View Single Post
Old 03-05-2011, 04:19 PM   #329
Tenyu
Dojo: Aikibodo
Location: Arcata CA
Join Date: Jun 2008
Posts: 150
United_States
Offline
Re: New Internal Style of The Wooden Staff

Quote:
Gary Welborn wrote: View Post
Tenyu
It is your path alone to travel...and that is cool. It is yours alone to follow....you have stated in your recent posts how much beyond any of us you are in your development,,,,maybe so...... It never helps to step into a room full of strangers and start telling them how much more you know than them and how much better you can apply what you know than anything of them can with what they know. There are places I know that if you took the approach you have here fights would break just to see who would get to toss you out of the place....and they would.

Maybe you are a gift from above....but your marketing department has not served you well. I think I said somewhere that this would not end well and I still think that is the case. Good luck with it....
Gary
Gary,

I agree with you now that Aikiweb is not the best ‘target audience' to find someone interested in learning what I do. I don't know what the average age here is but it's probably well over my own age. I've only had one teacher younger than me, a 4th dan at Seido who'd been training his whole life there. I learned a lot from him regarding Karate technique in class and seeing how influential it was to his daily life the few times I hung out with him outside the dojo. At the same time I had already been through quite a bit myself in life, many unique experiences which were foreign to him. I never treated him any different inside the dojo from my other teachers who were anywhere from 15 to 40 years older than me though.

If I were your guys' age I probably wouldn't want to learn from someone my age either, no matter what I had to offer. I've only trained in six Aikido dojos, and except for one there was rarely anyone younger than me, including large seminars! I did get quite a bit of interest from one California affiliation during a weekend seminar I attended but that was before I was even teaching at Northcoast. The shihan wasn't at all embarrassed to be genuinely curious and interested in what I was doing while we talked in the presence of his senior students.

I should focus my efforts on the younger generation.

You can probably see I'm quite passionate about Aikido, and I know the descriptions are foreign but believe it or not I try to make it as simple as possible to understand without sacrificing important details. What I've posted on Aikiweb is not at all indicative of how I would teach in person to a beginner. In the beginning, I teach by example, omitting the difficult terminology, and giving simple corrections "hold here on the stick", "see where my foot is pointing", "keep your back straight", just like any normal dojo.

-Tenyu
  Reply With Quote