After being told that people who train aikido could use their spiritual ability to stop people from hitting them with sticks, Christopher Hein was intrigued, but could not find a dojo until 1998. He threw himself into the training, becoming uchi deshi at Aikido of Fresno and a black belt. With a history of fighting, Hein experienced a bar fight where aikido did not manifest itself. He went to on train in Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu Mixed Martial Arts, historical stick fighting, and other martial arts until those experiences brought him back to further research aikido. Today, Hein took some time to talk about that journey from aikido and back again, some of his discoveries of the aikido, and the future of martial arts in the United States. All images provided by Christopher Hein. This is the first part of a two part interview. Read the second part here.
Martial Arts of Yesterday, Today, and Tomorrow: Welcome, Hein Sensei! Thank you for joining us today!
Christopher Hein: I’m excited to be here.
MAYTT: How did you come to find aikido? What about the art that grabbed your attention?
CH: I had heard about aikido in a strange way; I had a friend who was on a spiritual journey, this was in high school. His mom took him to see a spiritual counselor. I didn’t know anything about this kind of thing, so I went along with him a couple of times. The spiritual counselor asked me if I had heard of the martial art of aikido, because I mentioned I was into martial arts. “Aikido is this martial art where the master puts a blindfold on and people try to hit them with sticks, but they can’t hit him. They [Aikido practitioners] use their spiritual ability to do martial arts.” I was like, “Whoa! Sign me up. That sounds cool!” Then it was a while until I found a school and settled down and started training. That was my first experience with what aikido was and the name.
MAYTT: When did you start training in aikido?
CH: 1998. I was actually studying ninjutsu. I did a Richard van Donk seminar in Santa Cruz. I was doing a bunch of ninjutsu stuff, and I was really excited about ninjutsu. I was planning on moving to Santa Cruz and in the interim before I was going to move there, I found an aikido school in Fresno, and I started doing aikido. I started then and I really got into it pretty quickly. I was uchi deshi after the first three or four months.
MAYTT: Who was your aikido instructor? What was training like under him?
CH: Patrick Cassidy. He had spent seven or eight years in Japan under Morihiro Saito. He was uchi deshi with him for a period of time while living in Japan. Patrick originally did strict Iwama, but by the time I started training with him, had mellowed. From the other students I heard when he first returned from Japan that he was very strict and taught as he had learned there. But in the states, we are a lot more casual, so there was a rough beginning. However, by the time I was training with him, he was much more casual and relaxed.
When I began studying with him, he started to incorporate a lot of Aikikai into his Iwama. We studied the strict Iwama syllabus with a lot of Aikikai flow to it. We did a lot of jiyu waza that wasn’t scripted and a lot of movement-based stuff. Patrick had also studied some Ki Society before he went to Iwama, so there was some of that mixed in as well. It was a mixture of things. The hardcore part of the syllabus was Iwama, so we learned Iwama weapons, Iwama forms, and demonstrated the forms in Iwama style, but the practice also had lots of other aspects of aikido in it.
MAYTT: So, you have had a rounded approach to aikido at the time?
CH: Yes. It was a good exposure to aikido.
MAYTT: The 1990s are considered by many to be the heyday of aikido, part and parcel with Steven Seagal’s popularity. How often did you hear in the dojo that Steven Seagal was the reason for students coming in to train?
CH: Huge. It was probably the reason half of the people were in the dojo. Everyone knew who Steven Seagal was, and a lot of people knew that he did aikido. It was just hand in hand. He was hugely responsible for people being in the dojo.
MAYTT: A few months after you earned your shodan, you got into a bar fight where you did not use any aikido but your previous fight experience. This event caused you to explore other martial arts. Why did you want to prove that aikido worked, why not pursue an art that had a track record of working?
CH: I actually didn’t want to prove that aikido worked. When I got into that fight, I was like, “Huh. Curiously, aikido didn’t come up.” And I spent some time going to some local schools. I went to a local Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu school, there’s a kickboxing/karate school here; I did a bunch of different stuff and went to a bunch of different schools to see if my aikido worked because I thought that it would once I had more time sparring. From what I understood from other martial arts is that sparring is a process, and you have to do it to understand the timing of everything. So, I figured that it would just come out [in the sparring practice], but it didn’t. So, for a while, I thought that aikido didn’t work. By the time I got serious about studying Mixed Martial Arts and Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, I had given up on aikido. It was cool; I liked it; I thought that I gained lots of things in my life outside of martial ability, but I really didn’t think aikido was going to work at all [in a dangerous situation]. It wasn’t until I got into the Dog Brothers fight that aikido naturally appeared and I thought, “Oh, there’s something here.”
I never had this idea: “It’s a shame that aikido is not awesome. I want to be the guy that proves it’s awesome.” I just thought, “It’s something I spent a lot of time doing, I should give it a fair shake.” And after I felt that I’d given it a fair shake, I thought, “Okay. I’ll move onto studying other stuff.” But then when it reappeared [in the Dog Brothers fight] and when I’ve given up on it, it was like, “Oh. This stuff has some intrinsic value.” At that time, I really wasn’t interested in proving that it worked; I was interested in finding what intrinsic value it had. I did think that the whole system would be fruitful, I thought, “What parts are good.” And that started with weapon work and then progressed to anti-grappling stuff, then armed grappling stuff; it progressed further and further until the system proved itself to me. I wasn’t trying to be an advocate for the system at the time – it just kept working. Then it got to such a point where I was like, “I should be sharing this with everybody because it’s so cool.” It [aikido]was a really neat way to go.
MAYTT: I see. Over the years, you have participated in various competitions and tournaments. How important do you feel the average martial artist should compete? Would they be missing out on something if they do not?
CH: It really all depends on what you’re interested in. I don’t exactly know what the average martial artist is. I’m not trying to be obstinate here. But I think people go to martial arts for many different reasons. Reasons that are so different-sometimes two people might both call themselves martial artists, but they’re looking for totally different things. The only thing that binds them together is some tangential tying to the word “martial art.”
If you are interested in being a “sport martial artist”, or what people like to call combat sports, then of course you have to compete. That’s the essence of it. If you want to learn how to box, you have to go box [in competitions]. There’s no way around it. You can’t just go to a gym and practice boxing and spar in the gym – that’s not the system of boxing. The same thing’s true with Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu – this is a point of contention. If I said this to my first Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu teacher – that Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu is about sport competition; they would have laughed. The old school Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu guys would say that Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu is about self-defense. But in the modern era Brazilian Jiu-jitsu has become- like boxing, about the sport aspect. So, then that takes on another tangent. If you’re interested in self-defense, and not sport, then you should still compete. You should do this to mentally try yourself against other people. You have to compete in order to learn how the timings work, what aggression is like, how hard it is to deal with other people, and when you’re going to fail and fold. This stuff is going to happen to you in a fight. So, you have to compete in order to get that essence.
There are also people who would call themselves “martial artists,” and I believe rightfully so, who have no need to compete. If you want to understand the cultural underpinnings of a martial art, you might never have to compete. If the martial art system you study is about cultural heritage, then competing could be of zero importance for you. If you are trying to understand yourself, to actualize yourself through martial arts training, there may be no need to compete. If self-development is your goal, just going through the rigors of training on a regular basis, and going through the ranks, and the highs and lows and day to day training – all that stuff may be enough to help you understand yourself.
It really depends on what you want, but if you’re looking at self-defense, I think you should try some competition. Competition will tell you what fighting is like. Even if you want to do aikido, which I personally don’t believe is teaching you about fighting- you need to know what fighting is like. You need to know what fighting is, even if you want to avoid fighting.
If you want to understand what fighting is, you’ll need to compete. Unless you’re going to be a brute and get into street fights all the time or be like I was and have a bad attitude about stuff for a while, you’re not going to get that unless you go compete. If you’re interested in self-defense, I think it’s important to go to competitions but not to specialize in any one kind of competition. Do a kickboxing match, do a Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu match, do stick fighting, do Mixed Martial Arts, do whatever it is; try different things to understand what fighting is and how it works.
MAYTT: How does that perspective apply to teaching at Aikido of Fresno?
CH: It was profoundly important for me personally, because I had to go through all of that. So, I grew up getting into a lot of fights, just because I had a bad attitude. So, I understood how situations played out. Fighting was familiar to me. But doing it in the competition, I had to be in a much more controlled mindset. It was really important to see that controlled mindset in different facets, not just get pissed off and go at it a hundred percent. I have to calculate what’s going on. I have to understand the timing and the rhythm and the pacing of what’s going to happen in a fight. So, it [competition] was really huge for me. Competition really clarified the glaring holes in aikido as a system if you wanted to use it for fighting. For me, competition was super essential, and I go back to the lessons I learned from competition all the time. I don’t really have many students that compete; I have one of my students who just competed in Brazilian Jiu-jitsu. So, I have some students who compete in some stuff, but most of my students aren’t interested in that[sporting] aspect; they’re more interested in self-defense or self-cultivation, so it’s not huge in the culture of the school. But for me, personally, it was a big deal.
MAYTT: In the mid-2000s, you met Michael Varin, a local aikidoka, and established Central Valley Aikido, where you tried “figuring out how aikido really worked.” Was this around the time when you started coming back to aikido, seeing there was something worthwhile about it?
CE: Yes, so Michael and I trained together under Patrick. Michael is also a shodan under Patrick. So, we knew each other. While I was off training in Mixed Martial Arts, we had correspondence. The world was a little different than it is now. We would send emails back and forth, and he would tell me things that were going on in the dojo and I talked to him about some of the experiences I was having with Mixed Martial Arts and things. So, we had contact.
We were both uchi deshi together – never at the same time, but it’s this shared brotherhood/sisterhood thing. It’s like siblings. I’m pretty familiar with everyone who was uchi deshi during the time period I was with Patrick. We had those times where we needed support, so we knew each other well.
When I moved back here, I was assisting teaching at Aikido of Fresno and so was Michael. Both of us had dramatically different classes from what was the status quo at the dojo at that time. Another instructor had already taken over Aikido of Fresno at that point. There was a class of personalities, so Michael and I decided to do our own thing together. We broke off from Aikido of Fresno and started Central Valley Aikido. At first, that was us teaching in the park and we had one student who was a Marine Corps guy and who was dedicated and was there all the time. Other than that, people came in and out. It was basically a year of Michael and I hammering through the material over and over and over. Then, eventually, we turned my garage into a dojo, and I think we were there for five years. We had regular students, but it was always really small. So, the objective there was to figure out what was going on with aikido and how it worked.
MAYTT: I see. What led the both of you to continue using the name “aikido” when the focus was more on non-traditional aikido?
CH: I still ask myself that question to this day. At some point, I may just stop using the word aikido to describe what I do. But, in truth, at that time, we were definitely trying to do aikido. We were taking all the lessons that we had learned in aikido and finding out how they actually apply. There’s a lesson in aikido, say, shomen uchi ikkyo omote. What is that doing? What is the purpose of that? We worked through it over and over and over, trying different ways, trying it live, trying it with weapons, because we were trying to figure out how it actually appeared and worked. It was never a doubt to us that what we were doing was aikido because it came from the lessons that we had learned in aikido. But the practice methodology was dramatically different.
Every martial arts system has its philosophy, it has its techniques, and it has its methods it uses to develop its practitioners. To me, the methods used to develop an aikido practitioner weren’t very good. And I knew that from doing Mixed Martial Arts because in Mixed Martial Arts, you would teach me a technique and I would be using it right away. Those methods of development were learning through live drilling and live practice and learning the techniques cut up into smaller pieces. I personally knew it was a better way to learn because I learned to apply the Mixed Martial Arts techniques faster than I learned to apply the aikido techniques.
For me, with aikido, I was years into aikido, and I was a black belt but I still couldn’t apply aikido techniques. We felt that the methods traditionally used to learn aikido must be broken. The methods that we were using in the garage weren’t traditional aikido at all, but the curriculum we were using was the same stuff. We still used the traditional techniques like ikkyos, sankyos, nikyos, kokyu nages, and all the things you would find in aikido. We still had those same techniques, it’s just the methods we were using to teach our students were different methods.
So, I don’t think there was a doubt in our minds that what we were teaching was aikido, but we were doing it in a different way.
MAYTT: Could you give an example of how you would break down a specific part of an aikido technique in the same way a Mixed Martial Arts technique or drill would be done?
CH: I think the most important thing to understand is what’s the motivation of said technique. Aikido doesn’t teach what the motivation to use a given technique is. So, aikido says, “Here’s a form; say the form, shomen uchi ikkyo omote, and here’s how you do the form, and here’s how you do all the steps, and here’s how you do it right, and here are problems that people have, and that’s the form.” But they don’t explain what the motive of the form is. And so, you abstractly go, “Well, it’s to take someone down. That must be what it is.” What you should ask yourself, “Is that an efficient way to take someone down? Would it be more efficient to grab someone by the waist and throw them down on the ground? Why is it better to take someone down ikkyo vs a tight waist?”
So, Mixed Martial Arts doesn’t start with the paradigm of, “Here is something, master it.” The idea of Mixed Martial Arts is, “Here’s a problem, how can we solve that problem?” The problem is, say, a cross [punch]. Well, I can slip the cross; here’s how slipping works. Slipping is obvious; it makes great sense. I put my head where the punch is not going to be, and he won’t hit me. Then we explore problems that arise when the slip does work; maybe they feinted and when you slip you end up getting hit. Ok, here’s how you cover when you slip in case they feint, then you’re covered. So, different teachers teach in different ways, but the way that I learned it is that you learn from the problem. Once you understand the problem, you start to understand the possible solutions. And the form, if you want to use the form, would unfold as you find new problems that need to be solved – like the example with slipping a jab and they feint and slip actually gets you hit; if you cover the slip, then you don’t get hit.
The same way with aikido, we started asking aikido, “What problem is this trying to solve?” By asking first what problem we are solving, then the techniques start falling into place. So, for shomen uchi ikkyo omote, it’s someone trying to stab my head. That’s why you have this strike that looks weird in the form, because no one strikes like that. Well, if someone is trying to whack me in the head with a Billy Club or stab me in the head with a knife, that’s exactly how they would strike. What’s my answer? Well, I’m going to stick my arms up because I don’t want to get stabbed in the head. That’s a human response; that’s not some special martial arts thing. Ok, if someone is trying to stab me in the head and I block like that, what’s going to happen next? Well, they’re probably going to stab again. Well, if I shove their elbow as they’re rearing back to stab again, then I can make them move away from me and then they’re not stabbing me, and that’s great. You can follow this progression if we ask what’s the problem instead of just saying, “Here’s material, master it.” What aikido does, “Here’s material, master it.” With my students now, I never say, “Here’s material, master it.” I say, “Here’s a problem. Here’s an idea for solving that problem.” After students have been in the program for a while, I start to teach them the traditional forms of aikido, so they have the same touch stones with the martial art. But by the time they are learning those forms, they already understand what the forms are teaching, so I don’t need to explain it anymore because we’ve already gone through that for maybe a year or two at that point.
So that’s the way I look at teaching aikido now, trying to find what the problems are instead of memorizing a set of moves for no apparent reason.
We need to address the problem first and then start looking for solutions for the problem instead of just taking this set of things and memorizing it for no apparent reason. I think the same thing is true with aikido. Josh Gold had written an article about a fantastic seminar that he gave – I think it was some sort of corporate seminar – and what I took away from this article is that he told people how aikido worked and what aikido did. That’s basically the party line that we’ve had forever, which is, “Use their force against them; we don’t attack people; it’s nonaggressive and nonviolent; small people can use it.” All this stuff. He said that when he’s telling people this, they are super excited. Then after that, he did practice, and he listed a bunch of forms practice. Josh! How can you say all this stuff that fires people up and after that, you show them a bunch of stuff that’s not connected to the stuff that you just said? In my opinion, after going through the system, it is all connected. But you have to explain how it’s connected, because we have this problem where we have these things we practice and these things we say, and they don’t seem to jive.
If we want to get at what aikido is, we have to present problems to the public and the problems that we are solving, and then we have to know how we’re solving them. If I tell someone, “Aikido is the martial art where you use their force against them.” I then need to immediately show them how we use their force against them and what that means. And not just show them ikkyo ura waza and say, “See when they push, I turn.” It has to go beyond that. We have to get at the core of what that means. As aikido practitioners, we need to understand what we say has to match what we do. Until we get to where what we say is what we do and we can explain every gray shade in between what we’re saying and what we’re doing, then we’re not going to get anywhere.
To me, the aikido community, if they want to go anywhere, we have to pull inside – we all have to become friends, or at least be able to deal with each other’s shit a little bit. Then we have to agree; and once we agree, we can say, “Hey rest of the world, here’s what we’re actually presenting.” That can take whatever shape it decides to take and present a unified front, but instead, everyone wants to teach their own little iddy biddy things, and I’m as guilty with this as anyone. To me, as an aikido practitioner, I try to at least match everything I teach to what people typically think of as aikido. I think there’s an aikido zeitgeist and it’s the way that the public feels about aikido, and they would say these same things that we talked about. But we have to understand, down to every last instructor, how those fits – how what we teach fits that. You gotta make your system fit that.
This is the first part of a two part interview. Read the second part here.
To learn more about aikido and its history in America, click here.
Martial Arts of Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow 