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Old 03-23-2017, 11:23 AM   #227
jonreading
 
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Dojo: Aikido South
Location: Johnson City, TN
Join Date: Aug 2004
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Re: Are you invincible if you possess Aiki?

Speaking for myself, with regard to specifics of our training:

Chris's blog, and now Allen's blog, explicitly provide exercises for heaven/Earth/man balance and I don't have much else to contribute, which is why I often refer people to read those blogs, rather than just rewriting something. Heck, I will occasionally still refer back to posts Dan made on Aikiweb that are 5/10 years old, because they are relevant. There are several old school instructions, many from O Sensei, if you know where to look. Mostly, I feel the value of my comments do not lie in repeating something that has already been said, but providing my perspective based on what I have seen in aikido, often as a humor to a serious issue. Saying the same thing more times does not make it more or less true; as a matter of convenience it maybe brings things back to the surface...

At its heart, IP is a methodology to support internal stability and generate whole body power, right? You'll have a "all directions" camp, an orbit or rotation camp, maybe an "opposites" camp. What am I missing? From there, I think you have the specific conversation about body work exercises - foundation exercises that dominate your physical training. After that, you'll have some movement coordination and maybe get into application, if you're good (moving with yin/yang balance at the attraction point of pressure). You have a variety of arts that sit on top of some internal training methodology, with parallels in movement and internal training. Since we are aikido, largely the conversation is limited to aikido.

We just don't train it enough, or explain it enough, or challenge ourselves to do it enough before moving onto something else. Standing in some variation of zhan zhuang is not how most people want to spend their "training" time. We have shizentai, a natural stance that most aikido people use more similarly to kendo or karate, but not quite hanmi. We stand in HEM in shizentai. We stand in HEM in hanmi. Think we are successful all of the time? Nope. Transfer that mentality to aikido - paired exercises, techniques, free style. This is a difficult thing to do and I think we brush past the obstacle that is a practicality of function. We have pretty good instructions and way marks for our training, it's whether or not we listen to them or defer to another authority.

Last edited by jonreading : 03-23-2017 at 11:35 AM.

Jon Reading
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