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Old 09-29-2002, 10:00 AM   #1
Jermaine Alley
Dojo: Aikido Of Richmond
Location: Richmond, VA
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Is "Loving Protection of all" Practical for Today?

Is "Loving Protection of All" practical for todays street encounters?
I think that we budoka are merely practing theories. We are practicing a particular "theory" of cleverly designed techniques/systems that deal with a serious of different attacks (physical or mental).
Can we afford to think that "loving & protecting" this "attacker" is going to guarantee my safe passage all of the time in every situation?
Are some systems of Aikido incorporating a "false sense of security" for todays' situations? Are we being TOO DAMN NICE?

A Quick reply to my own question..No i don't think that i have a false sense of security at all, but I can't allow "loving protection" to enter my mind when i have to defend myself until after a confrontation is over....tryin to keep it short....more to this after some of your responses...
jermaine
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Old 09-29-2002, 10:10 AM   #2
mike lee
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to be realistic or idealistic?

"Loving protection" continues right up until the moment he makes his move -- then things should shift into survival mode. When he has a change of heart, it's back to "loving protection."

That's the best I can do at my current skill level. If someone can do better, I bow to them.

But for the long run, I don't fill my brain with a lot of "what if" scenarios. I barely have enough brain cells to cope with the day-to-day problems at hand.

Generally, I think people that walk around with a "loving-protection" attitude come off as being false. They often end up being the first ones to lose their cool when the chips are down and tensions get high.

For me, if I can just be straight-forward and sincere, that's good enough. I always respect a guy who's straight and trustworthy. Plus, a guy like that is ususally very clear and hard to fool.

Last edited by mike lee : 09-29-2002 at 10:22 AM.
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Old 09-29-2002, 10:30 AM   #3
mike lee
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"Loving protection" continues right up until the moment he makes his move -- then things should shift into survival mode. When he has a change of heart, it's back to "loving protection."

That's the best I can do at my current skill level. If someone can do better, I bow to them.

But for the long run, I don't fill my brain with a lot of "what if" scenarios. I barely have enough brain cells left to cope with the day-to-day problems at hand.

Generally, I think that people who walk around with a "loving-protection" attitude come off as being false. They often end up being the first ones to lose their cool when the chips are down and tensions get high.

For me, if I can just be straight-forward and sincere, that's good enough. I always respect a guy who's straight and trustworthy. Plus, a guy like that is ususally very clear and hard to fool.

I've got this one student who's very talented, but recently he's acting like he cares too much when he does waza. It's killing his technique because he always stops the flow, because he thinks that shows he's being careful. It's a big mistake. He won't be able to progress much further until he overcomes this illusion. One can care — but being overly careful can end up creating more probelms than it solves.

Last edited by mike lee : 09-29-2002 at 10:36 AM.
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Old 09-29-2002, 10:39 AM   #4
Jermaine Alley
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Mike,

good point.

At I often get kind of miffed when some people in my class forget about "survival". Everyone ponders about what will happen in a street situation, but have never been in the first confrontation to know. To experience that adrenaline that just takes off as soon as a "threat" presents itself.

I have been in a few fights before being a cop and after being a cop. I have lost a few, and come out of a few on top to a certain extent.

When i teach a class, I stress that "loving protection" is part of the history of our system, but that needs to be put aside when you think about your own lively hood.

"Coming home alive" is the most important phrase that exists among folks that put themselves in harms way as a job. Sometimes I think the phrase needs to be right next to "loving protection".

thanks for the reply...
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Old 09-29-2002, 10:51 AM   #5
mike lee
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I don't think it's really very practical to be going around thinking about philosophy. It clouds awareness.

For me, the No. 1 rule in the dojo, and the street, and in most other places (even when I'm sound asleep) is awareness. For me, this is the cardnal rule of survival.
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Old 09-29-2002, 01:00 PM   #6
daedalus
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Loving protection is wonderful, but I'm no where near the level where I can physcially pull it off in a real situation. The most I can hope for is for everyone to survive, but my survival takes precedence over whoever happens to be attacking.

There is also something to be said about disabling and physically harming an attacker as being loving protection. Follow me on this: what is more damaging, a broken wrist and concussion or life in prison for killing someone? Drunken groups of college guys (something common by me) like to go around and pick fights. It wouldn't be much of a stretch for one group to go too far and kill someone out of drunken rage and stupidity. I personally feel that in a situation such as that, some bruises and broken bones would be a gift to the attackers when imprisonment would be the other option, thus making their injuries loving protection. Let's hear it for the moral high ground of causing injury! ;^)

Brian
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http://www.shinjinkai.org/
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Old 09-30-2002, 09:48 AM   #7
aikigreg
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Don't forget loving protection means protection of self as well. I try very hard to keep this attitude. This is how I felt before I ever knew what Aikido was, which meant that when the fight was over I didn't kill the guy lying helpless on the ground.

What that means now I'm not sure - I'll write that page when I come to it. I don't believe it means giving up the innate sense of self-preservation or to welcome death so that your attacker may live.
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Old 09-30-2002, 02:12 PM   #8
Bruce Baker
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Reality of Loving Protection

There is a duality of Loving protection, something like I love and protect my children, but if they get out of line they are punished, and if you touch them I will rip out your heart and jam it up you @$$! You get the idea.

Remaining calm, with the clear mind that is not angry, not seeking to hurt anyone ... well ... it gives you the advantage to inflict pain for the sake of need and not for the sake of anger, vengence, or a whole host of emotions that eat away at you.

No attutude, loving protection, and the ability to let act without emotions that will cloud your judgement when restaining or protecting yourself or others.

I wouldn't put "Loving Protection" into the category of not doing what is needed to be done, but being able to see more clearly when enough is enough.

Or, when my partner cranks too hard, I ask for a little less loving ... please.
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Old 10-01-2002, 02:47 AM   #9
mike lee
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let there be no doubt

To everything, there is a time, and a place, and a season.

A time to laugh and a time to cry.

A time to embrace and a time to refrain from embracing.

A time for peace and a time for war.

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Old 10-01-2002, 08:01 AM   #10
Paula Lydon
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~~I think loving protection is akin to compassion, and I make a distinction between what I term 'realistic' compassion--seeing and dealing with the reality of a person/situation compassionately--and the present day sugary, fluffly crap that passes for compassion.

~~Let's say there are two people coming down a street, yourself and another behind you. A man attacks you and you only break his arm (you could have done much worse), thus sending him on his way home or to hospital. So what's my point? The person behind you, who would have been attacked next, had a gun...

~~Who is to know? We cannot judge by circumstances. Do the least violence, without anger or fear, but if you happen to break an arm maybe it's just what's needed in that moment by a 'loving protection' greater than your own.

~~Paula~~
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Old 10-01-2002, 10:33 AM   #11
opherdonchin
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Quote:
Jermaine Alley wrote:
Can we afford to think that "loving & protecting" this "attacker" is going to guarantee my safe passage all of the time in every situation?
I haven't been in a fight since my teens, but I can give you my thoughts on the matter.

At the simplest level, I think of 'loving protection' as being similar to relaxation and not using force: it's a good idea because it's effective. I have seen regularly and often that the more compassion and caring I can bring to a situation without losing my own center and balance (in the dojo or outside of it), the more effective I will be. This has been especially true for AiKiDo techniques, but once I started noticing it there, I started noticing it other places as well. Think about the beginner on their first day who feels like they need to muscle an irimi-nage in order to make a person fall, and you will see how I think of the places where I fail to find the feeling of 'loving protection.' It's just an example of me getting in my own way and preventing myself from being effective.

Of course, like with the relaxation and the no force, the actual message goes deeper than questions of effectiveness. The ultimate message has something to do with an awareness of my own tendency to perceive things as conflicts and my own failures to to be appropriately harmonized with a situation ahead of time. I'm not going to go around beating myself up about those failures (well, yes I am, but you know what I mean), but by seeing how effective relaxation, no force, or loving protection can be, I think I'm given an opportunity to question my habitual attitudes of forcing things and feeling threatened and feeling a need to overcome others or protect myself. That doesn't mean I'm going to have all the answers; it just means that I've got a few more questions.

Yours in Aiki
Opher
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Old 10-01-2002, 12:25 PM   #12
kung fu hamster
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Loving protection is what we aim for but it can be argued that sometimes it's for the greater good of the majority that one ‘uses the sword'. Paraphrasing a program on snipers who trained at Thunder Ridge, one reporter asked a law enforcement sniper "You intensely train for years to aim from a great distance at a small target the size of a football (man's head/brain area), and you've been called to duty many times to use your skill in situations such as hostage taking where the victim is displayed with a weapon to their head, does it ever cross your mind as you squeeze the trigger that you are taking a life and does that disturb you?" The sniper replied simply, "No, I don't think of it as taking a life, I think of it as saving a life." Yes, the aiki thing to do is keep ‘loving protection' in mind when confronted by a situation fraught with conflict potential, sometimes it's all you can do is keep from being sucked into the violence of the other someone else's vortex.
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Old 10-19-2002, 07:29 PM   #13
Pretoriano
 
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"What?, compassion? that is gonna take you to the grave... exactly thats how talks someone who ignore what Loving Protection for all Is"

SK.

Loving Protection for all is when you realized by Direct Experience that isolation is not posible, Every thing is interconected and in direct or indirect relation, of course LP is an step further than compassion.
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Old 10-19-2002, 08:13 PM   #14
ChristianBoddum
 
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Hi there !

This thread is a little disturbing,

it seems like you want the techniques but not

not to bring the love into your beings.

What I meen is that love is not a fickle feeling,is is a force to be reckoned with,

a force so strong and determining that O'sensei changed the classic techniques to

enter it's ultimate form - an expression of love. We work so hard to learn to extend because all extension protects us more - when our natural body tells us to contract and in reality be unprotected.

So what O'sensei discovered,developed and passed on should be taken more seriously from my point of wiew,or else I can't see the future of aikido as passed on to us by O'sensei.

I had to say this,please try get me right.

yours - Chr.B.
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Old 10-20-2002, 03:11 AM   #15
shihonage
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Re: Is "Loving Protection of all" Practical for Today?

"Loving protection" is something reserved for a drunk uncle who's got out of hand at a party.

And even then, MAYBE.

I suspect that those who post lengthy paragraphs about "loving protection", are the people who's never been attacked in their life.

I still don't understand how such people still exist in this day and age, but apparently they do.
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Old 10-20-2002, 07:26 AM   #16
mike lee
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Evil Eyes choose your path carefully

The road to hell is wide.

But,

The Way of Aiki is one of the divine techniques

To which only a narrow gate does lead.


Last edited by mike lee : 10-20-2002 at 07:32 AM.
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Old 10-20-2002, 04:28 PM   #17
opherdonchin
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Quote:
Aleskey wrote:
I suspect that those who post lengthy paragraphs about "loving protection", are the people who's never been attacked in their life.
Yup. Guilty as charged. At least I haven't been attacked physically with an earnest intent to harm or kill me since elementary school. I like to chalk that up to my credit, actually.

Knowing how not to get attacked seems like one of the principle skills a person can learn in life. Honest love for others (without any notion of self-sacrifice implied) is, in my view one of the best ways of doing this.

Yours in Aiki
Opher
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Old 10-21-2002, 01:43 AM   #18
Ali B
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I am a person who has been attacked and also protected others whilst they were being attacked but I have to agree that we have to practice with love in our hearts and not only in the dojo.

I was was taught that a real master is someone who takes the negative in the universe and makes it positive. Loving protection can save your life. It is a much more realistic approach that anger, vengence, hatred, which is where the attacker is coming from.

I donīt live in a violent society, my ideals probably reflect that. If I lived in a place where I felt my life was under threat walking home at night, then maybe things would be different but isnīt aikido the Way of Harmony? or, The Way of Peace?

Love and Light

Ali
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Old 10-21-2002, 05:39 AM   #19
Bruce Baker
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The fact that we have people who have never been attacked is a testament to either rooting out the bad elements of our society, or the structual protection of certain segments of our society due to education, income, population, and structual law enforcement in particular communities.

The protection of the innocent by those who are not so innocent.

Maybe having half of your acquaintences go through AA, go to jail, or become the same low income social failures that their parents were, barely staying off of welfare, is enough to awaken the mind to the fact that the innocent geeks have begun to rule the world, gain the better income, and although some of them failed, most of them have a pretty good life.

Violent society?

Depends how many guardian angels lurk in the crowd.

Long replys by those who never been attacked?

Sorry, I have been attacked enough times to know what it is like, and stood between harms way enough to know what it is like.

The best way to measure the way of peace is to measure the length of happiness a family enjoys over hundreds of years, and if each generation was able to cope with the problems of the day?

As complicated as that may be, that is the measured way to define each generations 'Way of Harmony', or find the 'Way of Peace' for what is today.

As a sidebar ... Maybe wisdom does come with age, and that is why when someone is declared to be a "shihan" before age sixty there is always a hollow validity to being called shihan.

Being a teacher of teachers may not be applicable to this post, but then again we all try to balance the positive and negative energy that drives our emotions, and we are all human, aren't we?
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Old 10-21-2002, 08:04 AM   #20
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The fact that loving isn't pratical or normal in our society gives greater emphasis to us training and expressing it.

Until again,

Lynn

BTW: Yep, been there and done that and expressed all my loving protection to those I was protecting.

Lynn Seiser PhD
Yondan Aikido & FMA/JKD
We do not rise to the level of our expectations, but fall to the level of our training. Train well. KWATZ!
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Old 10-21-2002, 11:32 AM   #21
shihonage
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Quote:
Lynn Seiser (SeiserL) wrote:
BTW: Yep, been there and done that and expressed all my loving protection to those I was protecting.
Would you care to elaborate ?

I'd really like to know what lies behind that bold statement.

Last edited by shihonage : 10-21-2002 at 11:37 AM.
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Old 10-21-2002, 08:46 PM   #22
SeiserL
 
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Quote:
Aleksey S (shihonage) wrote:
Would you care to elaborate? I'd really like to know what lies behind that bold statement.
U.S. Army Recon/Foward Observer/Military Intelligence 1972-1974

Lynn Seiser PhD
Yondan Aikido & FMA/JKD
We do not rise to the level of our expectations, but fall to the level of our training. Train well. KWATZ!
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Old 10-22-2002, 12:29 AM   #23
shihonage
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Quote:
Lynn Seiser (SeiserL) wrote:
U.S. Army Recon/Foward Observer/Military Intelligence 1972-1974
Please describe a situation where you were attacked by something more serious than a drunk uncle, and you used the "loving protection" .

I'm very curious.
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Old 10-22-2002, 04:37 AM   #24
ian
 
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I can't believe you fellas!

Surely those of you with military experience would agree that violence is always a short term solution. An instructor recently said something to me which sounds quite simple, but is quite profound (though not entirely true); "you can't change anyone".

I think his point was, try to use force and people only resent you for it. You may beat them down, but they'll spend the rest of their time plotting revenge.

I have been in several real fights, one involving a knife, and at no point was my objective to damage or kill the aggressor. Yes, I did strike several of the aggressors, but not to severely injure them. In all cases both myself and the aggressor only came away with scratches and bruises. There are times when more extreme measures need to be taken, but training in aikido increasingly reduces these occurances. When Ueshiba challenged a navy officer to attack him with a sword, he didn't break his arm, in fact he didn't even do a technique; he just avoided getting hit.

I feel that if we focus too much on trying to attack someone we'll get pulled into confrontations because we don't give ourselves the option of escape. To me aikido is a physical expression of showing the futility of aggression - this cannot be achieved by breaking limbs or killing people.

Ian

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Old 10-22-2002, 04:41 AM   #25
ian
 
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I'd hate to get political, but I do hate this attitude of protecting 'loved ones'. Are all your actions based around making sure that you're O.K. regardless of how everyone else is? Is there no understanding of Ueshibas phrase 'I am the universe'?

Ian

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