View Single Post
Old 12-30-2015, 08:05 AM   #18
jonreading
 
jonreading's Avatar
Dojo: Aikido South
Location: Johnson City, TN
Join Date: Aug 2004
Posts: 1,209
United_States
Offline
Re: Opinions on this please.

Quote:
Mary Malmros wrote: View Post
"collectively"? Oh, come now.
I am not sure what this means. I think Peter hit the nail on the head, issues of competency are best met with face-to-face conversations that are unambiguous about what we do and why we do it. My implied "collective" is to include everyone in this. It is no different that expecting a level of competency within a technical curriculum, teaching standards, or other aspects of our training.

The rub of my comment is that maybe we aren't as competent to share what we do as we think we are. Maybe an good MMA girl can kick our ass. Who cares? We do. For all our "it's not about fighting", it's about fighting and having respect for what we do. There is plenty of room for someone to respect what we do but not be interested in doing it.

I have never found polarizing perspectives as a path to understanding. I think it is ridiculous that we'll spend time talking to wide-eyed newbies about aikido when they walk into a dojo, but we're adversarial towards people who practice other arts, even if they criticize us. MMA and other sport fight systems raise awareness of martial arts, discipline, good training and healthy exercise - that's good for all of us. Why wouldn't we want our sister arts to be more knowledgeable about why we do aikido?

Jon Reading
  Reply With Quote