View Single Post
Old 02-16-2017, 07:36 AM   #14
jonreading
 
jonreading's Avatar
Dojo: Aikido South
Location: Johnson City, TN
Join Date: Aug 2004
Posts: 1,209
United_States
Offline
Re: A defense of Aiki

Quote:
Ron Ragusa wrote: View Post
Well, you kind of recast what I posted with some of O Sensei's cosmological metaphors thrown in. Recall I wrote, "Whole body movement with aiki as a discipline is indeed not predicated on anything 'to do with your partner, or connecting centers, or being affected by an opponent.'"

Aiki is a result. It's a condition of the mind/body unit that arises when mind and body are integrated via intent. Training aiki strengthens the mind/body unit beyond what might normally be achieved by physical or mental conditioning alone. In my mind, one doesn't do aiki, one is unified with aiki and that unification within oneself is expressed as whole body movement; or as I would say, movement with mind/body coordinated.

Ron
Kinda. Part of what you said also was that the training of whole body movement was not exclusive of co-dependent movement. While on some small level of commonality, that may be true, I am being a little more firm here by saying that if you are moving with dependence on your partner's interaction, then you are not moving correct. Join center is false.

There is another thread right now musing the "worthiness" of aiki training. I am trying to separate my thoughts to better match the thread to which I post, but it brings up a series of questions that we explored, so I am going to post some comments here, instead:
1. Everyone is not doing "it." I have worked out with a number of people who claimed to have IP or "do that" in their aikido. They don't. Sensei so-and-so said this or that. Great, where has sensei been to teach this stuff? Why can I count on two hands the number of IP heavyweights in aikido? This is was critical issue for us when we looked at who was doing what and we realized that pool is pretty small.
2. There are some digs about aiki people in the other thread that illustrate real points... I can point to a lot more aikido people who will talk their way out of anything, rather than defend what they do. I know a lot of aikido people who purposefully avoid checking their stuff to see how it works. I know a lot of aikido people who use parlor tricks. This points to what we found - you can't hide on the mat. You are either using IP or you are not. And we found you can tell the difference literally just by touching someone.

I got no problem with keeping things light and fun and digging at each other. I got no problem with ribbing our crazy training techniques, from bongo drums to breathing and in between. But the truth of the situation is that aikido has some real problems in the fighting world. Doing better jujutsu is the not answer to the better "street" application. Talking down to MMA is not the answer to dealing with fighters you can eat you alive. Aiki has survived for a long time, while aikido is relatively young on the fighting arts timeline.

It's the internet, so I am not inclined to make statements about who does what because you can't prove anything one way or the other, but your words are immortalized for the world to criticize. I take people at their word when someone says what they can (or can't) do. Internal power is tough training. It's not for everyone. We all want to say we do it because it sounds like Eastern magic and we know that O Sensei did it. Empirically, we just don't train the way you need to train to make aiki movement. This is why the post-war aikido struggled to produce anyone with the look at feel of the earlier students of O Sensei. That's not to say that there are not good teachers out there, or that aikido isn't worth practicing, or that we should start naming names to embarrass people. If your instructor knows and just isn't teaching, why? If you are doing and not teaching, why? Do you feel like everyone else, why? These are tough questions that we need to look at.

By the way, you are being a good sport and I appreciate the dialog.

Jon Reading
  Reply With Quote