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Old 12-12-2012, 07:52 AM   #14
Cady Goldfield
Join Date: Oct 2006
Posts: 1,035
United_States
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Re: Body Type and Spiritual Beliefs

To address the OP,
It seems to me that the idea of an art like Aikido, is that any body type can practice it successfully, and that being large or small doesn't necessarily mean you'll have advantages or disadvantages unless you're considering being competitive with others.

The real issue, IMO, is not what kind of a body type you start with, but what you do to forge and "re-create" the way in which it carries itself and moves. This is where the concept of a connected body comes in. "Connected" here is used in the sense of how everything in your body carries itself and moves as an integrated entity, in a unified process and not in a chain of sequential movements.

Pretty much any body type can learn to do this. Morihei Ueshiba started training and re-forging himself this way, under Sokaku Takeda's teaching, when he was young, muscular and strong, but was still able to create great power when he had a body that was old, skinny, sick and frail, because he had taught his body to move in a very specific way that differed from the conventional mechanics of human-body movement.

Last edited by Cady Goldfield : 12-12-2012 at 08:04 AM.
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