p00kiethebear

The only way to keep aikido martial is to keep questioning the martial applicability of what we do, whether you're in this for the spiritual aspects or not, aikido is first and foremost a martial art and we won't be able to keep it a growing art if we can't critique it and try to make it better. If anything, people openly critiquing Aikido is a sign that perhaps, we, as practitioners haven't questioned it enough ourselves. There is a difference between having faith in your art and having blind faith. Even the Buddha turned away potential followers telling them that they didn't understand why what he taught was "right".

The problem with aikido is the seemingly lack of consistency in the skill of the practitioners (from the outside looking in). No martial art of course has the ability to create perfectly consistent results as far as their teaching methods go. But aikido is at best a martial strategy that has been pr oven by a (comparably) few amount of talented students of the art. Otherwise it wouldn't be under criticism.

If you were to graph the amount of years trained, with the ability to defend yourself, I would predict that there would be little or no positive correlation between the two variables (positive correlation would be the outlier). This being the case, we would have to force ourselves to accept that aikido has a huge lack of empirical evidence to support a claim that the training and time spent in aikido will consistently produce "good" (with lack of operational definition) martial artists.

Until we ourselves as practitioners and teachers become better and more consistent, aikido will always be subject to criticism from the outside. And for now, that criticism should also be part of our motivation to keep delving deeper into understanding and practicing what many of us know (whether because of experiences or of ability) is a valid and acceptable form of martial strategy. Not necessarily to prove it to anyone (even ourselves, plenty aikidoka don't need to prove to themselves that it's valid) but to further our understanding of it.

Untill aikido becomes consistant, it will always remain a phenomona that few will understand and even fewer will appreciate.