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For the last six years, I’ve practiced Aikido at a Berkeley dojo called the Aiki Arts Center—previously named Aikido Shusekai.
Aikido is a Japanese martial art focused on responding calmly to attack without hurting the attacker or yourself. Instead of using force, you blend with the attack to redirect it. The name roughly translates to “The Art of Peace.”
When I first started practicing Aikido at the age of 10, I loved it for its physicality. The throws and rolls, kicks and punches—it was an outlet for my brimming energy.
Aikido is also spiritual. There’s a sense that we’re all working together toward something we don’t really know or understand. We trust each other; if we didn’t, the physicality would corrupt.
This same physicality makes the practice hard. I have recurring feelings of malaise and dread regarding Aikido. Every committed practice I’ve had has eventually run into this reluctance: swimming, horseback riding, internships.
What keeps me going to the dojo is the community.
The dojo’s senior instructor is Nick Walker Sensei, an autistic trans woman and professor of psychology at California Institute of Integral Studies. I started practicing there shortly after receiving my own autism diagnosis at age 9.
I am autistic, queer, trans, and so is the dojo. I feel safe there, and I love the practice, and so I stay. I train every Sunday.
Here’s how it goes.
The dojo is located in the dark red Sawtooth Building, so named because of its jagged, angular roof. After parking, I go inside at half past noon, passing a sign propped up by the door that reads “Aikido in Studio 12! Beginners Welcome!”
Studio 12 is a beautiful space: two large skylights and sunlit rafters draped with acrobatics swings.
The far wall, called the Shomen, holds a Shinto shrine. We bow to it when we enter or leave the room or step onto or off the mats. It’s a traditional dojo furnishing.
If we’re late, other students have already put out the mats, and the floor becomes a sea of blue. If not, I step to the doorway, bow, and join them.
Once the mats are laid out, we stream away to get dressed. Those of us who are nonbinary get to choose which changing room to use, and I like the women’s room. It’s in the back, a cozy curtained-off storage room with rugs, mirrors, and a stack of chairs along one wall.
There’s usually some sort of conversation in the changing room. When I shaved my head a few weeks ago, Azzia Walker Sensei and I joked that people wouldn’t be able to tell us apart. She taught the Youth Program when it was still running. Now, I’m the only one left.
Changing is the step between Aikido and the outside world. I take off my street clothes and put on the uniform: long white pants, white jacket over a tank top, tied closed with a belt. It’s comfortable for stretching, rolling and falling.
I take my water bottle and step back through the curtain. In floods the sun.
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