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Old 02-23-2011, 01:40 PM   #4
Thomas Campbell
Join Date: Sep 2006
Posts: 407
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Re: "move your inside"

Quote:
Phi Truong wrote: View Post
to recap the three points: connected, unity, and move your inside.

move your inside doesn't mean that you are going to flip your kidneys around or turn your spleen up-side-down or making faces with your large and small intestines. although, if you can do that, please let me know how and i declare you alien and ship you to Area 51 (it does exist. .... does too!)

if you use Tohei's keep the one point model, then you know the one point is the hara/dantien, where your belly always itch and you can't scratch it while in front of ladies. so if you think of the one point located below your navel and a bit inward of your belly. imagine the one point expands and be as big as a tennis ball. now imagine threads extend from the tennis ball's surface and connect to various part of your body, for example, a thread with one end anchor on the surface of the ball and the other to your right palm. so if i want to move my palm, i just rotate the ball. the thread would pull and your palm move with the pull. now, since there are lots of threads on the surface of the ball, if the ball rotate and/or move in any direction, various parts of your body, the ones that had thread connection, move as well. thus the phrase "one moves all move". and if you view the ball as your dantien/hara, then the process called "dantien/hara movement", i.e. "move your inside".

for untrained or newly trained folks in this arena, instead of a ball, they have a point or small ball, say a golf ball. since the golf ball surface is small, it doesn't have a whole lot of surface area which mean it doesn't have a whole lot of threads connecting to various parts of your body. better trained folks, have larger ball, thus larger surface area and more threads, i.e. more body simultaneously control. essentially, you take Tohei's one point and expand it into a ball and move it around.

since we have #1 (connected) and #2 (unity), we are one and connected, 4-legged animal (donkey) and i am the head , as i "move my inside", you would move as well. however, the movement doesn't register with uke's perception, because uke's expecting power through the contact point. sort of imagine the threads are now extending into uke's body.
So Phi . . . is the 4-legged donkey a metaphor for the connected unity of nage and uke (each providing two legs)? If so, how does the nage's power extend into or affect uke except through the point(s) of contact?

Separately . . . how do you learn to rotate the ball (hara/dantien)? Are there specific exercises to do that? It's not aikido, but . . . in the Chinese art of taijiquan, teachers often say that the ability to rotate the hara/dantien will occur naturally over time as a consequence of training the form. This doesn't seem to happen for a lot of people, so I'm curious if there are separate exercises that would train movement of the hara in the aikido context. I'm assuming this would help in making the hara/dantien ball "bigger," as you describe.

Finally, are the "threads" that you write about related to the fascia often discussed here as providing the (or a) medium of internal connection? If so, where would I feel the movement (extension or contraction) of the "threads" . . . under the skin, and/or over or through the joints, and/or through the muscles? Those are all places where fascia wraps around or winds through the body.

Any insight you can provide is appreciated. Thanks.
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