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Old 01-15-2009, 10:07 AM   #8
George S. Ledyard
 
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Dojo: Aikido Eastside
Location: Bellevue, WA
Join Date: Jun 2000
Posts: 2,670
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Re: Aikido Styles & Teachers

Quote:
Omar Harris wrote: View Post
Hello to everyone. Would appreciate if you show me where do you stand from your own experience on the following subject:

After a long time of practicing Aikikai Aikido a person decides to experiment and try Iwama Aikido without resigning at all to his Aikikai roots. During this experiment the person discovers that Iwama has a lot offer to complement what this person thinks to know.

Would any one of you think that there's any kind of conflict here? Is this person a traitor? Should this person attend different style seminars or is this person bound for life by loyalty to this only style and scholl?

Thanks for clearing up the road.

Omar
As non-Japanese doing a Japanese art there is a tendency to try to be more Japanese than the Japanese themselves. Loyalty, in my mind, is always supporting the efforts of your teacher and your organization, putting them first. But it does not mean curtailing your own development because of personal and political conflicts between teachers and groups that started many years ago in Japan. I see absolutely no reason to carry those forward into succeeding generations.

This is YOUR life, no one else's. This is your training. Do not limit yourself. Do whatever training you think will benefit your Aikido. Too many teachers use loyalty as a way to keep their students from seeing anything beyond what that teacher can show them. Thus their students never progress beyond an imitation of a mediocre teacher.

In my own case I have been very lucky. Saotome Sensei has no such confidence problem. So he has always supported his students in any type of training they might pursue. He does this even to the point at which their investigations might take them off on some weird tangents. He seems confident that once you work your way through the issues you'll be back on track. He has students doing Systema, Daito Ryu, Ushiro Karate, classical arts, etc. I have trained with all sorts of Aikido teachers and have been able to discuss my impressions with my teacher.

If you don't have that, I'd say do whatever training you wish anyway. You have to to get as good as you are capable of being. Now, if you find a teacher that both "has it all" and can also teach what he knows effectively, then perhaps you do not need to look elsewhere. But my own experience has been that I did not start to understand what my own teacher was doing until I trained with a number of people from outside who gave me some new perspective.

George S. Ledyard
Aikido Eastside
Bellevue, WA
Aikido Eastside
AikidoDvds.Com
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