We frequently come across articles, essays, conferences and studies that more or less contain the sentence: “What future for…” to which must be added the topic on which we are debating, in a more or less worried way. It is therefore normal that this also happens for martial disciplines and therefore also for Aikido. Don’t […]
The experience of limit is one of the forces that has always driven our existence. A spark that ignites the processes that lead to discoveries, inventions and new solutions so that the living conditions of many -and still in too few cases: of everyone- improve. Yet, despite life expectancy having almost doubled in the last […]
Over the last two decades, every year a world-famous teacher held a seminar in our town. For the event, practitioners arrived from many countries. One of these gave us the gift of his patience, dedicating himself to us, who came from different technical backgrounds, hence allowing us to decode teacher’s didactic proposal. Having become friends […]
When we began practicing Aikido, we received a copy of the technical program from our teacher. The peculiarity consisted in the fact that, for each rank, an indication was given about the methodology of the test. We started from these indications for the first fifth kyu test: There is no real chance of failing the […]
A few women on the tatami? Let’s try to reflect on that. If we limit ourselves to saying that the majority of practitioners of a Martial Arts course is made by males, we are stating something obvious. There are more and more signs of a slow reversal of such a trend -in the Dojo where […]
Some time ago we wrote a post: Carrot and stick: kumi jo and fourtwelve steps kata. Summarizing, in that post we wrote that what may appear from the outside when looking at jo exercises, especially in relation to the various forms – kata, may sound messy. From the inside it often has the flavor of […]
Can intuition be trained? Can the rationality -that gives structure to technical training- support intuition, which is not rational and logical? In Japanese, intuition is chokkan and is represented by two kanji that have many things in common with practitioners of Martial Arts, especially Aikido: 直感. The first is choku, 直, which means direct, immediate. […]
Ten centuries after the descent of the Normans into Sicily, today a horde of sleepy Turin people gathered at Turin Caselle airport to take the first flight to Palermo. We’re heading to Aikido FIJLKAM National Seminar. An itinerant formula which, after a couple of editions hosted in Piedmont, moves to the Pearl of the Mediterranean. […]
On July 31st, 2023 we had the chance to train at the Hombu Dojo, in Tokyo, during our trip in Japan. Among others experienced during those week, the emotions we felt and lived changed a lot our perspective on things, especially about the discipline we practice. We dayly posted a short post about what we’ve […]
Doing well. Doing wrong. A world opens up right behind and inside the words. A world made of attitudes, actions, beliefs. A world made of enormous chances and equally enormous misunderstandings. In the world of Martial Arts, as well as in the larger world of human activity, we all witness two extreme realities. On the […]
