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Old 06-18-2012, 04:37 PM   #50
graham christian
Dojo: golden center aikido-highgate
Location: london
Join Date: Oct 2010
Posts: 2,697
England
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Re: Randori...we don't do enough of it

Quote:
Chris Parkerson wrote: View Post
I do not attempt to separate spiritual from physical. I am unsure what you mean in your term spiritual maii. For me, I say, there are no winners in a fight, only survivors.
How do you survive?

1. Don't get hit. How do you not get hit? Move both feet. Follow the geometry of evasion. All attacks work on an arch and/or radius. PI is present. Trust it. It is a sacred geometry.

2. Don't get mesmerized by the moving glitter. It absorbs your attention and you get clocked from somewhere else. Plus, if you process through your eyes/brain, you are too slow. Feel movement like fish feel other fish in water. Move with the ebb and flow by way of your hara and you will not be too slow.

3. Do not stand double weighted. It is a stagnant kiss of death. It will cause you to use your eyes and brain, then you will have to shift to one foot. That is wasted time. The hara initiates movement best when you are primarily weighted on one foot.

Just a start...

Chris
O.K. I Get the points 1,2 and 3 and could ask a few things about them. Firstly in the prior post I asked whether by intuition you meant spiritual.

Point 1 is different to me. On point 2, using hara rather than eyes, we are back to spiritual are we not?

Point 3 I disagree with or don't see how.

The main thing is though my reply to what I mean by spiritual ma-ai.

We used to demonstrate a one inch punch or even one cm punch from such, different to the standard or more common way of doing it. The point is spiritual rules are higher harmonics of the physical yet you cannot understand them thinking physically. ie: If I told you to spiritually let go of something it doesn't then fall down.

Now spiritual ma-ai I'll give you an example I feel you personally will get or at least find interesting. Think of sympathy. You may sympathise with someone and walk away carrying their problems. There I would say you didn't keep ma-ai.

On the other hand, and much more effective and helpful is empathy. Empathise with another and you are being with them spiritually and yet keeping ma-ai. Good counselors are good at this. So spiritually you can be with the other and even be with them completely withou losing yourself. You still are you, not overwhelmed or overcome. Thus you can be the other person and yet remain yourself. This is still ma-ai.

So in my Aikido for instance when you enter then obviously physically you are breaking ma-ai but if you maintain being with spiritually you are in fact maintaining ma-ai. The nearest I could say to this would be the oft said maintaining connection.

Hope that explains sufficiently.

Peace.G.
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