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Sharon Seymour wrote:
Wow. Powerful women. Scary, aren't they?
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These type of comments are unnecessary and uncalled for. No one here challenged the concept simply on the basis that it was developed by a woman. This is a good example where a you are asking us all to take a "leap of faith" in terms of making a connection between two things (gender and critique of the concept) that clearly do not exist.
Most unfortunately, it negates any reasonable reading of the rest of your post. Sad, because when you write,
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So few people have the dedication to not only achieve a high level of practice under highly-regarded and demanding teachers, but also to take their practice off the mat and reach out to those who might never consider martial arts training.
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it is a much more powerful statement - one I happen to agree with you on - one hundred percent.
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Go back to the kiai golf website and click on the Jamie Zimron link. Read the resume.
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You can easily point at the resume of just about any accomplished individual and say, "See here, look at all these accomplishments." That doesn't really offer anything in terms of insulation from that very same individual doing the most bone-headed thing in the world. Accomplished people may, in fact, be a group with the single highest ratio of doing bone-headed things to learning from those very same mistakes.
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As Bill Cosby said, "I don't know the secret of success, but the secret of failure is to try and please everybody."
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Again, truer words have yet to be spoken. However, this doesn't mean that one should negate the thinking, opinions and considerations of others in their own field.
Clearly, most of the comments here have been negative. Even those, such as myself, who support her initiative, and applaud her talent and ingenuity, still have some issue with the packaging.
While, I have serious problems with wearing Hakama on the golf-course, and didn't really care for her demonstration at the Aiki-Expo, I think that what she is doing, while not remarkable in any sense, is being very true to her own path. Perhaps the better way of marketing these two separate things, is to keep them separate, encouraging those interested in one to cross over into the other via the relationship she has with the individuals that study with her. That, to me, would be a more powerful method, as opposed to creating some artificial way of marketing the two together, in an attempt that only achieves something that is devoid of the natural culture of either element.