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Old 09-02-2008, 07:05 PM   #2
Kent Enfield
 
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Location: Oregon, USA
Join Date: Jul 2002
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Re: Taisabaki and Ueshiba

Quote:
Mark Murray wrote: View Post
Up to now, I've been reading articles and thinking taisabaki was actually, as the article put in parenthesis, body movement. You know, how the body moved physically. But, the longer I thought about it, the more I wondered if they didn't mean the internal structural body skills.
Well, sabaku doesn't mean "move". It means something more along the lines of "handle/deal with/manipulate", so while it does mean things like "step to the left with your left foot", that's not *all* it means.

Though they often get glossed over at lower levels, and I've not seen any indications of a purposeful curriculum for teaching body skills directly, at higher levels, there seems to be lots of attention to small details that affect how one moves and generates power: tension in the legs, alignment of the hips and spine, etc. It wouldn't surprise me at all for kendo people to visit someone who moves well to see if they could learn how to improve their own movement.

Kentokuseisei
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