriors. Some might say Aikidoka (Aikido practitioners) don't compete. It may be better to say we don't compete with each other. Rather we compete with ourselves of yesterday. Today I aim to discover how I limited myself yesterday so that I can move past that and become better than I was. This position has strong implications for how we approach practice. If I were to compete with others, I would hope for them not to be very good so that I could win the competition. Because I am competing with myself, I require that others get better too. Otherwise they are less effective in helping me to improve. Therefore our practice is unusually cooperative by nature.

Excluding winning tournaments or battles from our training goals has another implication that is unusual among martial arts. Our practice doesn't require you to be big, strong, fast or young to be successful. You can compete with yourself, regardless of where you're starting. We train average people, not to win matches but to become more confident, aware, compassionate, comfortable, effective individuals (yes, we have lofty goals). Aikido practice often helps people become more who they want to be. Therefore we can offer this study to many people, regardless of size, strength, age, coordination, ability/disability and many other factors that you might mistakenly believe to be limiting. For the same reason, you can train in Kokikai Aikido throughout your life and expect to always get better with practice, not worse as your body ages. All we require is sincere interest in and dedication to learning.

After some time, many practitioners find that the benefits of their practice become enriching and transformative. There are already enough words written about the many great changes that Aikido might bring to you. Your experience, however, will be your own. Unfortunately, reading others ideas without the benefits of your own practice can only give you the illusion of understanding. So instead of telling you about somebody else's experiences in Aikido, we would like to invite you to have your own. Our dojo is here to help you begin and continue on this path.

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