I Did Not Die Today…
This book begins with a story about my own encounter with death. On a hazy sun-drenched Summer evening in July 2010, I had a ‘brush with mortality’—a phrase we shall see that has multiple meanings in this book. I was making a short trip on my motorcycle to grab a bite to eat close-by after an appointment in my hometown of Vancouver, BC. What happened in a flash, shortly after I donned my helmet and pulled on my protective gloves in familiar ritual, both froze and expanded my perception of time and space and profoundly changed my life. I pulled away from the curb in routine fashion and paused at a stop sign on a side street and, seeing that the intersection to the major road was clear and the main traffic light was red, I proceeded across the pedestrian-controlled traffic light to make a left turn. Traffic flow was stopped in both directions at the main red light. I looked in each direction, twice. What I couldn’t have foreseen, despite all my normal and precautionary routines, was that I was headed for a near-fatal collision with a car. As I moved across the intersection, the pedestrian light still flashing a red hand to signal caution in crossing, a driver approached downhill through the glare of the setting summer sun to my left, seeing what I didn’t: a suddenly clear green traffic signal. Already in motion, the driver now accelerated through the green light. A tanker truck to my immediate left was fully stopped at the intersection yet to proceed through the green light, air brakes applied, obscuring me from the oncoming car as I pulled forward past the truck’s front bumper to make a left turn.
The oncoming car hit me broadside. The bike was hit with such force that it was knocked out from beneath me, spinning and skittering on its side axis into the middle of the opposite oncoming side traffic. According to a witness, I was knocked head-down off my motorcycle, straight into the pavement—mercifully landing after the car had pushed through. While my head and neck made direct impact, I can only attest to the fact that decades of martial arts training and break-falling in the Japanese defensive art of Aikido had effectively saved my life, instinctively putting me into a state of coordinated, relaxed body posture and protective responsiveness. As the witness stated later: ‘I don’t know how you survived that!’ As horrific as the accident was, I came out relatively spared of physical injury—this considering I ended up hitting the pavement helmet and hands first, my bike scattering across the road and ultimately written-off as a mangled unrepairable loss by the insurance company. In that life-threatening blink of an eye, years of quick reflexes and martial arts training in Aikido proved its merit, protecting me from significant shock, trauma, and, possibly, death.
This dramatic autobiographical event serves as the pretext of this book, where I use the ‘brush with mortality’ to examine the psychospiritual, kinesthetic, and relational aspects of practice as it applies to daily life. By this I suggest not just life and death situations (which a martial art such as Aikido suggests via ‘self-defence’), but rather to the sense of being fully immersed in living. Aristotle laid the early foundation for later phenomenological philosophy and study of ‘aliveness’ with the Greek term aesthesis , which forms the root of his theory of aesthetics. Jungian scholar James Hillman (1992, p. 60) is one of a succession of modern philosophers from Nietzsche through Heidegger to revive the Aristotelian idea of aesthesis (from Greek, meaning ‘sensation’), which relates to the experience of aletheia (meaning ‘unconcealment’ or ‘disclosure’ of truth through phenomena). As educator Elliot Eisner points out, ‘The opposite of aesthetic is anaesthetic!’ (as cited in Coghlan & Brydon-Miller, 2014, p. 121). Thus, in terms of ontology, and practice, being alive is not simply a measure of being not dead but being fully awakened. Speaking to this ‘aliveness,’ I take up the full kinesthetic (e.g., embodied) aspects of my own practices toward connecting with their generalizable and practical applications for full and joyful immersion in life. In my self-study for this book, the focus on aesthesis or ‘alive awakeness’ takes place primarily through my lifelong study of ki-energy (Japanese: ‘life energy, vitality, life force’) and mind-body coordination through the dynamic art of Ki Aikido, as well as my purposefully adopted practice of shodo (Japanese calligraphy). I go on to relate this core experiential ‘way’ of ki-awareness or aesthesis to the other practices in my personal and professional life: psychotherapy, motorcycling, and teaching. Though I did not incur any lasting physical injury from my motorcycle accident, my ‘brush with death’ was emotionally, symbolically, and spiritually shocking and awakening. I remain an avid motorcyclist, and as a teacher and practitioner of the art of Aikido, I draw on this direct encounter with death when asked if I have ever had to use Aikido in real life.
The Teleology of ‘Way’ as Self-Cultivation
Yuasa (1993), in his theory of ki , examines self-cultivation from an Eastern philosophical tradition, a position from which he advocates for a more ‘subjectivist’ scientific research approach. In doing so, Yuasa is highlighting—from the East Asian philosophical worldview—an explicitly teleological nature to knowing and being. By contrast, as Yuasa suggests, one result of the objectivist scientific paradigm that ensued after the so-called Cartesian dichotomy of mind/matter is that ‘[t]eleology has been expelled from modern science’ (1993, p. 148). Yuasa specifically refers to teleology via the history of pre-modern biology and traces pre-modern biology’s roots to Aristotle’s original notion of ‘final cause’ (telos), where ‘teleology states that all phenomena exist for a certain purpose’ (1993, p. 175). By this, Yuasa suggests that teleology and causality are mutually exclusive in modern science. In causality, for example, the lungs have a certain function in human physiology that correlate to circulation, breathing, and the autonomic nervous system. Conversely, as Yuasa informs us, Aristotle was led to telos because he was indeed familiar with biology and that ‘it is possible to view the character and structure of a living organism as formed to realize a definite purpose’ (1993, p. 175). ‘For example,’ Yuasa states, ‘the lungs are a means for the purpose of breathing’ (1993, p. 175). He also conjectures that Darwin purportedly used Aristotle’s theory of teleology in initially forming his theory of the evolution of life. While it may seem subtle or semantic, the distinction is vital in that teleology connects to human meaning-making in a way that transcends the scientific rigidity of causal relationships. What Yuasa contends, then, is that the phenomena of ki , measurable as it may be through experimental observation as, say, electromagnetic force both within and outside the human body (cf. discussion of ki-therapist in scientific study in the upcoming section), suggest a ‘third way’ that is neither scientifically measurable nor imm...