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Old 09-26-2008, 10:48 AM   #25
Joe McParland
 
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Dojo: Sword Mountain Aikido & Zen
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Re: Henka-waza and Keishi-Waza

Quote:
Janet Rosen wrote: View Post
The minute nage gives uke anything uke can resist, the technique has in essence become an attack which uke can apply a technique to.

Ideally in practice nage can do a technique giving nothing that can be resisted. I suppose if I had to specify having a long term goal in my own training, that would be it.
I thought about this a lot while and then after posting, Janet. There once was a thread wherein someone asked if nage could perform a technique without "adding" anything to what uke had offered. That really intrigued me. On self-examination, I saw that I'm still fairly primitive: I tug here, push there, or whatever is necessary to create that off-balancing, etc. But was it really necessary? How wonderful to minimize that with better leading and such.

In retrospect, though, that leading---or transmission of somatic information---is something that nage is adding / contributing to the equation. I suspect that a sufficiently sensitive uke can work with that as well.

In the end, how can Aikido be a balance restoring art if it itself is not balanced?

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