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Valerie Lang

Life and Death on the Mat

Updated: Jul 26


Semi-abstract image of young and old aikidokai bowing

maai


I’m about to pass a man on the sidewalk. 


Eight feet away. That’s when he pulled the gun on me.


The gun, maybe six feet away. Too close. Too far.


This was the distance between me and death, when I thought about three things.


The three things: my friends, my family, and . . . yoga? I was so surprised. They say you see your life flash before your eyes when you’re about to die. Maybe what they mean is that you see the things that make you feel most alive.


My friends and family, of course, I needed to see them again.


But yoga? I’d barely done it at this point. I’d taken just a few Friday night classes. Yet, in this crucial moment, I felt an ache in my limbs to simply feel movement in my body again. To move is to live, I thought. If I die right now, I’ll never move again. That’s death. 


I would do anything, anything, to continue moving. To continue living. To move is to live. Let me live.


Just moments before, I’d been considering ways that I could be more mindful in my day-to-day life. I’d contemplated the colors of the sunrise refracting on the snow. I’d chastised myself for not appreciating them more. Now, with the gun in my face, it all seemed so simple, so trivial.


“Get on your knees,” he said. And before he’d even finished the word “knees” I felt my knees hit the ground, heavy as lead. I’d been granted one more instance of movement, and I was so grateful to feel my body move just a few more inches.


“Give me your wallet. Give me your backpack.”


Yes, yes, I thought. Take anything, take everything, just let me live.


I reached into my pocket. Just keep moving, just keep moving.


He kept a wide berth, and kept the gun pointed at me. He walked behind me. I felt the gun trained on the back of my head; the weight of death, even closer. I held out the wallet.


The wallet left my hand, and I felt him pull my backpack off.


He stepped back in front of me again. He kept his distance, gun still pointed.


“Run.”


 

“Aikido is not enough.”


The voice spoke through the screen to me. A new member had posted to his Instagram stories about a frightening encounter he’d had while waiting for public transit. “Aikido is not enough.”


I went into his DMs to send him a message. What’s the most honest thing I could say?—this is what I ask myself when I’m not too sure what to say. “You’re right,” was the answer. “It’s not.” 


But I couldn’t send that. 


I felt his fear. I knew it incredibly well. But I didn’t want him to lose hope. What else can I say?


 

To move is to live. To move is to live.


That was the mantra I found myself saying in the face of death. I knew that if my body stopped moving, it was over.


After the incident, in quiet moments, I found myself facing the gunman again. I tried to return to my sitting practice—to be still and mindful. But every time I tried, my mind trailed back to that corner on the sidewalk, and I just sobbed. I had to find solace in my body before I could find presence in my mind.


The only time I felt “present” was when I was with loved ones, laughing, or doing yoga. I started doing yoga every day, sometimes twice a day. Through my yoga practice, I felt all that terror transforming into strength within my body. The movement helped ground me, helped me remember that I was alive.


It was just a couple of months of daily yoga practice, yet it felt as though I had gone through a lifetime of transformation. I felt incredible strength within my body—but I didn’t want to contain it entirely within myself. I wanted to project it outwards. That’s when I found Aikido.


 

And now I’ll ask you: What would have been “enough” in that situation?


I’ll have fantasies in which I “take somebody out” if need be. The fantasies of death and violence after having a gun pointed directly at you take on a whole new intensity, after the fact. They take on a sharper element of precision and a stark realism. But fantasize as much as I will, I cannot fight against the reality of that particular situation.


No matter how many times I look back on that day, there’s no way out. The man had no tells. I saw him from two blocks away and simply thought he was a late party straggler. His manner was loose and casual until the gun came out. Once I saw the black glistening object emerge from his jacket, all the martial arts in the world couldn’t save me in that moment. And if I’d pulled a gun in return, I wouldn’t be practicing Aikido today.


 

Sometimes, on the mat, I’m laughing. Smiling, living: the joy of moving, of being, takes me over. The joy of being present with all these other people on the mat.


Here, in this little space of trust and diligence, we push each other to do something more with our lives. To move. It’s so silly, so lovely, so amazing.


A new student starts a technique and gets stuck halfway through the movement. “Just keep moving,” I’ll say to them. “Just keep moving.”


Sometimes, I find myself not quite getting it. I feel stuck like thick mud. I’m trying to wrap my mind around a movement. What I really need to be doing is allowing the movement to enter into my body.


In those moments, to get myself to move, I’ll ask myself: What if this was real? What if this moment was life or death?


 

It’s taken ten years, but I recently had an unexpected realization: I would never want to trade places with that man.


As the one with the gun in her face, I felt a profound powerlessness that I would wish on no one. But I realize now—even though he was holding the gun—he was never in a place of power.


He was pointing a gun at me because he too felt powerless. Behind his fierce facade was nothing but terror and weak desperation.


 

“Aikido is not enough.”


You’re right. It’s not. Because if you’re operating from a place of fear, nothing will ever be enough.


Fear is the enemy. Fear escalates. It leads to paranoia, spitting wars, and violence. In a bad place it can lead to insecurity and death before it’s time. It’s what leads to fifteen-year-olds getting into gunfights, and it’s what led that man to raise a gun to my face that fateful Sunday morning.


The man I met that day had lost sight of his humanity and was letting fear hold the gun.

In the book Fear: Essential Wisdom for Getting Through the Storm, by Thich Nhat Hanh, he says, “We are very afraid of being powerless. But we have the power to look deeply at our fears, and then fear cannot control us.”


In Aikido, we allow ourselves to stand in the space of fear. Our maai is engaged with our partner in such a way that we are opening ourselves to a committed attack. And it’s in this crucial moment that we slowly learn to be present as opposed to fearful. Rather than escalating the fear, we can be responsive. We can absorb the movement and move as we need to. We learn a different way to engage in fearful situations.


 

Looking back at that day, I realize that the man in the black jacket and I made an incredibly unfair trade. I hope he’s in a better place now because the balance was definitely in my favor that day.


Sure, he walked away from that corner with a couple of dollars. But he also had the chains of fear wrapped around his heart, and the weight of death in his hands.


Me, I got to run.


And ran I did, with a relief, joy, and intensity that I have never known. I felt every single cell in my body release the fear of that gripping moment, and I took with me two essential gifts: freedom and the rest of my life.


 

Valerie Lang is a member of Lemon Hill Aikido. She is a painter by trade, an artist, and an aikidoka.

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A beautiful piece, Val! Thank you for sharing this life-altering experience with us.

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