Thread: Full Resistance
View Single Post
Old 12-29-2008, 12:05 PM   #88
Erick Mead
 
Erick Mead's Avatar
Dojo: Big Green Drum (W. Florida Aikikai)
Location: West Florida
Join Date: Jun 2005
Posts: 2,619
United_States
Offline
Re: Integration and Awareness!

Quote:
Kevin Leavitt wrote: View Post
No you cannot, but within every scenario there are some common elements that will come up in just about any fight that we can train. Fighting distance, weapons, no weapons.....okay.... Multiple Opponents? Well LOL that one gets tricky doesn't it? I tend to stick with one person for most of my training as, IMO, if you cannot control one, what makes you think you can control more?
As I see Aiki progressing through training it is becoming more and more clear to me. If my partner's arm, in the important respects, is also mine to use (if I use it in the way that does not require any nervous connections, by center-driven action ) then interacting with multiple opponents is the same. As long as I maintain my status as their mutual target they become effectively one many-limbed body centered on me, same as an individual opponent. All their actions will be driven by the motion of me at their mutual center. I believe this is what O Sensei spoke of in terms of making many one. But it emphasizes the risks to training in a competiive way, even as it makes clear that the "liveness" of training is so important.

If I begin to "run away" from multiple attackers, I am not evading them -- I am just repetitively trying to depart the center of their intended actions, and so losing the focus that it brings. So evasion is problematic.

If I begin, on the other hand to wish to make any one of them MY intended target, I lose that center-driven focus in my perception where I no longer have to worry about where the enemy is, where he is going, or what he is going to do (never mind the rest of them). Thus, attacking is problematic.

But if I am content to remain the target and simply cut directly into each attack in turn, and lead the whole of them with my own motion in concert with theirs, and remaining at their intentional center (NOT in the middle of a bunch of them, I hasten to add), while choosing merely where I wish to be centered upon -- I become the available and orderly focus of their intentions -- not too far out of reach nor so close as to not require some affirmative closure. I can snatch a group of them effectively off-balance in the sense of disorganizing their mutual structure of attack in a way directly related to the way in which I take kuzushi from a wrist grab or with kiri-otoshi or suriage with the sword, all to disorganize the attacker's structure of attack, by becoming and then changing the center. That is Aiki-DO. Sometimes, on a good day, I can even do it semi-consistently.

Good randori is like that.

In multiple attacks I need merely to move cleanly where I wish to be attacked. Kind of like Bugs Bunny, with his coquettish enticement, "Yoo hoo! Over here, boys!" Of course, I move best straight thorough his attack, so it may not seem so un-attacking. Especially when one moves before he has moved to attack but has already focussed his intention. And We all know when we are being looked at target-wise -- we just hesitate in acting on it, becasue we are unsure of whether to attack or run or block or what.

Each attacker is always "out" and each is always coming in -- to the center. Every response is directly from the center of the action and thus controls everything, if I let it do so. My intention must be merely to be in control of their center of action, which is, of course -- me. Simplifies everything, tactically and strategically, and every attacker is exactly the same, and they are all the same together. I make them that way be conquering both my desire to run and my desire to destroy a source of threat. Masakatsu agatsu. Competition does not build that. It is too goal-oriented -- which is to say it is oriented away from the point of being attacked and toward the other guy dealing with attack. He becomes the center.

Quote:
Lt.Gen. L.B. "Chesty" Puller wrote:
They are in front of us, behind us, and we are flanked on both sides by an enemy that outnumbers us 29:1. They can't get away from us now!

Last edited by Erick Mead : 12-29-2008 at 12:16 PM.

Cordially,

Erick Mead
一隻狗可久里馬房但他也不是馬的.
  Reply With Quote