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Ron Tisdale wrote:
I'm eating lunch, and had an interesting thought.
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Oh, Please, Ron.... next you'll be telling us, "Once I had a friend...."
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But when you consider the fact that the early aikidoka (Tohei, Shioda, Mochizuki, etc.) were already experienced martial artists...isn't this exactly what they had to do?
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I don't know enough facts. We know that Tohei spent a lot of personal time re-learning how to move with Tempu Nakamura... so he had to make a large effort to change over. We know also that Tohei is reported to have commented about some other uchideshi's lack of ki, even though that person was above godan (at least sixth dan), IIRC. So there was at least a question of who knew how to move with ki. O-Sensei wasn't teaching it to Tohei and others, so probably the uchideshi had varying degrees of ki and kokyu skills across the spectrum. We just don't know for sure, though
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How is say a 2nd dan, skilled in more or less moving in a relaxed and relatively powerfull manner, familiar with the outer form of the techniques in aikido, different from say, Shioda? Both at some point would have to go back and retrain their strongly ingrained movement patterns to do something different, right?
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I agree. The difference would be that the average nidan is far-removed from any viable sources of this type of movement and Shioda had sources more at hand. BTW... I've read the Shioda books (well, 3 of them) and I'm not satisfied that the books (which I believe were not personally written by Shioda) reflect exactly Shioda's take on things OR that the full extent of his knowledge and abilities is conveyed.
I remember that in Taiji, Wu Jien Jen developed a "square form" which actually broke the movements of his Taiji down into almost robot-like motions.... this was done so that he could teach large numbers of people at a time. Nowadays, you have some Wu-style practitioners that do this "square form" (they look like Mr. Robot-to) thinking they "know the secrets". I'd suggest that Shioda's method of breaking things down into simple concepts may present somewhat of a misleading potential in the same manner.
I.e., people can put almost religious faith in Shioda's deliberate and clever simplifications, but an open mind may need to be kept about what Shioda actually knew. That bit I saw him do on Shingi Denju DVD was well beyond anything I ever saw him mention in writing.
Regards,
Mike