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Old 07-21-2011, 07:23 PM   #196
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: Open Letter to My Students

Quote:
Byron Foster wrote: View Post
Wow, this topic has stirred up more conversation than I thought it would at first. Why we practice and how we practice Aikido seems to be very personal...

I do find it amazing based on this thread and others that it is often people who no longer practice Aikido (Toby Threadgill, Ellis Amdur, Dan Harden) can have the most insightful comments regarding the state of Aikido being practiced today. Do you have to be outside the system to see the system?
I think there are a number of points of view, obviously. There are certainly there are the folks that feel "it's all good" and there is no problem to be fixed. Everyone knows Aikido is changing, the whole world is changing. so Aikido will inevitably change with it. They are happy with going along with that change.

But amongst the folks that started Aikido "back in the day" it w3as presented as a certain thing... that's why we started training. Over time as folks poured themselves into their training, the started questioning as to whether Aikido was delivering on its promise. Folks were exposed to other martial systems, looked at what they felt they were getting out of their art and the group split into two. There were the folks that left... the vast majority of the koryu folks started in Aikido or trained seriously at some point. They left because they perceived problems with our art and felt that the koryu training either delivered something that most Aikido training did not or that it had less dysfunction than the koryu they had encountered. This continues to this day. There are a really significant number oif Systema folks who left Aikido because Systema delivered what Aikido had only promised.

There are a number of us that, while not in disagreement with these folks about the issues, have chosen to stay within Aikido hoping to help the art deliver in its promise. Of the koryu folks, the only one I am familiar with is Larry Biery Sensei who teaches in Ithaca, NY. He started training in koryu back in the day along with the other big names of American koryu, but he never quit Aikido. While I have not trained at his dojo, I would suspect that what he does with his Aikido would have a quite different "content" than the Aikido we often find problematical.

I think we have a great gift to be practicing at the first time in history when circumstances have made information exchange possible on a scale never ever dreamt of in the past. I really think that the information and the instruction is available to make Aikido what it always should have been, what it certainly was for the Founder. It isn't a koryu nor is it a "fighting" style. But it can have all of the elements that folks found so satisfying in these other styles. It will certainly be an Aikido-ized version but it can be something that folks from other arts find respectable rather than failing toi live up with its promise. If we can do that for our art, perhaps the exodus of our "best and the brightest" so to speak, will stop and we'll get back to the place at which highly experienced folks from other martial arts come to Aikido to train.

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