Burning the Clutch for the Blonde( OKIE Walk Ramble # 1)

My take is that walk doesn't represent specific techniques.  Not in a way that you can watch a karate kata and know that you are definitely seeing a punch.  Tomiki never exactly wrote down what the walking kata was supposed to do for you.  But you know that it is supposed to do something for you, and hopefully something beneficial.

You can see a definite progression of ideas in what we do.  The walking kata is about you and gravity.  Its about using your own balance, posture, and center as a weapon.  Your maintenance of these three things in relation to what another guy wants to do to your center provides the energy that makes things work.   The walking has a deep relation with two manned exercises we call the releases. Or it could be the first 14 moves of Yon kata, or the old sotai dosa. That's how the progression goes: a relationship between you and the pull of the ground. Then you add another person who wants to break your relationship with the ground. You take this energy and ride it out. Somewhere in this ride there is a all encompassing maintenence of posture, and balance, and center. This is where techniques start cropping up like wild onions. 

Mentally, you should be hungry like a wolf .  You ate a little for breakfast, but not enough to make it til noon and you have two bucks.  See the world as things that push on you, pull on you, and things that make you stay still.  Your feet move you in relation to how things pull and push on you.

Its all about the feet.

That Aikido dude George Ledyard talks about Burning the Clutch.  I like how that sounds, even though I don't use the phrase the same way he does.   Burning the clutch is putting your weight on the balls of your feet to the extent that you can slide that proverbial piece of rice paper between your heel and floor.

The spirit of prewar aikido is in koryu dai ichi.  That first move where you provoke a movement out of the other guy.  You pick up this movement somewhere along its course.  Your point of contact tells you what the guy is doing, whether you keep going or veer off, or turn.  You are always burning the clutch, going in a straight line down the road until the road forks,  There is something in the way on one fork so you take the other.   Movement in the walking is about going straight and taking forks.   

Don't treat the kata like a shinto ritual. Mix it up and play with it.  I like to use my hands some on the first three steps.  This helps me find my center.  When I say center, I'm talking about what Yang Jwing Ming calls the true center which is a point outside my body.   Put your feet in clutch burning mode, then place both hands about the level of your belt, slowly extend them outward until you feel yourself about to tip over your toes.  If you went further you'd have to step or faceplant.  If you step you keep that outside center out there where it belongs.  If you don's step then it disappears and so does your balance. Forward motion is the first fork.

Now put your hands in that center and clasp your hands and draw your hands back to your your belt knot, until you feel your heels start to sink down.(you should have been in clutch burning mode to feel this.)That feeling you get is that outside center, connecting with your inside center.  This what the hakama folks call connection.  You take the guys outside center, and put it into his body.  But as far as the walking kata goes your feet should move into a backwards stepping before your outside center touches your inside center.  Backwards motion is the second fork

                                                                          As far as posture goes always point your shoulders and hips the same direction.  Make sure your shoulders up is in good shape.  Most of us suffer from rounded shoulders, it comes from living the modern beat down life that we do.  Its just not a set up straight and tall thing.  Its a shortened muscle thing that may take a couple of years to correct.  You tube rounded shoulders and you'll see what I mean.

Posture is really metsuke.  That eye contact thing.  When you have your shoulders and hips facing the same way that is the same as looking at something.  Most folks turn their head one way, hips another, and shoulders another. This is a physical manifestation of distraction.   You are leaving the room through the north trying to get to work on time, a good looking blonde enters the east, and a pizza delivery guy comes from the west all within a few seconds of each other.  Your hips may be facing one way, the shoulders another, and maybe the eyes another.  Always listen to your hips, before your shoulders and eyes. 

Watch the Aikido between Mr. Hand and Spicoli.   Notice how Spicoli's posture alone threw Mr. Hand into offbalance and how his posture is superior to all other students in the class.  Notice how Mr. Hands posture is initially broken, but how he skillfully reacquired his posture.  The lesson of  The walking kata is that you will get your posture broken, but when you reacquire it, or maintain it, you create situations where you can win.  

In budo, the hips and shoulders always face the one object of attention.  The thing that threatens the true center. Multitasking is for dead men.  If your hips face or turn from the blonde, that's whats on your mind.  Or it could be the pizza, or work.  The hips always reflect the mind.  Not wanting to pay attention to the blonde, is the same thing as paying attention to the blonde.  It's a zen thing, 

Pretend something pulls you and threatens to take away your outside center.  Then you drop step into the pull.Try doing the forward walking steps on your tip toes with your heels raised high. Extend or contract your hands and drop as you feel your center being messed with.  Then dial it down til you get to that sheet of paper, clutch burning mode.

The walking is about your mind.  How it affects your posture, and balance, and center.   Aikido is about how your superior maintence of these factors lead to situations to where you can dump the other guy in a hole of his own making.  Understand the zen riddle of being both Spicoli and Mr.Hand at the same time, and you understand the walking.       

Body intelligence and Motion.

I'm going to jump into Morty Youshiba country here.  He's the guy everybody tries to figure out, even though he's dead and gone. So I might as well be writing about George Washington, here. But since Morty is a modern guy, a lot of people documented what the guy could do and say, and at least 10% of them aren't full of shit.

It seems Morty had that shinto back to nature mentality.  If morty took a learning style test he would probably rate high in the naturalist intelligence category and the body-kinesthetic category.  He also would have rated high in the math intelligence category because he went to a math school where they calculated things on that abacus contraption.  Young morty almost took a job being the tax man because of his math skills.  He learned math through the fingers, through the body, by whizzing those little disks around, which goes back to his body-kinesthetic intelligence.  He got the feel for numbers.

 A number on an abacus has a definite shape, feel, and time and space signature. subtraction had a feel. addition had a feel.  In fact, he attributed his quick thinking/reflexes to his school work, not to his martial training.  ( but you don't see a lot of people down at the aikikai dojo doing abacus work after bowing to their 19.95 framed picture of morty. )

My point here, to give focus to my rambling, is that there are several intelligences, or what they call learning styles.  My take is that they are all environmentally based, and that the only real intelligence, is what they call body-kinesthetic. That's seeing the world in terms of movement, our own movement relative to everything else that moves. Its a learn by feel.  We are born with it, and either develop it or we don't.

Cave men were this intelligence.

Probably sometime in here between fire and counting we developed a interpersonal intelligence.  We learned to work together, not piss people off, and go with the flow.

 Then some of em developed the naturalist intelligence.  This is seeing the world as a whole, and everything is related to every thing else, and dependent on everything else.  Morty used to say that body, the inner world, was just a smaller model of the outer world.

Coming in close to naturalist, is the visual spacial intelligence, mapping, modeling, figuring out where you are in space relative to everything else.

There are other intelligences out there, that we developed.  One of the latest on the scene is verbal-word based intelligences.  You can get a lot out of reading shit, and explaining shit. Its all evaluation and judgement, and do this, don't do that.  The modern school system trains this intelligence over everything else. People leave school and think they know something, and usually by the time they hit their thirties they figure out that they dont.

The ones who don't get to this point are called assholes.

 Much of martial arts training is leaving the verbal based intelligence behind, or at least at the door in your shoes.

But it always shows back up, it drifts out of the shoes and on to the mat.

On a mess up, miscue, instead of another shot,or twelve, at it.  A guy stops everything and trys to explain what you did wrong, or rationalize why they moved the way they did.  The real benefit of the martial arts is understanding the limitation of this kind of intelligence.  There are things that can be felt, and not explained, or labeled.  And sometime the label screws everything up for a long damn time.  Like the word, "throw."  Or, "aiki."

 Anyway, let's look at the math angle here

 Why in the hell did ancient man back in the cradle of civilization days go from not counting jackshit to counting things in base sixty?  Don't you figure they would have counted fingers and toes?  Why the jump to sixty? Why sixty minutes in an hour?  360 degrees in a damned circle?  Ask any math teacher, or google it, you'll get a math teachers explanation. you'll get it filtered through a mathmatical/verbal intelligence.  We take their explanations as the truth because society has deemed folks who can do math as smart.  But it doesn't satisfy the original question: how did folks one step away from living in cave make that leap to sixty?


 Look at your hand.  Flex your fingers.  Look at it in terms of motion and how it moves.  Look at the joints.   You have three moveable joints on each finger and thumb.   count em and you got 15.  People used to relate to the world in terms of motion, not as a series of objects, or material.  They counted the things on their hand that moved.  Count the moving parts on both hands you get 30.

Counting by the fingers, to ten, is seeing objects.  Not motion.  

Look at the sky long enough and you'll see that joints in your hand closely reflect the motion of the moon from going to full and empty (28 days).  30 days in a month, right?  probably just a coincidence, right?  

stick your  right hand out in front(say facing north) of you level with your shoulder,  move it right, in hand spans till you reach "90 degrees" (or pointing east)   now count your  finger joints in each hand span position.  you'll get pretty close to 90.  go in a circle you'll get 360.  look at how things move in the sky and you'll get that 360 approximates a year.

You have four limbs. And there are four cardinal directions.  north, south, east, west.   

The human body is linked to the outer world of movement.  People figured that shit out while they were living in caves.  Counting to sixty was as easy as turning over your hands. Four hands in an hour, right?  

I bring this up because math teachers haven't figured it out.  They haven't rediscovered the obvious.  They see knowledge is an object.  That is what they are good at.   Just know that there are 360 degrees in a circle.  You don't need to know why. If you stop your brain and wonder why you get behind and have homework.  The kids that can get all their math done in class are geniuses right?

Memorize it and make it an object that only relates to itself and applies only to human communication. You enter the realm of understanding what the boss wants and getting it for him quicker than anything else.  It manifests itself as the belt/ranking system. 

Objectified knowledge makes more money, and builds a better microwave burrito, but that's about it.  If you like money, then making the world into objects, and machines, and the notion of building more machines to solve the the world's problems lets you sleep at night.

Its a lot easier way to live than changing your relationship to the problem.   When you see the world and people as objects, then you can keep on doing what you are doing, you can poison the ground water to turn a buck, because somewhere somebody is going to make a machine to clean up the mess.

Company policy is just a way to turn a human into a machine. That machine can be C3P0 or it can be a Terminator.  Beware of the man who sees company policy and religion as the same thing, because this system builds terminators.  

 Anyway, I have written about how what we really do is separated judo.  It isnt Aikido.  The mental objects line up with aikido.  But the understanding of motion doesn't.  In main line aikido, the movements are objects too.  What we do is look at the how things move, we acknowledge the world in terms of  movement and how much space there is.   We are okay with any amount of movement and if we come to terms with our judo heritiage then we are okay with any amount of space.

We change our relationship to the problem, instead of making a machine(fighting system) to deal with the problem. 

Judo is present all over the 17.  I have been thinking a lot about foot sweeps a lot lately (My teacher, Jack Bieler, calls footsweeps insurance.) . I you tubed this.  If you want to see where footsweeps show up watch this. I have been shown the same kind of thing. This guy evidently has a judo background and he sees the world in terms of space and motion.

The  first three atemi waza are basically footsweeps with out the feet. Combine the sweep with atemi waza and you get an illegal judo throw.   This guy doesnt show gyaku gamae ate specifically, but if he moved his hand to the head its there as well.  The last two atemi waza are in koshiki kata, so they are from judo as well.  So basically, the first five techniques have more to do with judo, than aikido.  uki waza are lifted from judo.  movement 8 seems to be a Tomiki aikido movement that you dont see in other aikido styles, but you can see the positioning in this video.  Its judo as well.   

When you take Tomiki techniques and make them objects then you can relate them to Aikido.  But if you look at them in terms of motion, they relate to something else.  So when some one calls foul, and says you can't footsweep in aikido, or you cant standing elbow lock a guy in judo they are thinking in terms of objects, and machines, and systems. They are thinking sport. They are thinking competition.

They aren't looking at the changing their relationship to the problem.  They just want to calibrate the machine. Calibrating the machine is what makes aikido look like a joke.  Aikido players walk into the joke when they don't  understand their relationship with space and motion.  

The spectator problem in randori( What in the hell you boys trying to do to each other?)

The problem with watching aikido randori transactions that are competiviely charged is that you don't see a lot of recognizable technique.  A lot of techniques are labeled after the fact.  A guy falls down in a jerk and twist and it gets a name.  In Judo, it seems that folks can see it coming before the technique arrives.  The problem with sport is that it has to be recognizable to a spectator/fan: someone who doesnt do it, and has never done it, but can visually recognize skill and good technique over dumbass luck.  Aikido randori hasnt hit that point.  I love Aikido, but when I watch a randori match on you tube I scratch my head. 

I watched the hat randori a few months ago didnt know what to make of it, and then i watched it again.  I was surprised at how much it opened up competitive randori to where I was actually seeing techniques that are clearly executed instead of stumbled into.  Was it perfection?  No, but some problems have been solved.  You could clearly see counter move, and counter thinking.  The kid grabbed the hat twice, went to the well a third time and recieved the best competititve shomenate I have seen in my wonderings on You tube. 

We all know that a lot of aikido technique kicks off on a reach and grab.  An overextension.   I read an older tomiki book, the Higashi book where he describes most offbalances as coming from a lapel grab.  The extended arm fingers out posture of old tomiki films, imply a reach more than an actual strike.   The theory that aikido developed in part as a counter to judo thinking is supported in this thinking.  How would the typical new guy in the dojo try to handle Morty Youshiba?  We all know that everybody did judo, and judo was the default problem solver.  Reach grab, pull, push, throw.

I have heard that tomiki started with toshu randori then introduced the tanto form because the transactions were ending with judo solutions instead of aikido solutions.  The tanto at least caused an extension motion.  but an actual grab was not there.  That may be the reason why watching tanto randori isnt that interesting of an experience. The intention of reaching and grabbing isnt there.

We all have to admit that Tomiki was a man who was constantly looking at his ideas and reworking them.  Tanto randori, if Tomiki had lived longer may have just been an idea that didnt pan out. 

It seems hat randori solves some issues.  And at least you can see a skillfully played hat grab. 

Throw

"...the way we think about what we are trying to do affects our performance. When we try to create performance goals for ourselves so that we can try to learn a new technique, the name that the instructor gives it influences our thinking process."   -- Pat Parker, Hamare Judo(aikido if that makes you feel better) instructor and Koryu Kata translator, First class.  



It's comforting to know that I'm not just a stubborn dumbass, at least some of the time.   I think your level of stubborn dumbassitude correlates to your ability to appreciate things in the long term.  "Boy, I used to be a gen-u-wine dumbass about this, but now I shore do get it."   It comforting to know that folks who know a whole hell of a lot more than I do ask the same questions, and go through the same stages of doubt/frustration that I do 

I started to entertain quitting because of the word "throw."   We have 17 "throws" that we learn.  That's what we call them.  At our dojo, which is in a large college town, we go through a lot of beginners and dabblers.  Everybody comes in with the common sense notion that nobody wants to get thrown or fall down.  It's instinctive.  Well, if you cant "make" people fall, (because they havent gone through the trust/confidence relationship that may take a couple of years or more, depending on how forgiving your mat is) then you begin questioning the whole system.  Couple that with the fact that your primary source of  learning is a kata called Randori no kata, which for all intents and purposes should be called,"this will never happen in randori no kata."   Then you get the Pyscho-chemical frustration mixture on which this blog is founded and flavored. 

I think my hate/love relationship with judo came from the fact that judo guys seem to have more recipes to "throw" a guy who doesnt want to fall.   I started to try to find ways to "make" people fall, but that wasnt going anywhere.  I got to watch Eric Pearson some, and had him give me a mini-lesson on his four release forms.  And he he gave me a new principle to base my learning off of.  "put yourself in a position that the other guy is totally dependent on you for his balance"  I also kind of extrapolated this into, " put yourself in a position to where the other guy is dependent on you "not cranking his joint."   Use a guys motion/intent, to stop his motion.   So making a guy fall, with a "throw" may not be what we are learning.

I went down and did about 12 or so Akikai classes and an Akikai seminar.  And almost joined up based on the word "throw."   They throw and fall a lot, and seemingly better.  But after a while I figured out, that the Akikai system of throwing and falling is based on a system of spoon fed safety.  Big good looking falls that don't hurt take a lot of work and a good mat.  It takes six years to shodan for a reason.   A hakama dan is an expert at getting "thrown"

So what a person does is he reworks what things are.   The kata are large motions.  They make learning easier, but eventually to start to represent things that aren't there in concrete form but are implied.  heres a list of 17, that represents what I get out of the 17 as it applies to randori. you'll see that I dont use the word throw. A lot of this sounds like modern Musashi cliffnotes and the reason why anyone who thinks they know what Musashi was saying is full of shit.  You may know the 17 better than anyone, and you may not know what I'm talking about. 

1.   inside options working out
2. stepping through
3.  locking the spine/ mopping the feet.  ( a foot mop is an improvised foot sweep done by an aikido guy.) 
4.  uprooting
5.  turning
6.  weight on the back leg. following in
7  weight on the front foot. stringing out
8 hand change stringing out
9  handchange following back
10.  controlling the mirror
11.   hand spiral to the back leg
12. hand exchange stringing out
13. hand exchange hand spiral
14.  shopping cart on a roller coaster
15. shopping cart dump
16. invisible clothesline
17. backfoot/front foot, down the toes.  (Or Iwo Jima/flag plant nage if done in kata form with the knee drop.)

What it is, and What it aint.

The majority of my blog posts are trying to figure out what it is, that I'm studying, trying to figure out if there are any dead ends, and exploring ideas that either lead to a dead end or help with my learning and understanding.  Its a matter of what it is, and what it aint.

Tomiki got a lot of flack for labeling what he was doing as Aikido, because it was different in both philosophy and practice.  The kind of" Aikido" I study comes from the Tomiki line, but I would say that other Tomiki/Shodokan folks would say, "that aint Tomiki Aikido."

If you look at Aikikai schools, Iwama schools, Yoshinkan schools,  you will think that we have some similarity to these schools based on the label Aikido.  You'll see shihonage, kote gaeshi, and other shit, and assume that we have a great deal in common.  But trust me we don't.  The problem is the label of Aikido.

My initial crankiness and criticism in this blog dealt with comparing what I study, (which I have to label Texhomiki Aikido for the lack of anything else to call it), to the films of Tomiki and Ohba, to Loi, the Shodokan folks, and to Youshiba line folks, usually got me thinking two things.

1.  Did some one eff up somewhere. ( did they learn half, make up the rest.)
2.  Am I learning bullshit?


The fact that nobody can effectively say what the movements of the walking really mean and what they really teach.  The fact that Koryu Kata(ichi, ni) that contained a lot of Aikido DNA were not taught, and that the randori seemed at the time just a form of bullshit dojo hypnosis. ( I assumed that the slow down, and relax part was just a way for the other more "experienced"guy to beat me. Hold still while I hit you with light touch parlor trick bull shit you dont understand yet. (While I was getting the cotton ball treatment, I was mentally picturing kicking knee caps and nuts. )  These were all good reasons to assume this is bullshit.  But I was getting healthier doing it, and it made my life better so I kept showing up.

I almost started going to an Akikai dojo because they sweated more and a lot of thier techniques showed up in Koryu Kata that we don't formally teach.  But I couldn't handle the bowing to morty,  the hakamas, and the notion that I was paying a hundred bucks a month to do another guys  dojo housework, especially  a guy in a hakama.

But then I figured out what was going on, at least as far as I'm concerned.  Folks may disagree with me, but what we do is more kito-ryu than anything else.  If you take the old daito ryu+ Kito-ryu= Tomiki Aikido equation and try to figure out what that means and look for it.  You'll find the Kito. I'm pretty stubborn and I found the kito.

The Daito ryu is there as well, but more in the spirit in which a  function is applied type of thing.  Get smaller,see everything through the filter of the first four releases in which you only move if you have to, adopt an straight up the gut mentality(everything is either shomenate, gyaku gamae ate, or ushiro ate) everything else is not a throw or a lock so much a "drill down."  and you've essentially squeezed the daito ryu out of the orange. That is if the orange is the 17 and four releases.  This is a simplification, because daito-ryu is a big animal.

The one big thing that people don't look at when they try to define what it is, and what it aint is the impact of Judo on what we do.  Now what I'm going to say is more of an observation crossed with an inference.  And I also want to add that I may be full of shit on this one.

What our branch of the tomiki tree is, and aint, is due to the fortunate lack of compartmentalization.  We try to compartmentalize two things.  That's judo, and that's Aikido.  you maybe at a dojo where there is a judo class now, and an aikido class later. But I don't give a crap if you are in aikido class you are still doing something that can only be described as the bastard child of really damn good judo mixed with Tomiki Aikido.

I'm not driving at this from the obvious angle of well, Tomiki was a judo man, so there is that influence that he had from Kano, blah, blah, blah.    I'm saying that this thing that we call Our Aikido was developed by very experienced Judo players who had been there and done that.  They may not have been the "empty jacket " judo player that Pat Parker describes, but their Jacket was, is extremely light.

I used to think that the light touch, go slow, randori that we do was a bunch of flaky bullshit.  But the more I observe judo, and what folks call light touch judo, the more I understand what is going on.  It's said somewhere else that the reason that we don't do the competitive hard randori is that the students over here were older students that didnt want to go there.  A person could misread that as people were wussing out.  But really it was folks who did the competitive Judo and wanted to learn other things.

What I've seen with judo guys is that they get lighter and better the longer they do it. Bob Rea calls his judo geriatric judo. Hell, there aint nothing geriatric about it. If aikido, our aikido, was developed from folks who understood the lighter and better, or learned judo concurrently with aikido from lighter and better senior instructors, then that  explains just about everything.  Especially, our Randori.  Our randori is about good fits(tsukuri), and kuzushi.  Its about releasing from "grips"  and finding  counter fits.  It aint about the throw.  

But....

I was listening to Nick Lowry talk a few weeks back.  If I recollect, he was telling about a time most people come to tell their instructor, "look you are holding back, there is something that you do, that you aint teaching!"   Well, I think everybody in our line gets there.  I'm there.   But I tend to blame an identity crisis.  We want to use the Tomiki name, and the Aikido name, but we are a whole hell more about Judo than anything else.  I also recall Nick talking about going to an Aikido clinic over yonder and saying how the other aikido folks, many who have seen a whole lot of this and that, had trouble putting a label on what we are doing.  He said that they see us as some sort of "judo."

I have opened up my understanding of what we are doing through observing Judo.   We really do a separated Judo.  I'm beginning to see 17/ big 10 and other Koryu as "grips" that may lead to some sort of foot action,  some sort of shoudler/ hip misalignment that lands a guy in some sort of trouble.  A #6 oshi taoshi is a light grip,  he may release out of it, or walk into it or something else.   The end result may be able to be labeled with a technique name, or it could be labeled: He fell down.

That gets us back to what it is, and what it aint.   And we get in trouble when we teach what it aint, like that's what it is.   I've been to a "real" aikido dojo, and I make them nervous, or  at least scratch their head, or both.  When folks stop making eye contact with you in a martial arts dojo or clinic that means you represent things they'd rather not think about. (Or you may smell)

 So if we aint aikido, and we are real, and have our own substance, then what are we?   I practice separated judo, who is going to teach me about those damned foot sweeps?    

 



   

Principles and 3 ways to think about them.

I'm getting close to the Nidan level, and its time to look at principle.  Principle is a learning tool.  It isnt a way to kick someones ass.  But in order to get better, they have to be my principles and not someone elses, because we are dealing with me and my environment, not a samurai, or a Kodokan Judo player, or a Shinto Mystic.

There are two broad classes of principle.  There are principles that allow you to move and think in isolation.  And there are principles that allow you to move and think in relation to someone else.  That's all that I can  honestly say.  They may be two separate ideas, or the same ideas. 

People talk principle, but they dont talk about where to apply it.  One type of aikido training comes with different principles than another.    I think that folks will have a great deal of technical and tactical frustration if they don't understand what their focus is. I can think of three areas where principles may be different.

Go Big

This is the area of kata training.  I like kata training because when you work it in  whole units and you try to hit the mat and sweat.    It trains intangibles.   What one guy gets from it another guy doesn't.   Some people get intellectual stimulation out of it.  I have noticed that students who do Jodo, or Iaido approach Aikido in much the same fashion.  They are comfortable with the kata approach but don't understand it as a vehicle for fitness or as a springboard to explore variation.  Put a guy who likes kata for the sweat, with a guy who is a classicist in training then you have a recipe for frustration.  But the classicist can often times help you figure things out. They help maintain a standard model from which variation and insight are possible.  They do the heavy thinking so you dont have to.  They are a necessary part of the dojo ecosystem.


Go Small

This is a Toshu Randori guy.  The master of light touch.   The thing I've noticed is that these guys operate off of ideas that may not be kata based.  No one to my knowledge has exactly looked at our aikido to really label and identify what is going on here.  I've said it before but the way we randori has a lot of similarities to what the Tai Chi and Wing Chun guys do.  I randoried with a guy who had a background in both and he was every bit as tricky and frustrating and enlighening as Randoring with a Judo player.   I have crossed hands with a High Level Tomiki guy(JW Bode) and he feels very similar to a Tai Chi guy.  How do they get there?  

The randori game we play is let another guy walk into something.  You have the feeling that a guy is beating the shit out of you, suffocating you like a constrictor and you are essentially doing it to yourself.   Its talked about but not explicitly taught.

Right now, I'm of the opinion that you can't get here from kata although kata is an initial entry point for it.   You start out trying to put a gedan ate kata style on people and then you discover that there is a smaller animal that exists that is related to gedan ate in a " hey that's kinda like Gedan Ate."  but it aint kind of way.   There are numerous techniques that exist in a "kinda like" fashion.  They aren't explicitly trained because they don't look like the damn kata. They are labeled after the fact in relation to the kata. It's something a guy does that works every damn time.

Their are the things that some people really want to learn but aren't taught.  A guy is put in a situation of figuring it out for himself and hoping like hell he has 15 years worth of good Randori partners. 


 Go Open

My definition of an open aikido system is reflected in individuals I have met. It's model based.  Aikido was originally model based.  Here is a model that I see in more than one person I know.  

A) Kata training(both aikido and weapons) that serves as entry level work that helps relate things to non kata ideas.  Randori, restraint, conflict.  Perfection isnt the key here. understanding and insight is. 
B)  "Kinda like" techniques from Toshu Randori  that represent a non-kata reality.
C) Judo techniques that frustrate an Aikido player, that capitalize on muddy maai.  
D) "Let the other guy walk into it tactics" explictly taught.
E)  The  open ended model has a mind set that powers the techniques.  

 Some martial arts schools are probably not developed by a founder.  They are developed by  students that are trying to figure out how one guy(or three) does what he does.   Martial arts like this don't have explicit teachers, they have models.   There are some people so good at what they do they are never figured out.   Aikido is one of those model driven martial arts.  Our branch is  model driven because of our hard headed "figure it out for yourself" Toshu Randori practice. You can hope for 15 years of good randori practice or you can find a "open" model to study.  Or you can get lucky and get both.



Like I said, learning principles will be different for each area of focus. Is it a kata, randori, or model based focus?