Over the course of Aikido training a student will inevitably encounter many problems. For instance, practice partners may be 'difficult' or even deliberately obstructive, advice from senior students or teachers might be contradictory, practice principles may seem to be incomprehensible or unattainable, confidence in instructors may be questioned, and so on. "Aikido Body, Mind and Spirit: The System" explores a range of these problems and questions from the point of view of a student training with a fictional Aikido master instructor called Alex Essani. The conversations between Ian, the student, and Alex Essani, the teacher, are inventions that serve to examine training principles, practices and problems. In this first book, Ian is introduced to basic ideas regarding Aikido practice in the dojo. Subsequently, in Books 2 and 3, he is encouraged to explore rather less pragmatic ideas relating to mind and spirit. This is a bilingual text in which the original version in English has been translated into Russian.