Aikido Decatur — Decatur, GA — www.AikidoDecatur.com — (678) 662-9237 Speaker: Joel Riggs sensei "The focus of training here at Aikido Decatur is the process which O Sensei shared with us for transforming ourselves into someone who can blend with an attacker's energy. It's not natural when someone attacks for us to agree with their first motion. Most of the time we try to defend/block, or we try to hit back, or we try to run away. "In aikido you do something else, which is to invite that initial attack, and then you can control your attacker and pin them to the ground or throw them in a way that's harmless. "We can't just be the same person we normally are though, because our normal reaction is fight, or flight, or to freeze. In order to flow with an attacker we have to be someone different, and O Sensei shared with his students a process of opening and allowing larger energies to come. And that is what allows us to blend with someone else. "If my identity is just me and the rest of the world is other people, and we are in opposition to one another, I can never flow. I can never blend with someone else. But if my identity is larger such that I am connected to others, or as in O Sensei's words "I am the entire universe," — that's an advanced level of the practice but that's where he got to — then if I am the entire universe, I am one with others and therefore I cannot attack them. And I can blend with them; they cannot attack me either, for one being cannot attack itself <b>...</b>
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