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Old 01-16-2013, 10:34 PM   #5
Cady Goldfield
Join Date: Oct 2006
Posts: 1,035
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Re: A Consideration of Aikido Practice within the Context of Internal Training

Going into virtually any aikido dojo on the planet would be fine for getting in good aiki practice as nage... no one would be the wiser when you apply aiki to your waza. They'd just think that your aikido is fabulous, perhaps mysteriously so. On the other hand, I'm not sure that taking lots and lots of hard ukemi in such a setting would serve as a necessary prerequisite to learning aiki (there are other, less bitter-eating ways); but, taking ukemi of any kind, copiously, from someone who has aiki could offer some opportunities. In taking ukemi for someone who is aiki adept, an intuitively astute student can "steal" ... by feel ... what nage is doing internally. The more ukemi, the more opportunities to cop that feel, so to speak, and make it one's own.

In the absence of a direct and succinct teaching syllabus or terminology to help the student parse out and work the different core movements and processes to develop the skills, person-to-person transmission through feel seems to have a very long tradition in the Asian internal arts.

That may be why certain internal-skills adepts did not like to use the same uke for more than one technique, or to repeat techniques on any one uke, if they had no intentions of teaching the skills to him or her. And, why such teachers would take ukemi from students they did want to teach, to feel whether the students were doing things correctly or not.

Last edited by Cady Goldfield : 01-16-2013 at 10:45 PM.
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