Quote:
Daniel Rozenbaum wrote:
Thank you for this important discussion, George Sensei.
Judging from the events schedule at Aikido Eastside, there's a weekend seminar almost every month at your dojo, sometimes even two times a month, always with outstanding instructors. This being the Seattle area, there are other great seminars that take place at other local dojos throughout the year. It's a great problem to have for a dedicated Aikido student, but could it be that a substantial part of it is that practitioners in your area simply have to make some hard choices as to which seminars to attend?
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This is certainly the case... and the other dojos do not have more "serious" students than I do. I have had several conversations wit my friends who run dojos and their experience does not really differ from mine in that it seems very difficult these days to find folks who can / will train as we trained when we wee young.
Now that may be the central issue. It is young people who typically can train like maniacs. They may not be married, typically do not have kids, mortgages, huge insurance, and blah, blah, blah so they can devote themselves to building that solid foundation that carries them through the later stages of their lives when perhaps they can't train six or seven hours a day.
If you have a situation as we do now, when people begin their training already in mid-career, with relationships and families and all that entails, well they never get the chance to put in the time and effort that we did. I think this has serious implications for the art.
In my own case, I understand that all of the local dojos hold their own events and their students pretty much feel that's their limit. I have developed overlapping communities which support our events. The Aiki / Internal Power work has a core of folks from my dojo which is augmented by out of town folks fro Eastern Washington and Oregon. Collectively, we can bring Dan Harden and Howard Popkin Senseis out three times each a year. The seminars barely break even but since they are about my own training as well as everyone else's I just need it to be close enough that I don't have much out of pocket.
Because of the plethora of Aikido in my area, and the fact that most folks tend not to train outside their own group, I need my students to really step up and support the Aikido seminars we hold which are three in number. I can't afford to subsidize these events out of my own pocket nor should I have to do so. The number of students I have training at the dojo is fully sufficient to support our events in-house and any folks who coe from outside are just gravy.
I treat my dojo as a resource for the larger Aikido community. Ihold one seminar each summer in which I invite teachers whom I know but are perhaps less well known around. I want to support American teachers of Aikido and I use that seminar to give people exposure. These are top level folks. Yet I'll turn away people when I have Ikeda Sensei and worry about whether we'll break even when it's a non-Japanese teacher. That's even true when it's Gleason Sensei in the Fall.
Anyway, it is what it is and I am absolutely cognizant of the fact that we are pushing the envelope in terms of what we can support. The larger community is starting to realize what we have going on and in many cases I am more likely to have someone jump on a plane and attend one of our events than I am have someone from another local dojo attend. I think that's fairly ironic but it is what it is.