This is going to be a bit of an odd blog post as it’s more like a legal disclaimer than anything else. As we continue to get used to regular training again, consider accepting new students, and look to producing more public content it feels important to be clear about our influences and our affiliations. Jeremy Hulley and I have been training and teaching together for nearly 30 years now, and during that time, the question that we have always asked ourselves is, “Is this what our teacher wants us to be doing in their space?” After closing down Seattle School of Aikido and introducing the idea of Japanese Fighting Arts NW, the question is now, “Is this what WE want to be doing?”
One of the biggest challenges for us going forward, especially wrt video content, is to credit our influences and teachers correctly and transparently while not implying an ongoing affiliation or endorsement that does not exist. This also means generating useful content for public consumption that does not violate any trust put in us to protect information that is not considered public. This is the tightrope that we will walk.
For the upcoming video content we will be posting a mix of exercises and concepts as they were taught, but also modifications and variations of those concepts and exercises. A large part of that content will be based on what we learned from Neil Yamamoto and Dan Harden. We are not an affiliated Sangenkai study group, but we must acknowledge the deep influence he had over us and every aspect of our training over the seven or so years that we regularly attended his seminars, workshops, and intensives. For those of you who have trained with him, a lot of what I’d like to talk about will be extremely familiar. I will not however be going into any details on anything that was presented outside of his normal open weekend workshops that have been attended by literally thousands of people. Generally speaking, I will be limiting even that content to the material that I personally was asked to present to newer students during his seminars. At times I will be intentionally vague and may even be misleading. So, if you find yourself thinking, “That’s wrong, that’s not what Dan said…” you might be right! Or it might have been how he USED to say something. It could also be how I am now thinking about a given concept or exercise and IS in fact different. My suggestion would be to try it on, take it for a spin, see how it feels to YOU. I’m a firm believer that we need to be able to put things in our own terms in order to truly own them and that parroting someone’s exact phrases is a poor indicator of true understanding.
If you find any of our content helpful or interesting, please let us know! I’d love to have some offline conversations with you, or if you find yourself in the Seattle area, we’d love to have you at the dojo. There is no better way to really communicate this stuff than hands on and in person.