In my five years of training I have come to understand the spirit of Aikido as a peaceful option to violence.\u00a0 At the heart of Aikido is the ability to make the attacker and defender equals, so that there is no winner or loser.\u00a0 No one is beaten or injured (seriously), and the attacker sees the error of his\/her ways.<\/p>\n
Though Aikido is peaceful, it is not demure or submissive.\u00a0 For a technique to work, one must be aware of her surroundings.\u00a0 This includes the attacker(s) and the space in which you move.\u00a0 If you are unaware, the attacker will overcome you before you know what is happening.\u00a0 If you are unaware of the surroundings, you may trip and fall, or throw your attacker into a brick wall or off a cliff.\u00a0 (These are extreme examples.)\u00a0 I’ve heard spectators\u00a0at Aikido demonstrations say that often they had trouble telling who attacked first.\u00a0 To me, this means that nage’s response to uke must take place at nearly the same time as uke commits to the attack.<\/p>\n
Aside from a few Aikido novels, most of what I learned has been through training and listening to my instructors.\u00a0 Books are certainly useful, but they are purely supplementary.\u00a0 It is impossible to truly understand Aikido without doing it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
In my five years of training I have come to understand the spirit of Aikido as a peaceful option to violence.\u00a0 At the heart of Aikido is the ability to make the attacker and defender equals, so that there is no winner or loser.\u00a0 No one is beaten or injured (seriously), and the attacker sees… Continue reading Spirit of Aikido (As I Understand It)<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-74","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-10","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aikidocenterofjacksonville.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aikidocenterofjacksonville.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aikidocenterofjacksonville.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aikidocenterofjacksonville.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aikidocenterofjacksonville.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=74"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.aikidocenterofjacksonville.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":117,"href":"https:\/\/www.aikidocenterofjacksonville.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/74\/revisions\/117"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.aikidocenterofjacksonville.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=74"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aikidocenterofjacksonville.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=74"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.aikidocenterofjacksonville.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=74"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}