From WGUNTHER@UTMEM1.UTMEM.EDU Wed May 27 11:52:59 1998
Date: Tue, 26 May 1998 11:47:16 -0500
From: Wendy Gunther
Reply-To: Aikido List
To: AIKIDO-L@LISTS.PSU.EDU
Subject: seminar review serious
Dear Listka,
It rocked, it rolled, it kicked ass. It was glorious and gleeful and
astonishing. I have not been thrown out of a party by the police since I was a
teenager. I kept imagining it on my resume.
Yes, we all would have said we had no mental image of the writers of many
posts, and yes, everybody we saw confounded our mental images that we were not
aware we had.
The biggest thing I saw was that everyone was doing aikido. No kidding,
sometimes we in the various ryus begin to think that we have the One True
Aikido *TM*, and everyone else has fallen from the Way. Tell you something,
folks, we all are practicing the Way. Everyone is doing the One True Aikido.
It's like coming from a little tiny Baptist church in Sioux Falls to the
Vatican, and realizing that, against everything your local teachers ever told
you, the Catholics are Christians too. That means the Church is a mighty big
tent. Well, I'll tell you, Aikido is a mighty big tent. Iwama fits in it, and
Yoshinkan, and the Jiyushinkai, and the Aikikai, and the Ki Society. We are
ALL doing the same thing (or we're all trying to) and the Art is a whole lot
bigger than I ever realized. Nor is it in danger of dying out. I know, I know,
there are a lot of dojos out there where the form is taught without content. I
think the Art is always dying out and always being reborn somewhere. It sure
as hell was alive on the TASA mat. I know five different ryus now where it
sure as hell is alive and being taught.
Jim of the wolves had a Deep Thought on the 760 mile drive home. (I think
Chuck Clark sensei beat me out with his 1000 miles, unless that's round trip,
in which case my ass is stiffer than yours, Chuck.) Clearly, George Simcox and
Chuck Clark are both doing aikido. But they teach it very differently. Could
it be that our major disagreements are really on the best way to teach aikido?
Here's my own Deep Thought, born of listening to too many old Broadway
albums on the way. There's something some people have at some time in their
lives that for convenience I will call a Transforming Experience. You get it,
and the world changes for you forever, so that you can never look at life
through the same eyes again. The rank order of importance of things changes
drastically, and following it you change your whole way of life so much that
other people say you seem like a different person. Not saying whether said
experience is "real", just that it changes the way you behave. For St.
Francis, it was religious. For some New Agers, it comes through that stuff. In
all the old Broadways, it comes through falling in love. "All the beauty of
life seems to be / Like a bell that is ringing for me; And from the way that I
feel when that bell starts to peal, I could swear I was falling in love"
(Brigadoon, Rogers and Hammerstein). Well, I think that when you get up the
side of that twelve-year-high mountain, not O Sensei's peak but the littler
aikido peak that allows you real yudansha out there to "get" iriminage and to
see in sudden insight that the principle under all the techniques is the same,
you have a Transforming Experience. Here's my deep thought: Real Aikido is a
Transforming Experience.
Well, no wonder we have a hard time agreeing how to teach it. Transforming
Experiences are notoriously difficult to teach because they don't go into
words. Imagine trying to train people to fall in love. "You'll hear this bell
pealing when you've got it..."
Got to go to a meeting, when I come back will do my second seminar review,
which will focus on all the stuff OFF the mat that was SO FUN.
Did I say Mike Bartman is really tall?
Wendy
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