harmony

A couple of days ago, when I was writing the address of my dojo's website onto the pavement with chalk (with the aim of drawing attention to martial arts, especially to aikido), a little kid was coming by with his mother. As he saw what I was doing he asked his mother what I was writing there. After having received the answer from her, he immediately asked her mother "What is aikido?" I was curious about what people not doing martial arts might know about aikido so I waited patiently until the woman said something.

I have some sort of confusion about our martial art when it comes to the concepts of harmony, control, centre, and so on. Connor has already made some comparisons between aikido and other martial arts (see his self-defence post series,[1] [2] [3] [4]), and there he discussed which one is 'better' than the other, which one works better against one another. In this post, I compare aikido to other martial arts in the sense how selfish they are/appear. By writing my thoughts down, I hope to organise my thoughts and share them with you in order to give you some interesting ideas, and to receive some feedback (by the way, all these aims are selfish).

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.

I have been getting questions recently about the applicability of aikido in self defence situations. How effective are the techniques of aikido as self defence techniques?

Before going into the details of the techniques and their effectiveness, however, let us examine the ways self defence can manifest itself.

Objectification is something that people have investigated recently in a scientific way, and Zolley has also written a post about it in connection with a recent scientific study. The following paragrapsh contain my own personal thoughts about the issue of objectification.

As I teach aikido to children I often think about teaching methods. Kids' attention (in addition to respect) has to be earned as they are not as patient as adults who come to training and can listen to whatever sensei says even if he talks for an hour (he does not, btw). Kids can't practice iriminage for 10 minutes, they get bored after 2. So I need to find what is effective, what is useful, what is fun. Although I don't teach adults regularly, kids' classes and adults' classes I train in give me some idea about how I should teach children, and how I should teach adults when I get to that situation some time. The following paragraphs describe two basic methods/approaches to get to the state of 'perfect' aikido.

In a recent article in The Times, the Prince of Wales writes about Harmony with nature. He also defines what harmony means in this context, and I think the whole article can be interesting to people who do aikido. As I understand, Charles talks about harmony in a similar way as O'Sensei talked about "harmony with the Universe".

A couple of weeks ago I attended a series of seminars which were about the psychology of investing money, tips to build businesses and the key to being successful. I know, it sounds a bit strange to mention financial topics, entrepreneurship and the key to success in an aikido blog but I hope that, by the end of this post, you will understand why I mention them here.

In one of my recent trainings, a frequently occurring question/problem has come up. This problem usually occurs with beginner students: when they are practicing, as uke they want to resist the defenders movement, they want to stop them from executing a technique.