Keith Larman

Tony:

Well, having met and trained with a number of people who've responded to you in this thread I seriously doubt most would disagree with much of what you have written. And without question most have little use for the "shooting balls of ki" stuff.

Ellis Amdur in his book "Hidden in Plain Sight" posits an interesting theory that some develop some of these body attributes through the years of hard training including taking a lot of ukemi. Which to me as a guy interested in psych and epistemology is really intriguing. Because one could argue that if his theory is correct then many who have developed some of these skills through their training may have no idea that they've developed actual physical structures that others lack. Hence when they say things like "they relax under pressure" they're actually doing something substantially different from what their students are doing. And the simple fact is that they can't communicate what exactly they're doing because a) they don't realize what they're doing is something different from what they think they're doing and b) the student on the other end lacks the physical structures to be able to do it themselves no matter how hard they try to relax. Just as an example.

But I'm just plodding along myself trying to figure it out. Carry on...