JW

Hi Conrad, I'm not sure what you mean, regarding the relationship between the internal power folks' posts and hardness/toughness points of view. To me kokyuu is both hard and soft (soft in how you do it, powerful in effect on others).

I certainly agree that you can find people who mix bits of internal power and woo-woo stuff. And I agree that spirituality and martial effectiveness and internal power can all be found to co-occur or not-- there is no reason to think that such things will always go in a certain way hand-in-hand. I think there is a relationship between these 3 things, but it doesn't mean that the people out there are predictable with regard to what ratios they employ.

One of my favorite examples of respectable internal training combined with woo-woo attitude are the videos of Okamoto from Daito-ryu-- his teaching is clearly valuable, but the ukes in those videos.... sometimes they make me wonder.