Part 5 - NVC, Holistics, Integration Training

Now I'd like to move to your other expertise and to those fields. For example, I've just read the basic NVC book and for me it was basically verbal aikido because of connection and everything in there, and you have much more experience there...

I have some experience of Nonviolent Communication, but again, just a few years, I've lead some body practices at Nonviolent Communication retreats which is very cool bringing together non-athletic, physical aspects of aikido with this verbal aikido if you will. It's all about connection, it's all about nonviolence, so those ways are very similar to aikido. There are things that are profoundly different from aikido, there are things which can help teach aikido, I wrote a paper about this, which is online, about the connection between Nonviolent Communication and Aikido, and how they can inform each other and help each other. I used to joke that aikido is what you do when NVC goes wrong and NVC is what you do before you need to do aikido. It isn't always possible to grab your boss and get him in a wrist lock but it might be appropriate to just listen what he has to say or blend before he's saying. The verbal aikido ... NVC or other system can be massively useful in your life. I find it very useful in conflict situations and in relationships and intimacy. Also at work, I'm using it increasingly with my employee, at the moment. It's very useful.

Can you talk a bit about Holistics and Integration Training and, possibly, about their connection with aikido? What aikido elements are used there?

I've always been interested in the psychological side of aikido and what aikido can teach to normal people, because not everyone is insane and is going to spend three to four nights a week being thrown around in an uncomfortable, difficult way of learning an art that can take ten years to get a black belt, that's not for most people. So I figured out years ago if aikido is really going to benefit the world - because I think it's a wonderful thing - there needs to be ways of applying aikido off the map, and needs to be ways of sharing aikido with regular folks, civilians. ... Aiki Extensions which was this organisation of people who do just that, and I trained with several of the real masters of that field, Richard Strozzi Heckler who works with military and with business, Wendy Palmer who works in business and personal development and Paul Linden who works with abuse recovery and children, particularly children with ADHD and other issues like that. There's some others but these were the main ones, Jose Bueno in Brazil being another one. I lived and trained with those folks and then started my own company using that work. I teach an exercise class called Holistics which is all the good stuff from aikido but, again, applied in a less extreme, less martial setting, so I just do it in the dialogue of exercise and personal development. That's more my hobby now really. My main business is Integration Training and here I use a lot of principles and practices from aikido, so principles AND practices in a business context. My main client is - government actually, not business - the NHS, the National Health Service. I do a lot of work on stress that brings together physical centring and postural aspects of aikido. I combine that with Non Violent Communication and other linguistic coaching, with some cognitive psychological work, with some organisational, more traditional kind of training work. My specialty is embodied leadership, so that's how managers, leaders at various fields - charity, business, government - how they embody who they are. People say 'is that body language?' No - I say, it's much more deeper than that, it's about body being, it's about who you are. Communication is a big part of that though. So that's a specialty of mine and I'm the British leader in that field which at 29 is cool :). My teachers from the United States, they come over and I train regularly with them. I've just trained with Wendy Palmer sensei a few weeks ago. So that's my main business, working on leadership, stress, also in team building and with conflicts - bringing teams together of different businesses that have various issues, and that’s staring to be a real success now. I'm talking to some very big clients at the moment and I'm really happy. It took a while to establish, to sell this weird idea to people but once I learnt how to package and market it in what was a foreign world at first it was fine. Now it's really taking off and I'm very happy about that.

I think it's a great thing to bring so many things together...

Yeah, I love to bring things together. That's really been a passion for me since I was a kid. In a way, aikido does that. It brings together the philosophy of nonviolence with martial arts, that it's sort of comfortable with a paradox and integrating different things it's really important to me and I enjoy it. I love it. It's a fun game. I use the Integral theory of philosopher Ken Wilber. That's really the framework I use a lot for 'how do you really be holistic' wherever that's making you aikido holistic, your business holistic, or your parenting. If I'm running a workshop on, say, stress, how do I make it come from all the angles, hit all the bases so it has as much punch as possible, so it's as powerful as possible, because if you miss anything out, if you miss any part of the person wherever it's head, heart or hara, mind, body, spirit and emotions, if you miss any of that out you are less powerful. So whether it's leadership or team building or stress or change management, whatever you need to be holistic to be effective. So I do it not just because I like it and it's nice but it makes you more effective in whatever you do. So your aikido is more effective if you incorporate the psychology, the mental aspects, one meaning of ki is to do with mind, so it's that aspect. The heart aspects which are normally ignored in aikido, the elements of emotion which Japanese (and British) culture suppresses in general, so that's another major element if you want to improve your aikido, bringing your heart, your emotions into it, your passion. And then hara, your physical sense, your bodily sense and also your intuitive sense. That's really the heart, the essence of aikido, it's the hara. Often we miss out the heart between the head and the hara. You know, that's just one modle, the three centres that Wendy Palmer Sensei uses, there's other ways to look at it but that's just one fairly simple model. The same in 'do you bring your head, your heart and your hara into a relationship?' So if your boyfriend or girlfriend is arguing with you or upset about you for something, do you kind of analyse it with your head, do you bring your emotions into it and connect with them emotionally, do you bring your gut instincts in it before talking to them, before making decision about to split up with them or whatever. So relationships, business, aikido, it's all the same thing because it's all just people.