The following is an excerpt from “The Gift of Danger,” authored by Mary Stein of the Suginami Aikikai:
“About thirty years ago, still a few years from my fiftieth birthday, I read of a martial art that was described as non-violent, resolving conflict through skillful relationship. It came from Japan, where a man named Morihei Ueshiba had questioned the destructive purpose of the martial arts he had mastered. He had gone on to transform old techniques in order to create a new art that provided effective self-defense while protecting both the attacker and the defender. He came to call his art aikido, which can be translated as ‘the way of harmonizing energy.’”