About

Aikiman is the home for a single body of work. The books, the teachings, and the tools all point at one thing: raising the quality of the human experience. Everything gathered here comes out of a life spent asking the same handful of questions. What am I? Who am I? Why am I here? What can I actually know? This is where what I have found along the way is offered, in case it helps you on your own path.

It begins on the mat. In 1988 I walked into Los Angeles Aikikai, the oldest Aikido dojo in the country, and began to train. For most of the years that followed I practiced two and three times a week, and in time I began to teach. Aikido is less a fighting art than a study of how to meet what comes: how to stay centered, how to turn force into harmony rather than collision. Somewhere in those years it stopped being something I did and became the way I saw everything. Awareness, presence, and the understanding that teaching another deepens your own understanding are the same principles that run through every word I write.

In 2018 a serious injury changed the shape of things. It required surgery, and the long recovery that followed meant stepping back from the mat I had practiced on for so many years. The discipline I had built my life around was, in its old form, behind me. What it taught me in leaving was the same thing it had taught me all along. You meet what comes. You find your center again. You keep returning. That returning is the quiet spine of everything I make now.

Under the Aikiman name the work takes two forms. The written work lives in The Book Dojo: The Unified Soul and the growing Wisdom of The Unified Soul series, contemplative books meant to be carried and returned to. The teachings in motion live in Dojo Wise: short reflections and wisdom shared wherever you watch and listen, along with pieces you can carry and wear, a few quiet words on a shirt, a hat, a poster, a card, so a reminder stays close and the message travels a little further into the world. Two doorways, one path.

I am not writing to you from above. I am a little further down the same road, turning back to point at what I have found. We are all, in the end, on the journey of the soul. If anything here is good company on yours, it has done its work.