Thought for the Month
What aikido taught me about being human.
June 2026 · A personal reflection
A note from Saale -
People ask me what aikido does for me. I never quite know how to answer, because the honest answer is: it does everything. Not in a grand, mystical way. In the smallest, most ordinary way you can imagine.
I don't practice on a tatami every day. I practice in the kitchen at seven in the morning, when someone has spilled milk and someone else can't find their shoe and the toast is burning. I practice in the car on the way to work. I practice on the phone with my mother, when her voice gets tight and I feel my chest get tight with it.
Aikido, for me, is not a hobby. It is the lens I have learned to look through.
With my children
Blending, not breaking.
My middle one has a temper. She is fierce and beautiful and when she explodes, she explodes. My first instinct, always, is to meet that force with force - to be louder, firmer, to win. But aikido taught me what happens when you do that: the energy has nowhere to go. It just builds and builds until something shatters.
So I try something different now. I get low. I get close. I soften my voice until she has to quiet down to hear me. I move with her anger instead of against it. And almost always - not always, but almost - the storm passes through her faster. She lands in my arms instead of against a wall.
That is aikido. Not the throw. The listening. The willingness to receive someone's force without needing to crush it.
With my partner
The space between.
In every relationship there is a moment - you know the one - where a small thing becomes a big thing, and suddenly you are standing on opposite sides of something that didn't exist five minutes ago. The old me would dig in. Hold my ground. Make my case.
The me who has trained for years does something stranger. I step to the side. Not away - to the side. I try to see the shape of what they are actually saying, underneath the words that stung. I try to understand the attack before I decide how to respond to it.
Sometimes the response is still: no. Aikido doesn't mean you never hold a line. It means you hold it with your whole body centred, not from your throat. You hold it from a place that is calm, not clenched. And that changes everything about how it lands.
With my parents
Receiving what is given.
My parents are getting older. There is a grief in that which I did not expect - a slow, daily grief that lives under everything else. And there is also a tenderness, one that asks me to be softer, more patient, more present than I have maybe ever been.
Aikido has a principle called ukemi - the art of receiving. Of falling safely. Of absorbing impact without hardening. I think about it often when I sit with my mother now. I receive her stories, even the ones I have heard a hundred times. I receive the weight of her worry. I let it move through me instead of bouncing off.
Not every gift is easy to hold. But the practice of holding it gently - that is the practice.
At work
Centre before motion.
Work is where aikido surprises me most. A difficult email, a tense meeting, a deadline that presses in from all sides - the body reacts before the mind can think. Shoulders climb toward the ears. Jaw tightens. Breath gets shallow and quick.
The first thing aikido taught me was to notice this. To feel it happening in my body before it reaches my mouth. To drop my weight, settle low, breathe down into my belly - the way you do before you receive a technique on the mat. Centre first. Then move.
Almost every decision I am proud of at work was made from that place. Almost every one I regret was made before I found it.
What it cleanses
A wash for the nervous system.
Here is the thing I most want to say, and the thing I find hardest to explain. When I train - even for ten minutes, even badly - something in me resets. Not my mood. Something deeper. Something in the wiring.
The day I have been carrying in my shoulders lets go. The conversation I have been replaying goes quiet. My nervous system, which has been braced for something it couldn't name, remembers that it is safe. The breath I have been holding all day without knowing it - I finally exhale.
I don't know if this is science. I only know it is true. Movement is a kind of washing. It doesn't fix the problems. It just makes me present enough to meet them.
Thank you for reading.
This is a new space - a monthly thought, a small window into the person behind the practice. It won't be polished. It won't be instructional. It will just be honest.
If something here resonated, I am glad. Come back next month - I'll have another one. Until then, keep moving, keep breathing, and keep finding your centre.
- Saale