Then in the summary of episode 4 I forgot to mention that Marian and I had participated in the 21st international push-hands meeting of Nils Klug's school in May 2022 and enjoyed taking Birgit Golze's beginner lessons there.
To complete the CV of my involvement with martial arts: I have been following David Valadez of Senshin Center online for some time now because, to my taste, he has a very interesting view on aikido and martial arts and can also explain and show a lot of these things. He can be found on Patreon, YouTube and Facebook.
I could of course have named these blogs: My martial arts journey but I figured that would make me look too much like a copycat and besides it wouldn't really capture my actual quest.
In the previous blog I already touched on the distinction between the (more) internal and the (more) external arts, also referred to as soft and hard styles within the martial arts. I suppose you may have guessed by now that it is precisely the internal side of the coin that fascinated me. Otherwise, my involvement in something like martial arts and the time and effort that I, as one not being interested in fighting to begin with, have invested in it would be somewhat difficult to understand. My first acquaintance more than forty years ago was, not entirely coincidentally, with an art that happened to be also called The Art of Peace or the art of non-fighting. https://dimasplace.wordpress.com/2012/04/05/tussen-5-morihei-ueshiba/
On the aikido mat you may find a group of participants usually more mixed in terms of age, big or small and male/female ratio than in most martial arts . Aikido is also commonly considered to be one of the gentlest forms of martial art. "Harmony" is a key concept in aikido and a term you can hear quite often in a class or training. What initially amazed me quite a bit was that those aikido practitioners all talked about harmony and so forth and in the still unite in so many different organizations that all pretend they represent the true ideal of "the great teacher". It reminded me strongly of the splits and mutual condemnation as was once common among protestant groups in the Calvinist Netherlands.
So you may come accross many practitioners on the aikido mat whose prime motivation to practice this art was of an idealistic nature. And then the monster of dogmatics is easily lingering just around the corner. The objections of Rokas (see previous blog) are not entirely out of the blue; For which is stronger: life or doctrine? There are also quite a few people (especially among enthusiastic practitioners of aikido or tai chi) who will never miss an opportunity to preach peace and quiet while they seem to constantly want to fight everything and everyone and moreover themselves.
In any case, I had a great time rolling around on the mat every week during those first three years while they tried to teach me some tricks of a martial nature. Also what is called the philosophy of aikido intrigued me enough to always have kept me busy in one way or another. Which resulted in a renewed acquaintance with aikido some five years before my retirement until now. However, my view of the matter has now broadened somewhat. I have some more knowledge and background information about Eastern wisdom traditions such as Buddhism and Taoism, my interest now also includes martial arts of Chinese origin. Possibly even more than those that are supposed to be Japanese. I'm even taking kung fu classes these days. Kung fu or gongfu means something like difficult or artful work that you just do not easily master and requires quite a bit of training and effort. So not necessarily a martial art, although it has become known in that sense in the West. That's partly because of a certain Bruce Lee, the man of: be like water, my friend.
I assume that it is now clear that I am not involved in these things to learn or to be able to fight better, but rather to leave all that fighting behind me whenever possible. So to shed a light on that question mark in the title of these blogs, I'm going to remove both the question mark and the title completely and I won't talk about myself anymore as a martial artist or as a warrior of some sort nor use any related terms because that's not me at all. But still in due time, I would like to talk some more about that so called internal power, which I referred to in the previous blog, and how it links to the various martial arts because that is something that happens to fascinate me immensely.
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