Aikido's contribution to practitioner's health

Abstract

We developed an extension project at the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Norte (UFRN), and includes students, teachers, other servers and the external community. Our goal with this article is to present the reports of our project members and discuss about the contributions of the practice of aikido in relation with health as an existential phenomenon and with the care of the self. Methods: Questionnaires were applied to collect data about the following information: 1) if you are part of the internal community (server, student or professor) or external to the university; 2) age; 3) practice time; 4) your opinion about what health is; 5) the impact of aikido practice on the practitioner's health; 6) whether aikido can be understood as a health practice. and were analyzed by theme content. Results: 34 practitioners volunteered to fill out our questionnaire. From the external community, 14 members answered the questionnaire, and from the internal community, one is a teacher, two are employees, and seventeen are students. From the reports, we are allowed to perceive health as a dynamic phenomenon made up of social, cultural, biological, emotional, and spiritual aspects, among others. Conclusion: Aikido addresses many of these spheres and promotes selfknowledge and caring for oneself and others, reflecting about their experiences and their health through interpretative elaborations of their own condition. Such attitude strengthens the idea that there is a hermeneutic dimension of health that has elements that can be narrated and analyzed.