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Old 08-13-2008, 09:02 PM   #103
Dan Austin
Join Date: May 2007
Posts: 151
United_States
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Re: "Aiki" in Russian Video Clips

Quote:
Dan Harden wrote: View Post
When doing Shiko "Open your pelvis, put your intent from your left foot to your right hand. Cross-line body work is very important. Draw yourself over with your right hand, "pull yourself back upright with your left leg pulling your right side hand back up, while your left hand draws your right leg up and you right leg is pulling down. Maintain and hold these six contradicting lines in your body; up/ down, left / right, front/ back, and while you are doing that hold a connection from your feet to each opposite hand. If you can; try rising up in the back and sinking through the front, at the same time. Do it till your intent is so refined that "your will" pops you off your own feet when you go back upright. Oops I see your spine let your sort of slide over and your postural alignment broke!" Er...good luck with that.
Actually since there are videos online of Akuzawa and Rob doing a variant, this makes more sense than you might think. Granted I wouldn't expect to learn it well from just video and asking questions online, but I still think there is potential value because people can compare notes. Rob L. may not know how to do it well, but perhaps well enough that if somebody ran into him they could get some pointers. As long as there are no illusions and people keep refining (as they have to do anyway) I think it would be a benefit.

Quote:
At any one point- with people doing these things together with me- they are failing to maintain something or other all over the place. So why talk about it on the net when they can't do it in person?
It seems like putting together a puzzle with pieces of collected information, and you never know what bit of information might cause something to click for someone. Rob John could say if anyone made improvement on Ark's material in between seminars. In other words there are probably a number of people who saw him twice, with a year in between. If they made some progress then that shows that while training with someone every week would be great, it's still possible to grind along and get somewhere with infrequent access to any correction.

There will be imperfect transmission and people heading down the wrong path for a little while here and there, and maybe in some cases taking big detours, but that's to be expected with any training process. Information is always better than a lack of information; what people do with it is up to them.