Aikido, authoritarianism, and conflict resolution

2008-11-18T12:59:00.003-05:00

This morning, as I slowly awoke to my dog sighing, sneezing, stamping, and staring her insistence that she be let outside to chase a raccoon that isn't there, I started thinking about my thesis and aikido.

I'm a (very) novice aikido student, but one of the things I've quickly learned is that you're not supposed to look at the fist flying toward your face. If you do, you get bopped. The fist distracts and fills you with the idea that you're about to get hit... and then you do.

Rather, the idea is to ignore the fist, while "seeing" the motion of the attacker, gauging his intent, direction, balance, and speed, all in a fraction of a second. Then you can know which way to move to get out of the way of his attack.

If the idea of authoritarianism is a fist, I've been getting pummeled for a while now.

I realize that I've been treating authoritarianism as an elemental "problem," an obstacle, a disease to be defeated and overcome. I've struggled with it and with my approach to it; wondering if I were taking a biased position toward authoritarianism; imagining that I had to find a way to defeat it, to counteract it in a mediation or facilitation setting. My approach has been that people who hold "rigid" beliefs or mindset with respect to a particular issue just need a good shift in their paradigm to be able to see things clearly (as clearly as
I see things, of course).

This morning, while trying to reframe things more creatively, it dawned on me that what I've diagnosed authoritarianism as a sickness, when it's really a symptom with it's own underlying issues. In my aikido metaphor, I've been focusing on the fist and not on what the rest of the body is telling me about the situation. I'm not a little ashamed at how long it's taken me to come to this conclusion, but it reveals much about how my thinking has been skewed by my own rigid mindset in approaching this topic.

To take the aikido metaphor in a different direction, I've been trying to wrestle the idea of rigid mindsets to the ground and defeat them. Really, what I've done is set up an enemy (either a person or an idea personified) to be conquered. What an effort it's been, and how little progress such a RIGID approach has netted me! What if, instead, I approached mediation from an aikido-like perspective, with my goal not being to debunk rigid thinking, but to allow it ventilation, understand it, then redirect it toward a more productive and elicitive end? If rigid thinking is the manifestation of a fear of loss of control in a changing environment, or the desire for order, or a need to please one's God, or any number of reasons, then these ought to be the focus of the mediator. Rigidity distracts in this case, and confronting it head-on will only result in further blocking behavior.

Transformation and Spatial Orientation

2008-11-13T11:44:00.000-05:00

My master's thesis focuses on conflict transformation and obstacles to transformation, in particular, rigid mindsets and authoritarianism. I've been thinking about different types of transformation, and what they might have in common. In particular, I'm keying on the phenomenon of individual familiarization and orientation to a new physical space.

This is mundane on its surface. I'm thinking about instances when I've gone to an all-day conference and encounter a strange (new) space that is perhaps convoluted and confusing to the uninitiated. I take a seat in the audience and, as the morning progresses, I orient myself spatially with relation to the dais, the arrangement of the audience chairs, the shape of the room, where the refreshments and restrooms are, etc. During breaks, I may leave the room and wander out into the lobby, where I reorient myself in this space and its orientation with respect to the conference space.

As the day progresses, I may come to see the conference space, the spaces around it, and even the building from a different perspective, a shifted orientation. What is interesting to me is how I can alternately reconstruct my initial perception of my orientation to the space and then compare that with my current perception of my sense of orientation within the space.

You may have experienced the same phenomenon, or at some similar variation of it. As a child, I delighted in this type of comparison and contrast of two perceptions of the same space. What had changed in the space? Time had passed, for one. I had begun to relate differently to the space as time passed and I became more comfortable in my surroundings as I gradually eased into my role as a participant/spectator/whatever. Also, I had framed the space so as to move around in it efficiently and without getting lost. Orienting myself gave me a measure of control over my situation and my surroundings.

Why do I find this phenomenon interesting, or even important? Because it points toward an everyday flexibility of my mind to adapt to a new situation, to slide from one physical orientation, or paradigm, to another with relative ease and inner peace. As time passes, I can "look back" to a time (or space?) when I saw things differently. I implicitly acknowledge the passage of time, changes in my own perceptions, and the idea that, at some level, I not only create, but manipulate and shift my perceptions so that I continue to come into harmony with the space around me.

How might this idea of spatial reorientation over time shed light on how individuals approach particular conflicts? It points to a degree of individual responsibility for how we frame a conflict. More importantly, it demonstrates our ability to be in varying levels of comfort over time, depending on how we frame (and thereby actively perceive) a given situation. It shows that, in at least some cases, we are flexible in how we see the world around us.

Moon Writing

Aikido, authoritarianism, and conflict resolution

Transformation and Spatial Orientation