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Root
Hi Bruce
I'm a newcomer to ki aikido -18 months - but have a background in tai-chi and pa kua. The iron shirt or iron body stuff is more shaolin and not my territory, but developing a root was important to the tai chi I learnt and the first 5 or 6 years was devoted to that.
BTW I have found no conflict at all between tai chi and aikido principles.
Rooting or having a root is about body as one unit and therefore how to direct energy applied to one's body. If all my joints are correctly aligned then when you push on my arm the force is directed to the ground and therefore I am not using my arm muscles to resist. Useful and a good protection for one's body integrity. But the more dynamic aspects - and where I see it most in aikido at my beginner level - is that as one develops an awareness of one's own root so one's 'reading' of another's root develops: if I aim at someone's body in a random way they can simply step aside or direct that where they will - if on the other hand I direct it straight down to their root they can't take it anywhere and will simply compress like a spring - release the pressure and they will move, so if I time it correctly I can add just a bit of 'encouragement' to that movement and away they go. There are ways in tai chi of dealing with others' attempts to do that to you, but I haven't found the correspondence in aikido yet - I'm confident it's there, but the training route is different in aikido, or at any rate in the school of aikido I'm studying. Is this useful, or did you want discussion of specific applications?
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