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Old 06-24-2010, 07:47 AM   #97
chillzATL
Location: ATL
Join Date: Jul 2000
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Re: Ki Aikido - quote from Gleason Sensei

Quote:
Christian Moses wrote: View Post
Obviously not Dan, but my own experience isn't that you're trying to shut people down just to be a dick, but that when you have some frame/IP/whatever and you're used to working with people who also have some frame/IP/whatever and you train with someone who simply doesn't have any and isn't used to working with people who do, they just never actually affect you. It's like they just kind of orbit around you at the point of contact, but there's no impetus to move or be thrown or anything. Conversely, when you go to affect them, there's so little structure behind them, that they simply fold or fall before you feel like you've gotten to do *anything*.

If my partner doesn't have any meaningful frame, I can't tell them how to do a technique against me. All I can do to help them is walk them over to the wall and start developing some frame, thus the solo work.
Hi Christian,

I understand what you're saying and wasn't asking from how does it feel perspective, I was just commenting on Dan's post about people not being sure how they fit in when they have these body skills and also how reluctant they are to give them up in the typically dojo setting with people who don't have them.

My point was that dialing back your ability to shut someone down or be moved by them is exactly the problem Ueshiba seemed to address with both the training methodology and a lot of the philosophy behind his art. If your art is a way to develop aiki (aiki.do to steal Dans term) then you're either going to have to segment your training classes based on skill or you're going to have to expect more skilled people to give in and let the un/less-skilled work through these things until they start getting some skills of their own. So I just don't understand how people who are getting these skills feel so out of place UNLESS they're in a situation where they simply can't offer any suggestions or advice and anything the might offer would be so far in left field from the wya things are already explained that if it were overheard by the head instructor there, it would get them in trouble. That environment is foriegn to me, but I know that it does exist. It just seems that "this stuff" fits so well with the general nature of what aikido is supposd to be (as it should) that I think you'd have to be pretty divergent in your ways of explaining things to not be able to subtly pass along some good advice to people that would help their training and possibly get them on the right track (albeit slowly), even if they knew nothing of solo exercises and the like. Granted I'm a noob, but even in my mega-noobness I started seeing the common ground almost immediately.
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