Quote:
Lee Salzman wrote:
I don't mean to imply that it was somehow a prescriptive method of unbalancing, rather to illustrate power differences can matter, that these power differences can be created because you have put in a lot of time solo training that someone else has not (using methods requiring little to no scientific literacy), and that pretty much all of us are starting off severely unbalanced to begin with.
So, learning first and foremost how to unbalance someone can seem rather backwards from that point of view. Learning how to not be a walking collection of imbalances can seemingly undo/invalidate many years/decades of the most well-intentioned and earnest training of most of us, because all someone has to do to point out our flaws is to come in contact with us. There really are dragons out there.
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Dammit. Yes. One of the reasons why I am waiting to be sold on a new teaching methodology with this stuff is for this reason... Ultimately, we are teaching people how to unbalance their partners and
hoping they are athletic enough to not to be [too] unbalanced themselves in the process. Through the learning process, we correct and encourage self-evaluation and
hope our students realize they are also unbalanced and consideration self-correctional behavior to be part of their instruction. Both instructional formats hoping that our students we'll get the message and become receptive to that conversation that eventually comes up... "don't try to do anything to your partner." "What? 5 years you've been showing me kata where I am instructed to do something, now you're telling me not to? F^*k this, I'm doing tai bo."
The converse of that conversation is this one... "Hi, welcome to aikido. You have terrible posture and you're one step above sloppily hurling your body in a general direction as your primary method of locomotion. For the next 5 years, we're going to concentrate on your problem areas, which seem to involve 'being'."