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Cliff Judge wrote:
Hmm, I don't recall saying anything about pulling when pushed or pushing when pulled. I think what a willow branch does is entirely different.
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You mentioned the concept of
ju, pulling when pushed is a pretty much text book definition of
ju as in judo, ju jitsu, which can be translated as yielding. But - and this is possibly my fault fo muddying the water - yielding in tai chi push hands is a slightly different thing, but happens to be the same word in english. At least that's what I was taught back in the day.
Quote:
Cliff Judge wrote:
Did you read HIPS?
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Yes
Quote:
Cliff Judge wrote:
I don't think merely offering no opposition gets you to a state of investment.
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This is a bit of muddled thinking, the investment I referred to was one in training, investing in the early days to reap the rewards in the years to come, it was at no point some sort of 'state', offering no opposition is how Morihei Ueshiba described aiki on more than one occasion (well, non-dissent was what he said, I'm paraphrsing), please note that offering no opposition/non-dissent does not mean giving away your centre to your partner/opponent.
Quote:
Cliff Judge wrote:
You need to actually absorb the energy somehow, or some of it. Then you give it back, plus perhaps some of your own. I think this is what the investment in loss thing is about.
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Not the way I was told about it, investment in loss is nothing to do with absorbing energy and giving it back, it was about a training paradigm where you spend a lot of time focusing on non-dissent with your partner so you can shed the idea that it is necessary to win an encounter or defeat someone somehow, this does not mean giving away your centre and easily falling over when only lightly touched, it's instead about giving up the idea of fighting which is what you need to do to be able to learn to feel the power someone is applying to your body.
An example my aikido teacher gives is that if you grip my wrist hard you won't be able to feel what I'm doing to you very easily as your hard grip decreases your sensitivity to how I am directing the forces within my body and yours. If I'm doing it right you'll fall over without ever knowing what I did to you because you hard grip decreases your sensitivity, your hard grip is abut having a fighting mind and a desire to dominate me. If you instead invest in losing then you are training yourself to give up that fighting mind, once you do that you can start to feel what is happening in the interplay of energies between us.
Quote:
Cliff Judge wrote:
I think this might be different than aiki, actually. I think of aiki as more of an instantaneous feeding back of the energy, but you send it back along a different line than it came in on. There is no investment, its hand-to-mouth, cash-in cash-out.
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I never said was aiki, I'm just interested in what effects such a training paradigm might have over the long term.