In the 1960s, Robert Nadeau was a direct disciple of the founder of Aikido, Morihei Ueshiba Osensei, training under him and other senior instructors at Hombu Dojo in Tokyo as a young man. Before he went to Tokyo, Nadeau had already been searching for answers in judo, yoga, meditation, and bodybuilding, all of which have informed his subsequent development. But Morihei Ueshiba Osensei was a profoundly inspirational presence, and Nadeau acknowledges him as his seminal teacher.
Aikido can be translated as The Way of Spiritual Harmony. It is written using three Japanese characters: ai (harmony/union), ki (energy/life force), do (way/path), composed vertically top to bottom, horizontally left to right, or horizontally right to left as in this rendition from the Founder’s brush.
Osensei’s approach to teaching Aikido was naturally rooted in his own spiritual journey and his own training in various arts and traditions. He lived and taught within the cultural and historical context of the Japan of his day. He readily demonstrated techniques but rarely taught them in detail. He explained Aikido at length, but then told students they had to experience Aikido firsthand if they wanted to understand it in its full depth. By all reports, Osensei’s explanatory diagrams were a complex amalgam of esoteric symbols and arcane language. His lectures were famously difficult to understand, even by his Japanese students.
In Nadeau Sensei’s quest to come up with teachable English language expressions that adequately transmit the authentic essence of Osensei’s process to modern students, he mixes Osensei’s original vocabulary with the language and concepts of Western psychology, the modern Human Potential Movement, and his own personal experiences, creating a teaching patois uniquely his own. His diagrams during class famously tend toward stick figures and line drawings. His lectures can be challenging to follow at times, even for his longtime students. But somehow, he always comes up with an effective approach to transmit the inner teachings of Aikido as a Way, beyond technique, beyond mere form.
At his Mountain View dojo, he expresses his approach to Aikido this way:
“Don’t ask me how I did this.
Ask me who I have to be where this is possible.”
Nadeau Sensei’s teachings touch on universal themes. The lessons go beyond Aikido. The inner practices can be done by anyone without any knowledge of Aikido or background in martial arts. Because the practices focus on an experiential process in service of self-discovery and self-improvement, individuals in the arts, education, sports, or business may find them useful and relevant. It’s all about human relationships and universal energy!
Beginning Basics
Nadeau Sensei encourages new students to begin where they are. As Osensei told him, you don’t need to go anywhere special to practice Aikido. It is here and now.
The first step is getting Present. This means being Present in your body and mind. One way to get Present is to settle into your experience. You might begin by naming the elements of your felt experience in real time, letting go of judgment without trying to change what you are experiencing. This can be as easy as labeling your sensations, feelings, moods, or surroundings.
He will guide students to feel the soles of their feet, then to sense the surface of the mat that supports them, and then to feel the floor beneath the mat, and the earth beneath the floor.
Listening more deeply in this way, we can begin to let go of preconditioned thoughts and habits and develop the inner spaciousness needed for new growth — spiritually, mentally, emotionally, and energetically. Feeling the rhythms and sensations of your breath can also be a powerful way of bringing your attention to the present.
With this orientation to practice, you naturally release tension. Letting go helps to shift the focus from thinking to deeper feeling and sensing, from cognitive understanding to embodied experience. Whatever the approach, being Present in the here and now is a good way to start practice, according to Sensei.
Open And Settle
Another way Nadeau Sensei encourages students to be more present is a process he calls Open and Settle. To open to the experience of finer energies may involve breathing and feeling more freely or opening one’s gaze to see more widely. And, at the same time, to settle into one’s body, both physically and energetically, for a more direct experience of whatever is present.
Open and Settle is one of Sensei’s most accessible exercises for beginners and advanced students alike. He often uses it as a kind of energetic warm-up, a familiar foundation for further explorations. For example, he might follow Open and Settle by asking students to more fully receive the invisible support emanating upward from the ground beneath their feet. He will guide students to feel the soles of their feet, then to sense the surface of the mat that supports them, and then to feel the floor beneath the mat, and the earth beneath the floor.
Opening and Settling is accelerated by appreciating these natural forces and aligning with gravity. Practicing this way cultivates a fuller sense of grounded presence.
Training with Osensei at Hombu Dojo, Nadeau recounts, included classes with long sessions of suwari-waza (seated techniques done on the knees) and lots of seiza (formal seated posture on the floor), which he believes Osensei emphasized to settle everyone in their lower bodies.
Nadeau Sensei’s emphasis on being grounded with a stable base reflects his lifelong training in judo, meditation, yoga, and Aikido. Training with Osensei at Hombu Dojo, Nadeau recounts, included classes with long sessions of suwari-waza (seated techniques done on the knees) and lots of seiza (formal seated posture on the floor), which he believes Osensei emphasized to settle everyone in their lower bodies and bring them down to earth for a more direct experience of the ground.
The practices of being Present and Open and Settle are designed to gently guide students to feel more completely and realistically what is happening in their lives in real time.
Allowing
Nadeau Sensei also highlights the importance of what he calls Allowing to bring a fuller experience to any part of these internal practices. To allow something is to accept it as it is as it unfolds. Sensei says, “Allow yourself to open more,” “Allow yourself to settle more,” “Allow more base,” or “Allow more space.”
Open and Settle, and Allowing, require practice and repetition before changes gradually become apparent. However, the shift from thinking to feeling and deeper sensing can be faster once the process becomes familiar.
Thinking is a normal and necessary response to a new situation. However, Sensei describes overreliance on thinking as being up in our heads and largely oblivious to our inner feelings and body sensations.
He teaches that we are all capable of feeling and sensing deeper dimensions of ourselves and connecting with finer and finer energies. Gradually we can integrate upper-level awareness with deeper-level experience. We practice this internal work ourselves to actualize the process. Reading these paragraphs and understanding the concepts is not enough. According to Sensei, sustained practice approached honestly is essential for a self-driven process of inner change.
Excerpt from Aikido: The Art of Transformation by Teja Bell, Laurin Herr, Richard Moon, Bob Noha, Susan Spence, and Elaine Yoder © 2024 Park Street Press. Printed with permission from the publisher Inner Traditions International. www.InnerTraditions.com
Laurin Herr, 6th dan, is a co-author of Aikido: The Art of Transformation (Inner Traditions), and began his Aikido training in 1971 as a student at Cornell University. Inspired by his first experience on the mat, he studied Japanese intensively, moved to Tokyo, and entered Aikido Hombu Dojo as an unranked white belt, earning his shodan there in 1976. He studied extensively in Japan and New York, until he met Robert Nadeau in 1999 in San Francisco, and has been training with him ever since.
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