An ongoing discussion on the AikiWeb Forum concerns an aikido practitioner with the following dilemma:

“A man has visited my dojo and is interested in practicing. His religion prohibits him from touching a woman who is not his wife.”

Obviously, any mixed dojo will require its students to practice with members of the opposite sex from time to time, so this prohibition is going to impose serious limits on the guy’s practice. Since the original post back in 2006, this anonymous sensei has received a veritable avalanche of replies, primarily falling into two camps. There are those who feel that compromising the functioning of the dojo for one person’s religious dogma is unacceptable, and there are those who argue that the necessary training restrictions are not sufficiently onerous to cause a problem. I fall – hard – into the first camp, but possibly not for the reasons you might suspect.

Back when I taught T’ai Chi, there would occasionally be students who wanted special dispensation. They couldn’t make it on the night of the lessons, so could they maybe arrange private classes when it was more convenient? They weren’t happy learning about the combat applications, so could we please leave those out? They were uncomfortable with the Taoist philosophy behind the form, so would I mind not discussing it? T’ai Chi seemed like the perfect compliment to yoga, so could we spend half the class time discussing the relative merits of each? Invariably, my answer was no.

One of the guiding principles of aikido, T’ai Chi and many other martial arts is that they are not about the self. Being concerned with oneself is a sure-fire route to staying at the bottom of the ladder. It’s a hoary old cliché, but when practicing these arts, the practitioner is supposed to “be like water” – water, which has no shape of its own but flows to fit the container. The shape of the container cannot be changed, yet this is what our neophyte aikidoka wishes to do. Hopefully, he will realise after a few classes that this is not how aikido works and will change his attitude, progressing in his practice as a result. If not – well, perhaps this is not the hobby for him.

When a person takes up a martial art (or, for that matter, any practice which has a venerable history and a codified procedure for learning), they don’t get to dictate how it is taught. Aikido is a great example. Over many years, various skilled practitioners have built up a system for training aikido students. The neophyte who walks in the door with a clear idea of what he wants to learn and how he wants to be taught it is on a hiding to nothing. Apart from anything else, how can someone who has only just started to study something know how it would best be taught? His teacher will, if he’s gone to a half-decent dojo, have many years’ experience in both learning and teaching aikido, so basic common sense suggests that the newbie might want to consider such a person’s opinion.

What the lady-phobic visitor mentioned at the start of this post needs to realise is that his personal and religious baggage needs to be left at the door of the dojo. Taking it in with him only means he will be weighed down and held back by it, and will never learn any skill in aikido. Obviously I think his religion is an idiocy (and not just for its silly take on women), but it’s irrelevant to aikido – if he can’t fulfil the demands of practice, then he needs to find something else to do with his spare time.