What new practices?

In a comment, Coleman Ridge observes that whatever we do to help put Aikido principles to use in daily life situations, for effective results, we ought to build new practices, and not hope for success by simply "intending" to do something different. He conjectures that these new practices would be rhetorical or linguistic, basically arising in the realm of speaking and listening.

This is what I think too. An assumption I'm making is that practices aimed at producing new actions, different from our default programmed actions, will be most successful if we simulate training environments similar to the ones in which we actually want to move in new ways. What I mean is, if we want to verbally "blend" with a declared adversary at work, we would succeed best by designing and training with practices using linguistic "blends" staged or role-played in a workplace setting.

This assumption is a corollary of my original suspicion: that on-the-mat training is insufficient to enable a robust ability to enact Aikido principles verbally in off-the-mat domains. I do not know whether these assumptions are that well founded, and I believe it would be a tremendous project for a doctoral student to explore these assumptions.

I also have additional concerns about any proposed verbal learning practices. One of the most important of these concerns to me is, how to facilitate such learning while preserving the dignity of everyone in the loop. In the dojo this is easy. The students give the teacher complete discretion to guide them through whatever physical and attitudinal shifts they need to make to progress in the art. It is a given that the students are not themselves aware of what these shifts are nor how to make them. To put ourselves in the hands of a teacher to help us learn what we don't know we don't know requires a deep trust. Establishing this kind of trust in the more purely linguistic world of everyday life and especially work life is vastly more difficult and complicated than doing it in a dojo, where you can see the physical techniques you want to learn performed elegantly and expertly.

There have been a few researchers in organizational behavior that I have grown to respect as possible resources for help in designing the kinds of practices that might help, and at the same time, satisfy the learner's right to informed consent to the nature and structure of the learning process design. This value of informed consent, I feel, is important in preserving the dignity of everyone involved.

Some of the researchers I'm talking about are John Dewey, Kurt Lewin, and Chris Argyris. One basic practical guideline I'm drawing from these and other researchers is that it is not helpful to "trick" someone into learning something, no matter how beneficial such learning potentially may be to the student. Not only is it not helpful for creating learning, it actually inhibits learning by eroding the student's trust in the teacher or facilitator. I think many teachers limit their success by being in denial that their very methods are counterproductive to the results they claim to achieve.

Comments

[Coleman Ridge]

Here is one technique, or class of techniques. It consists of creating, or finding, an architectonic, a system of systems, that will include both one's belief system and that of one's opponent, and set them in right relationship to one another.

What, you may ask, the hell does that mean? Here is the best example I know of the thing being done well. I tell this story often; pardon me if you have heard it.

On the campus of Fordham University, a Jesuit college in New York City, there is a reflecting pool, and at one end of it a bronze statue of a tall lean man pitching a net out over the water. If you look closely, you see that the sculptor made art of necessity. Peter's fingers split to become the meshes of the net, so that he is casting out his own flesh, and will be caught by whatever he catches.

When the Jesuits went to China, they presented themselves as students. They learned Chinese, and then read their way through the classics of Chinese philosophy. They noted similarities to the pre-Socratics, and introduced the Chinese scholars first to Parmenides and Heraclitus, and then to Plato and Aristotle. From there, it was a simple step to show how Aquinas and Scripture can be seen as a completion and a divinely inspired fulfillment of the aspirations of those philosophies, and thus of Chinese philosophy. (Thanks to very clever back-interpretation by generations of Catholic scholars.) When the Dominicans showed up to check up, the Chinese court was on the verge of conversion.

However, the Jesuits were wearing Chinese clothing, practicing the Confucian virtues, and paying reverent respect to their ancestors.

Whatever the Jesuit's original intentions had been, they had been caught in their own net. They had engaged in real conversation, rather than proselytizing, and had been influenced by the Chinese scholars as much as they had influenced them.

It could not last, of course. The Dominicans, God's dogs, began to bark in panic. One of them told the Emperor that his ancestors were in Hell; the Emperor told them that they should all go home and come back when they had their story straight.

But that is how you do it.

[Jeff Dooley]

An Aikido exemplar of what you describe is tai-no-henko. In this technique, as I'm sure you practice it, you absorb an initial grab, using the grab to make contact with uke's body. Then, instead of pushing back, or dragging uke around, you simply use the connection and the initial energy to pivot around the fulcrum of the grabbed wrist, facing suddenly in the same direction as uke. No fighting, just a strong move to leverage the attacker's energy so as to make your own statement while staying connected and taking in the view from the attacker's perspective.

So the Jesuits pulled this off somehow. I wonder what training they had that the Dominicans and most of the rest of us did not have?

[Gabriela]

Yes you can save a psone game to a ps one memory card on a ps2you are getnitg an error message saying that the data is damaged otherwise known as uselessyou will not be able to save to the memoryim pretty sure that it wont be able to save any game if you can save another game to it then you will just have to restart final fantasyim sorry for your problem it really sucks i have had to restart a game just because of that same problem