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Old 04-16-2006, 03:58 PM   #37
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Dojo: Senshin Center
Location: Dojo Address: 193 Turnpike Rd. Santa Barbara, CA.
Join Date: Feb 2002
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Re: Am i missing something??

Well Paige, I tried to make it clear on what was my opinion. I also tried to make it clear that this is not your problem - that I'm not trying to solve you. So you can stop taking things so personally. Like I said, your issue is a simple one - you have said why you have quit training several times already. One does not have to be a psychic or a robot to figure it out - though one would have to be honest and capable of reason.

Your post was a platform for other ideas here - deeper matters relevant to folks that train a bit more seriously than you can and/or decided to do. You should let it go - not hold this thread so tightly - like your Aikido. Others, including myself, as teachers, find this topic interesting, because the ranks of Aikido are made up with more folks that train like you (i.e. desire-based, hobby) than like anyone else. Moreover, others, including myself, as practitioners, know that these issues are issues for all of us - for those of us that seek to train beyond desire and deeper than the hobby level. Others, including myself, are more interested in discussing those issues relevant to deepening our practice - which is quite different from wasting energy trying to find ways of believing that desire-based Aikido (or hobby-Aikido, or Aikido-lite) can or should be able to achieve everything that a mature Aikido practice can or will.

As far as I am concerned, this is not about you Paige. Your person here is just an abstraction, an anonymous delegate for millions - for all of us. You have made your bed, now sleep in it. Hobby Aikido is good for you. It is good for me that it is good for you, or rather I could care less how you practice. I mean, please, how exactly does your practice affect my own? How would it affect mine ten years from now (should you not have moved on to another hobby by then)?

What irks us when we are stuck like you, why we thus to turn to petty insults like you have, is not what I have said about your hobby-Aikido, but rather that I do not hold that hobby-Aikido is good enough for me. You act like you do not want a blessing from me on your hobby-Aikido, but you demonstrate clearly that you do desire a blessing from me on the necessary delusions regarding hobby-Aikido. Deep down you know you are unsatisfied by your practice (hence why you are not practicing now), like any of us would be sooner or later, and the fact that there others out there that would also be dissatisfied with such a practice is threatening to you -- or you've let it become threatening to you. I cannot respect that.

What I can respect is someone that trains at the hobby level or the desire level and is TRULY fine with it -- I mean, TRULY FINE WITH IT. Someone that can say, "Man, Aikido is just a hobby for me, and that is cool. As a hobby, I don't expect it to do more than a hobby can do." We have folks that train like that at our dojo -- and they are a great part of the overall community. This is not you Paige -- you are a hobbyist, but you are not totally fine with it -- which is why you are ignorantly asking how come you are not into your hobby anymore -- as if hobbies are supposed to last for forever. I mean, how many times do you think stamp collectors feel pressed into a personal crisis for moving onto a new hobby, such that they feel motivated to ask the larger stamp collecting community: "You know, I just can't get into my stamps anymore -- not like I used to. What's up with that?"

The fact is that very very few hobbyists ever really speak AND think like they are totally fine with being a hobbyist. Usually they just speak like they are fine. Deep down most are festering in insecurity regarding the superficiality they cannot seem to move beyond. This is even more the case when one is dealing with practices, like Budo or Aikido, that ideally are not supposed to operate at the hobby level. I cannot bless a practice that has someone training at a hobby level and expects everything to be his or hers just the same, like they are training seriously (i.e. expecting hobby-level interest to not inevitably wax and wane). If you are looking for a blessing here on hobby Aikido, you will just have to keep offering insults and/or acting like you are above it all -- I guess. Serious practitioners, like the others here that have also moved beyond your personal crisis concerning the topic of the thread, are never going to give blessings to such ignorance concerning what one can and/or should expect from the various levels of training.

David M. Valadez
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