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Old 11-30-2012, 07:15 AM   #247
Marc Abrams
Dojo: Aikido Arts of Shin Budo Kai/ Bedford Hills, New York
Location: New York
Join Date: May 2006
Posts: 1,302
United_States
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Re: Is aiki a clash of forces?

Ah! Finally out of the time out room for pointing out the obvious......

This might come as a surprise to some people: Dan Harden fought against the VERY STUFF that he is now teaching. He walked away from his training for awhile because he was stuck at a crossroads. He was as closed-minded as everybody else who gets to that point in their training experiences.

You try like hell to figure out what the hell is going on and why what you are doing does not work. You are trying like hell to fit what someone is struggling to show you into your closed-minded, preconceived parameters. You are facing the "cliff of paradigm shift". You can either walk off the ledge into the unknown and discover a new world that does not fit neatly inside of what you believe are the limits of our world experiences, or you will go back to the safety and security of what you know, while discounting and denigrating where you almost went.

Suddenly you recognize that you do not have a complete paradigm of understanding under the "old ways", BUT you do need to be able to do things in a very different way. My students use to ask me to explain how the hell this stuff was working. They stopped, because all they got was the same line: "I am a student myself. A complete understanding of this is above my pay-grade. The best that I can do is to share with you the explanations and the ways of my teachers. We are all in this struggle together." The amazing thing is that this stuff works. You change in ways that leave people scratching their heads trying to figure out how you did what you just did. We struggle daily to better understand what we are doing so that we can teach it better. Anybody who has been training with Dan Harden will tell you how his teaching paradigms and methods just get better. This is a reflection of that very process!

We are left at the same precipice that we started off at. Jun sent me to the proverbial time out room simply because I pointed out the obvious- WITHOUT ATTACKING ANYONE IN PARTICULAR AND WITH A GOOD DOSE OF HUMOR- The struggle between the closed-mind and the open-mind happens inside of ALL OF US! Getting hands on with someone who can actually do this stuff is only one aspect. If you are not able to make that paradigm shift, you will not continue to do the work and you will not make the substantial changes that this very, very hard work allows you to make. People need to really get off their "high horses" and stop relying on what they think they know. If you want to genuinely change through this work, you have to let go of where you are in order to make that crucial paradigm shift.

Simply ask Dan, Ark, etc..... how many people they have taught and how many of those people have actually made that critical paradigm shift and stuck with this work. Then again, we can continue debating things from perspectives that will get you no closer to any real understanding, let alone real change. When the posts become personal, we are far beneath the level necessary to accomplish anything positive- that was why I asked that the thread be closed. A lively debate can take place with people vigorously putting forth their ideas. If those people are not open to considering something different and even changing their perspectives based upon different information, then it is not really a debate of open-minds. Just more of what we have too much of in our world.

Marc Abrams
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