Quote:
Pete Rihaczek wrote:
The things that you talked about earlier that took some years to start getting the hang of, Mike typically covers in a single workshop.
Snip
Or maybe I'm wrong and you do know it all, in which case all us poor schlubs, who are scratching our heads trying to work these things out because we've encountered physically unremarkable people who somehow possess the power of hydraulic equipment, are all ears. The floor is yours.  |
Which is why I'm interested in this stuff. As I've said before, I want to know if there's a quicker way to learn and teach this stuff, otherwise I wouldn't be reading these discussions. I'm generally pretty slow in learning this stuff, others aren't but that's my fault not my teachers really. I'm not sure its the method that's to blame either but that's a matter for debate and, like I said, why I'm interested in these things.
For the record in a single 6hr workshop I too could get people to do the things it took me years to learn, but like Mike often says, when they leave it would start slipping away, it took me years, because I needed years to absorb the skill properly and to be consistently able to do these things and have them trained into my body and mind. The two aren't the same thing and I think you know that.
As to body conditioning exercises, think you may have missed my point, life in general is one. Anytime I do a hard physically demanding task or anything else for that matter I try to 'do it with ki'. Just like Rob and others have said you have to train hard to learn these things, even if you're just opening a jar in the kitchen you have to try to do it in the right way.
I most certainly don't 'know it all' nor have I ever claimed to. If you want to re-read what I've said, you'll see that right at the start I said that I can't do the things that Dan Harden says (and people who have trained with him say) he can do. I probably can't do the things Mike can do either. I can do some of these things consistently and probably most of them but much less consistently. But I know what my skill level is, I know where it's going and I know what I'm trying to achieve. I also understand the subject matter enough to be able to discuss it in a reasonable way, and seeing as these are discussion forums not a dojo it seems fair to discuss them. As you yourself have pointed out talking about it is one thing, doing it is another.
This whole debate seems a bit like this. People say these skills are absent from aikido. This is not true, though they may be absent from a lot of aikido maybe even most of it for all I know, but they definitely aren't absent from it totally. People start talking about Chinese internal arts and their skills and saying that these are the skills missing from aikido. How do they know? They are certainly similar skills but are they the same? I don't think they are. For example, I'm not sure fajing is necessarily a part of aikido's internal repertoire, it certainly doesn't appear to be hugely prevalent in film of O Sensei and others. The discussion is interesting and productive but I don't think you necessarily have to go to see Dan Harden or Mike Sigman or anyone else to learn these things, I think they are more common than many people give credit. Maybe that's just me being optimistic, dunno.
Mike