Aikido

So in class this week one of the topics that stuck out to me was the concept of Aikido; fighting by simply defending yourself but not bringing harm to another person. It was strange because we have been trained since birth that fighting is both parties equally trying to harm each other. So the concept of standing there and defending but not advancing isn't something you would normally think of. Especially me because I'm a Krav Maga fighter, one of our main goals is to defend and advance at the same time (aka block and punch), because we are taught that you cant risk the person coming back to try and hurt you again. That's why when we were talking about Aikido i kind of didn't fully understand it. If you don't punch back, like i was taught to do, how can you inflict harm on the person so they don't hurt you again? But the idea of Aikido is that you don't want to inflict harm, because then both parties are angry and the fight will go on or your attacker will pick another victim. The idea is to show him or her that you can hurt them if you need to, but you don't want to. That way they'll walk away peacefully. This just keeps making em think of what I've been taught, my dad has been telling me since birth that if someone tries to hurt me i should hurt them back and worse so they know not to mess with me. It always made sense to me, but i never looked at it as perpetuating the violence, i just looked at it as self defense. But with the concept of Aikido self defense means nothing more then defend yourself, which is interesting.