Presence is the practice. Part 2: The social side of centering

Why being grounded isn’t enough if you can't express it

Most aikido instructors know how to center themselves before a grab, a strike, or a fall. But what about before a difficult conversation? Before a parent meeting, a business negotiation, or a tense moment on a street? That’s where things get blurry.

In Part 1, we explored the "translation gap" between physical calm and social or emotional resilience. In this second part, we go deeper into what it really means to center, not as a ritual or a posture, but as an invisible, usable skill in everyday life.

Centering redefined: fast, invisible, real-world applicable

Mark Walsh has spent decades helping people become more skillful under pressure. For him It’s a practice of returning to your internal alignment, where emotions, attention, and intention come back into sync. When this inner coherence happens, you begin to respond instead of react, and communicate instead of defend.

Rather than performing calmness, it involves creating a genuine internal shift, one you can return to even when the world around you becomes chaotic. This is the practice of state regulation: a fast and embodied way of accessing stability in real time, whether on the mat, in a meeting, on a stage, or during an argument.

Photo from Mark’s archive

Most people think centering is some kind of woo-woo practice. But if I ask you to stop breathing, you'll feel 'energy' right away. Centering is not an external technique. It's noticing and managing the body's energy and state. When the breath stops, awareness rushes in. That moment shows how physical, immediate, and real embodiment is.

Practical centering means:

• Noticing you're off

• Making a micro-adjustment (jaw, belly, breath)

• Returning to yourself before you react

It happens in seconds. And it works best when no one notices you're doing it.

Mark often suggests anchoring this skill to routine triggers: before picking up the phone, before answering a tough question, or even before entering a room. The key is repetition. Like a kata, the more often you practice centering in low-stakes moments, the more reliable it becomes in high-stress ones.

Regulate yourself, not others

Many aikido teachers are used to the idea of controlling space, blending with an attack, or maintaining center under pressure. But off the mat, that mindset can quickly become manipulative or tone-deaf.

"Embodiment isn't controlling others but instead regulating your own state. If you can do that, you influence the space around you."

This is the core of embodied aikido: shifting yourself in a way others feel. Without preaching. Without fixing. Without forcing harmony.

Co-regulation in practice: calm yourself to influence others

Co-regulation is the social magic that happens when your presence affects someone else’s nervous system. Parents do it. Lovers do it. Great teachers do it.

But it starts with self-regulation. One technique Mark emphasizes is checking your breath length when tension rises. A short, high chest breath is often a sign you're slipping out of center. Simply exhaling longer than you inhale can begin to reset your system. Another is to shift your weight slightly to feel your feet again - a quiet, physical cue that you're still here, still stable.

When you're grounded, relaxed, and alert, others tend to respond with more ease. Not always. Not instantly. But enough to matter—especially in conflict.

In Mark's words: "You become the thermostat, not the thermometer."

Tools: jaw, belly, breath — micro-body shifts, macro results

The ABC Centering method Mark uses offers a simple map:

• Awareness: Notice your current state

• Breath: Use it to regulate

• Center: Shift your posture and tone

Simple tools, like softening the jaw or deepening the belly breath, can have surprisingly strong effects. Much more than abstractions, they’re direct interventions that change your state in real time.

For example, relaxing the jaw, one of the first places tension shows up, can soften your tone and make your voice more steady. Expanding the breath into the belly slows your tempo. Aligning the spine often changes the emotional narrative entirely. They're small shifts that build relational presence.

From sparring to speaking: embodied influence in daily life

A teacher may flow effortlessly in randori, but falter when mediating a disagreement between family members. Another may maintain presence during an embukai in front of an audience, yet tense up when responding to a drunk person causing a scene in a restaurant. These everyday situations are often more revealing than any physical exchange.

This disconnect is not surprising. Embodied communication is not simply about knowing what to say, but regulating the state from which you speak. It is your nervous system, not your script, that often shapes how others receive you.

Research shows that human language evolved from physical gestures, movements that slowly took on symbolic and emotional meaning. Today, we still communicate most of our emotions and intentions through posture, breath, tone, and micro-movements, often before words are even fully processed. The body speaks before the mind does.

Practical techniques

How to practice embodied communication through voice and presence

• Feel your voice in your body
  Speaking is not just mental. Focus on how your voice feels as it moves through your breath, tone, and posture—not just on the words you’re saying.

• Breath-voice connection
  Begin with a sigh of relief. Inhale gently, then let out a slow, gooey exhale. This helps downshift your nervous system and grounds your presence.

• Body awareness while speaking
  Notice areas of tension in your jaw, shoulders, or spine. Adjust alignment, soften where possible, and let your posture support vocal clarity.

• Humming practice
  Try sighing out on a hum. Let the sound fall forward into your lips and face. Feel the vibration resonate in your bones, especially around the chest and jaw.

These practices align closely with what aikido already teaches us: awareness, alignment, and responsiveness in motion, only now the motion is language.

Understanding this gives Aikido teachers a head start. If we already train sensitivity through contact, timing, and non-verbal feedback, then the same sensitivity can be trained in dialogue. Speaking becomes a continuation of the same centered presence we practice on the mat. Listening becomes a form of ukemi. When our tone, breath, and body align, even challenging conversations become places of influence rather than reaction.

"If you're truly centered, it should show in how you listen, how you talk, how you hold the room."

This doesn’t mean adopting a new persona, but being more yourself under stress, not less.

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In Part 3, we’ll shift the focus from inner regulation to outward leadership. How can Aikido teachers become facilitators of presence—not just transmitters of technique? We’ll explore how influence works when you stop trying to instruct and start showing up.