Quote:
Cady Goldfield wrote:
What Chris said. Sums it up.
Benjamin, we have had discussions here on aiki, right in this forum. Somehow, and perhaps not surprisingly, they did not get far because in words it just comes across as so esoteric. We could try it again, though.
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I understand this exactly. it is hard to explain in words. I can do some stuff, for example, but I am not sure if the stuff I am doing is what you or anyone else is doing. The only way to know is to meet and exchange ideas in person. I think people have been slowly waking up - for a few years now - but the thing is, most of the discussions I see end up off at some tangent into the mysterious
ki world of fluff. Not that they may be wrong, but rather that it just makes no sense to the rational mind. For me,
aiki is a physical skill that can be learned and taught (if one knows what one has learned). But to even get that far, I think people need to recognize it as
aiki (rather than
ki) so that exchange - even in person - can progress. If someone tells me to transmit my
ki from my tanden into my partner to control him I will just smile politely and not come back. If someone shows me how he transmits the power from his foot to his hand in an efficient powerful manner I will be all ears - to see if it is the same or different to what I do, and to see if there is anything I can add to make what I do better. And so on. Thus, I think it is important to think of Aikido as being
The Way of Aiki, rather than some fluffy alternative. I can't even begin to engage people in conversation about it, let alone practise anything, unless they can at least get that far into my mind.