Alcohol, Drug & Mental Health Services: Sober Women & Healthy Families Conference

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Sober Women and Healthy Families

AiKi Conflict Transformation Workshop

Santa Barbara County Alcohol, Drug & Mental Health Services

Hosted by:

Santa Barbara Community College

October 26, 2002

On Saturday, October 26, the Santa Barbara County Drug and Alcohol Program held its annual “Sober Women, Healthy Families” conference at the Santa Barbara Community College. The event, designed to help women who have been involved in abusive family relationships or have had drug and alcohol problems, featured a variety of workshops to provide support for the women and to look at new ways to deal with conflict situations.

One of the workshops was organized by Lia Suzuki Sensei, Head of Operations for Aikido Kenkyukai USA and co-founder of Aiki Conflict Transformation (ACT).

ACT was created in (1999) by Lia Suzuki Sensei and Steve Trinkle as a way to apply Aikido principles to conflicts in everyday situations. Most notably it has been successful as a redirection program for recovering addicts in Pennsylvania at the Penn Foundation and has been implemented into a women’s prison program in Santa Barbara, helping inmates cope with their unique prison life.

Sober Women and Healthy Families Lia Sensei and her students arrived early to the event and trained Aikido on a beautiful grassy hill overlooking the ocean filled with sparkling boats and the foothills of Santa Barbara. It was a fantastic morning to have training and everybody was having a good time looking forward to the workshop.

The workshop began at 10:30 A.M. and lasted for one and a half hours. About forty women signed up and when asked why they chose this workshop over the others being offered their responses were, for the most part, that this class seemed original and new and exciting. They were not disappointed!

Sober Women and Healthy Families Sensei began the class by asking the women questions relating to their current energy levels. While several of the women had a high level of energy most had a low energy level and felt as if they related to the color blue. After doing some Aikido stretches Sensei again asked the women about their energy level and all of the women said that their energy had increased and now most women said that they were more like a color red.

Then Sensei had the women do some physical exercises demonstrating the nature of flexibility and stability. When the women were tense and flexed they found that their center was taken and that they were easily pushed over. However, when they were flexible and relaxed they were able to keep their center and absorb the pushing. Sensei then demonstrated some tenkan exercises with an Aikido student.

The women were then asked to create actual scenarios applying the concepts of the tenkan exercises to everyday conflict situations. In a conflict (in this example we used that of verbal abuse) they came up with three ways to respond. The first was to tense up and get angry and respond with verbal abuse of their own. The second was to try to run away or back down from the abuse without changing the situation or trying to make excuses for the person. The third situation incorporated the principles of the ACT workshop. It sought to transform the conflict in some way. Transforming situations where both people invariably lose into situations where both people win. Many insights into the nature of conflict were created out of these mini-plays and everybody left the workshop feeling invigorated and refreshed.

Sober Women and Healthy Families People who train Aikido regularly get the opportunity to work with these concepts. It is very apparent to us when something we are trying to do in keiko doesn’t work and what we need to do to change our technique so that it does work. Applying these concepts to our everyday life might be an even greater challenge to our selves. Programs like ACT strive towards bridging the separation between keiko and our life outside of keiko. It illustrates to us the nature of conflict and new ways for us to respond to difficult situations. As ACT continues to expand and reach more groups like “Sober Women, Healthy Families” who will benefit from new ways to examine conflict, more people will be confident, self-assured, and ready to embrace the essence of Aikido training, the quest for inner peace.