Shodan reflections on the questions: “Where am I? Who am I? What am I doing?”

Congratulations to Dan Reid who passed his shodan test over the weekend of December 2-4, 2016; the Northwest Regional Seminar held at Multnomah Aikikai. Part of the requirements for his test included a written essay. This essay is published with his permission below.

Shodan Essay

The warm June air inside the university gym was thick with sweat, so the announcement that Chiba Sensei’s weapons class would be held outside was a welcome treat. We were in the thick of 2007 Summer Camp, and we all filed eagerly into the fresh air with bokken in hand. After a vigorous session of suburi and kirigaeshi among the broadleaf trees, we sat in seiza on the cool grass and Chiba Sensei gave a lecture. During his talk he said that whenever he trains in any form, he asks himself three simple questions that have stayed with me ever since:
“Where am I? Who am I? What am I doing?”


These questions may seem innocuous on the surface, but when I begin to parse their
implications they reveal hidden depths of meaning. The effort to internalize them and keep them at the forefront of my mind has been a core element of my Aikido and Zazen practice for nearly a decade.

The first question is the most straightforward and accessible, but the answer to “Where am I?” is not a street address or set of coordinates. Instead, the answer presents itself when I open all my senses completely to my surroundings. I try to widen and soften my field of vision in all directions, open my ears to small and distant sounds, smell and taste the air around me, feel the light breeze drying the damp spots in my gi, feel the smooth oak of my bokken, feel gravity pulling my body downward and pressing my feet into the earth. The sensation of gravity, which is actually a relativistic distortion of space- time, opens the door to perceiving existence in all four spatial dimensions of “where.”

The second question, “Who am I?”, seems to be the most deceptive of the three to Westerners. The answer is not my name; it can perhaps be best understood through other questions. How do I see myself when I’m not looking in a mirror? What does my inner voice sound like? What do I feel like inside my skin? Eventually, I begin to understand that this is not actually separate from the first question. This realization feels similar to the Hindu maxim “that art thou,” which reminds us that the outer universe we perceive is not different from our inner universe. The spatial boundary of my skin is a convenient external reference for my individual identity, but it is permeable and temporary. There is a constant exchange across the boundary of air, food, water, waste, sweat, light, thought, and speech. Continuous streams of cosmic rays and neutrinos from the far corners of our galaxy zip through my body without slowing down or noticing that I’m here. After my consciousness dissipates in death, my body will likewise disperse into the local ecosystem. Ultimately, “I” am a finite occurrence in time; understanding the second question effectively extends the first into the temporal dimension.

Finally, “What am I doing?” can be considered an intersection of the first two questions. When I do something, the “who” of the second question projects agency to affect or alter the “where” of the first. This “doing” includes but is not limited to what we perceive as direct action; it is uke’s committed strike, but it is also nage’s receiving and blending with the energy of that strike. The interaction between partners in Aikido training reveals the fuzziness of the boundary between self and other. When uke and nage both fully commit to a technique, we become like a binary star system, each orbiting a geometric point in space between us that is our common center of gravity. In the martial tension of each encounter, the center of the technique can move anywhere within or

between our bodies depending on our ma’ai, momentum, balance and weight distribution, points of contact, and intentions. When we can perceive the center’s movement, the possibilities for reversals, kaeshiwaza, and freestyle practice begin to present themselves, until the distinction between nage and uke is simply one of convenience.

Of course, I am by no means a master of any sort, and a visceral understanding of these ideas is difficult to maintain in my daily life and practice. Indeed, they often elude me altogether. However, these three simple questions have been enormously valuable to me as I remember and return to them again and again. I will always be grateful to Chiba Sensei for giving us this gift in that lecture on the grass. 

Daniel Reid, November 2016


Dan Reid has contributed an article to Dojo News previously.  Enjoy his September article "The River of Aikido":
http://multnomahaikikai.blogspot.com/2016/09/the-river-of-aikido-by-dan-reid.html