rob_liberti

Well, I believe that there is some degree of a common experience of:

- maintaining the central equalibrium which is the basic level of internal power. People training aiki all have experienced holding their lines of intention to the degree that they are able to resist random pushs and/or pulls without any conscious adjustments (that I am aware of).

- rotating your trunk around your spine to either dissapate stronger pushes or simply create instant center to center contact.

- holding those lines of intention and communicating them to someone pushing on you. For instance, your intention of "up" get _wierldly_ percieved by the pusher and they feel lifted as they push on you, you can instantly change your dominant mental line of intention to be "down" (without changing anything else) and that pusher starts feeling crushed. (People more experienced can achieve that degree of weird communication _instantly_ against strikes in real time with hardly any contact. There is at least a common experience of being on the receiving end of that.)

- combining the lines of intention up and/or down with power of rotating the trunk around the spine to completely mess up the "victum" of that.

- then using all of that stuff above to recover balance from absurd positions, to shut down/reverse throw attempts and attack with absurd amount of grounded power while feeling more "elastic" as opposed to "rigid".

I'm too much of a novice at this stuff to explain it better. But that's kind of my point. If you never even experienced it at all, how can you explain it better?

As far as the problem to be solved, I would say the problem statement would be what is the best/most efficient way to develop and teach aiki? So far for me - that answer has been Dan's training methodology.

Rob