Story

On the second day of the Doshu weekend there was one training in the morning and a number of demonstrations in the afternoon. Here's what happened:

On 14-15 November 2009, Doshu Ueshiba Moriteru held a seminar in the Netherlands. The event was (as far as I know) in correlation with the facts that the Netherlands commemorate the 400th anniversary of starting trade relations with Japan this year, and that Aikido has been practiced in the country for 45 years. This post is my personal report of day one of the seminar, day two will follow soon.

Before going on to relating to other people in the dojo, I would like to write about the overall process of dojo-change.
I've recently read about the steps of cultural shock (and I wrote a post about it which was lost just before submitting...), because of moving to a new country. The four steps of cultural shock are always there, and none of the steps can be skipped no matter how much you would want that. The only thing that might change is the duration of the individual stages. Before going onm here's the steps from Wikipedia:

Does aikido work in the street? What would it be like to send an aikido master out to deal with the bad guys? I'm not sure whether we will get any answers to these questions but I definitely want to watch a couple of episodes of how Steven Seagal behaves as a police officer.

Finding and settling in a new dojo is a real test. Unless you have something specific in mind, first you need to explore what options are there, then try some classes, and see if you can fit in the dojo. Then you can start training and settle down.

In an interview, when Paul Linden Sensei was asked about how someone should choose a dojo one of his points in the answer was the following: go and visit several dojos and see how people treat each other. If you want to be treated like the people there are treated (either by other students or by the sensei of the dojo) it's probably the place for you. I intended to keep this in mind when looking for a new dojo in the Netherlands.

Five years ago I had to leave my dojo because my studies took me to England. Now I'm doing the same thing again, leaving my dojo and going to another country. Before the last trainings at the dojo in Wimbledon I had been wondering if the two leaving experiences would be very similar.

A couple of days ago I was walking towards the train station after work. It was around 9pm but it was still not very dark. As I was walking I heard someone saying in a nervous-sounding voice: "Excuse me!!" It was a woman on a bycicle and she was saying this to an other woman walking just behind me. The pavement was wide, there weren't many people there walking but the bycicle woman wanted to cycle in the middle of it and anyone in her way had to get out.

In the past couple of days I have been noticing an interesting thing when I talk to some people: They don't listen. I don't want to complain about it because I'm not a perfect listener either and I kind of understand that people have some needs that need to be met; some needs that require that they can freely think what they want even if they are in a training environment and they are there to learn from the person they are talking to. By training environment, I don't really mean aikido training here, however, any kind of training environment can easily be compared to an aikido training which I hope to do towards the end of this post.

I've just found a cartoon in The Times that immediately reminded me of the harmony-control problem I think a lot about: