Quote:
Phi Truong wrote:
i thought O Sensei said to turn when push and to enter when pull. don't remember he said anything about push back. are we suck at learning aikido lesson or what?  |
I think you wrote this semi-facetiously, Phi, but this reminds me of a story that George Leonard told. During his many workshops on aikido and leadership trainings, George would ask attendees what they would do if they were pushed; the answer he got, pretty much invariably, was "push back." He went on to say that the point of aikido and budo training was to get away from such pre-conditioned responses so that we could create a culture that promoted a different way of resolving things -- hopefully, with a result that's better than it was when the conflict emerged.
Frankly, that's the kind of interactions I would like to see here on AikiWeb -- a dissolution of conflict that takes the discussion to a better place -- rather than into a fibonacci escalation of unfortunate rhetoric. Again, this isn't to say that we can't disagree and be passionate about our disagreements, but to diminish the amount of entrenchment of our calcanei into the granular mineral materials and speak more amenably to each other.
Thanks,
-- Jun