Hi ,
At one point in my life, I was a pretty physical guy.
I started studying martial arts in my teens because I got tired of being bullied. I lived with a black belt judo champion who taught for the Army and another friend who had belts in various disciplines. I would sometimes help them at classes. I never became a teacher or black belt, but I was decent enough.
My interest in martial arts as a formal practice ended one day when I was in college.
I was walking across campus near the student union on a sunny day and noticed a guy on a bicycle heading my way. While he was still 30 yards out, I started mentally calculating where I would be in relation to him when he passed. I was trying to position myself in case there was a collision… or an attack.
Nothing was threatening about him.
Just a guy riding a bike.
No doubt, this kind of thinking might be expected from Jason Bourne or an action hero, but I was just a college student on a sidewalk. And he was just another guy on a bike.
In that moment, I realized my martial arts training had changed how I experienced the world.
I was doing this kind of mental assessment all the time and hadn’t noticed.
I didn’t train to become hypervigilant.
I didn’t want to treat the world as dangerous by default.
I had learned martial arts to protect myself — not to imagine threats where none existed.
And so, that very day, I walked away from martial arts.
No regrets.
But I didn’t stop working with movement — I just shifted how.
Instead of studying conflict in motion, I explored collaborative movement — especially contact improvisation.
This shift was incredibly valuable — and honestly, luscious. So many great moments.
Contact improv is completely unscripted movement between two or more people — usually without music. The only real rule: stay in physical contact. Not like a dancing on a dance floor. Any part of you in touch with any part of the other. You your finger touching their head. Their back against your leg. Laying on the ground rolling around. Having someone on your shoulder. It’s not about performance. It’s about connection. (Although I did wind up in an amateur performance group. So fun.)
Perfect for me.
It’s brilliant training for staying in the moment and staying in connection because you have both lead and follow. And you never know what is going to happen.
I didn’t know it at the time, but this was great training for being a coach.
In addition, I also started to work with ecstatic dance and trained with the late Gabrielle Roth, — movement as spontenous, unscripted, uncensored expression. A way to bypass the thinking mind and let the body move straight from impulse.
If you feel anger, you dance anger.
If you feel joy, you dance joy.
If you feel stuck, dance stuck.
No filter. No apology.
It was incredibly liberating — and also deeply transformational.
A foundation for both somatic mindfulness and interpersonal attunement. Not to mention some actually ecstatic moments.
“We dance to reclaim our brilliant ability to disappear {our egos and judgments} in something bigger, something safe, a space without a critic or a judge or an analyst.”
This was all happening in Boulder, Colorado — home to Naropa, the Hakomi Institute, Network Chiropractic, Integral Institute, and other organizations well ahead of their time.
Also home to Boulder Aikikai, founded by Aikido master Hiroshi Ikeda (7th dan).
One day, I discovered he was offering a class called Aikido Movement —
not for fighters, but for anyone wanting to learn the principles of Aikido through motion.
Y-e-s.
About 10 minutes into the first class, he looked at me and said:
“You are a dancer, huh?”
I didn’t think of myself that way. But clearly, some of what I had studied was showing up in how I moved. And of course, it felt good to be seen.
Maybe I was learning something after all.
We were practicing a simple movement — raising an arm and making gentle, direct contact with a partner’s forearm, skin to skin.
Each time our formarms touched, Hiroshi looked me diretly in the eye and said – “Body knows.”
(English was not his first langauge.)
Five times in a row.
Your body knows what’s happening.
It doesn’t overthink. It doesn’t hesitate.
It just responds.
He was saying “when you touch someone like this, two bodies in motion – maybe even in conflict, the body knows what to do”
That one phrase began to reshape everything I thought I understood about how to be present.
And what happened next would prove it in a way I could never forget.
More in Part 2 — next time.
Stay present,
– Brett
P.S.
This is Part 1 of a two-part story. In the next email, I’ll share a real-world moment where “the body knows” turned out to be more than a nice idea — it became the difference between disaster and safety, right in the middle of life