Post date: Mar 03, 2010 5:29:43 AM
Aikido and reality. Its an interesting association. At some level most come to the aikido dojo wanting to learn skills to deal with violence, yet our practice is quite removed from "real life" violence. Sure the techniques we learn are derived from battlefield techniques practiced by the samurai but its a few centuries removed from our daily lives now and not many of as wear body armour and carry metre long razor blades around with us. Often in the dojo we practice with a simulated set of attacks, sometimes its a polite practice, as we seek the inner peace of aikido perhaps at the sacrifice of martial effectiveness and understanding.
With the higher goal of practicing the art of peace we can do a little tweaking of technique and the way we practice it we can better prepare ourselves to understand and deal with violence. We can prepare our bodies for contact, the physiological responses of our bodies, the awareness of the what and when that it is likely.
This week with the aid of pads and mits I plan to introduce some psychological and physiological stress into our practice as an exploration and if there is intrest will continue to develop it.
We have in the past been fortunate to host seminars from self defence and combat based experts through the provisions of a community crime prevention grant and I plan to gather these resources together on this site for reference