Free Your Aiki
Site of AiBerk Retreat July 23rd 24th 2011
Geoff Evans' Bolinas Dojo, where Aikido of Berkeley will have it's 2011 camping gasshuku. All FreeAiki and Golden Bears Aikido students are welcome to join in. Please contact Justin Gordon for details and come.
So Your Webmail Account Has Been Hacked
The following is what I tell most people in circumstances like these:
Father's Day 2011
Paul Linden - Aiki Trauma Recovery and Peacemaking
I HIGHLY recommend these workshops and Paul Linden's work in general for all Process Arts (group process design and facilitation) practitioners. -- Brandon
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Aikido & Trauma Recovery August 11-12, 2011 |
Aikido & PeacemakingAugust 13-14, 2011 |
Columbus, Ohio |
Aikido and Aiki-based body education are useful as complements to traditional approaches to working with conflict resolution and trauma recovery. Resolving the body’s distress response is the key. When people are stressed, challenged or threatened, they typically contract or collapse breathing, posture, movement, and attention—which is experienced as fear, anger, strain, or dissociation. In situations of conflict, these powerful physical response patterns undermine people’s ability to think rationally, interact empathically, and act peacefully. They narrow people’s choices to oppositional ways of behaving. In trauma, these physical response patterns get locked into the body, which keeps trauma survivors weak and unable to move beyond their trauma. In these workshops, Aikidoka (and practitioners of other arts) will learn how to generate a mind/body state of expansiveness, calm alertness and compassionate power. That will (1) improve the efficiency and effectiveness of your Aikido, both as self-defense and as a meditation on harmony, (2) give you tools for helping clients break free of the physical trauma patterns, and (3) offer a rapid, systematic way of teaching non-aikidoka principles of aiki peacemaking. The workshop will include Aikido practice as well as body work and movement training.
“I am astounded at Paul’s ability to read the significance of the smallest body response. I would like to strongly recommend Paul's workshop on Aikido and body work to all Aikidoists. I believe that Being In Movement training is insightful, profound, and deeply healing.” Mary Heiny Sensei, 6th Dan Aikido
“Paul is a great teacher who is able to translate the empowerment I work to achieve with my clients verbally, emotionally and with metaphor into an actual felt body experience of awareness, self-protection and personal power.” Howard Fradkin, Ph.D. Psychologist. Affirmations Center for Psychotherapy and Growth.
Please forward this invitation to Aikidoka who would be interested.
PAUL LINDEN, Ph.D. is the head instructor at Aikido of Columbus. He holds a Ph.D. in Physical Education, a BA in Philosophy, a sixth degree black belt in Aikido, a first degree black belt in Karate, and a certificate in the Feldenkrais Method® of somatic education. He has written a number of e-books, among them:
• Winning is Healing: Body Awareness and Empowerment for Abuse Survivors
• Embodied Peacemaking: Body Awareness, Self-Regulation and Conflict Resolution
• Feeling Aikido: Body Awareness Training as a Foundation for Aikido Practice
FOR MORE INFORMATION & REGISTRATION: www.Being-In-Movement.com
Click on the Upcoming Events page.
Register and pay for the workshop through the Shopping Cart for the Aikido of Columbus website. You can also send in a check (made out to Aikido of Columbus).
25% of the fees will be donated to the International Aiki Peace Week and to Peace Dojos International.
Where: Aikido of Columbus, 3003 Silver Drive, Columbus OH 43224. Directions are on the website.
Click on Articles page for an article titled The Distress Response in Aikido, Trauma Recovery, & Peacemaking.
E-mail PaulLinden@aol.com
David Weinstock - Somatic Consensus workshop May 21 and 22_2011
Colleague and friend, David K Weinstock, will be in the SF Bay Area in May teaching Nonviolent Communication, Somatics, Aikido, and Consensus. Please consider attending and tell your friends!
Update March 10 2011
Golden Bears Aikido at UC Berkeley is flourishing and my Free Aiki Dojo is almost two years old and continues to grow well in downtown Berkeley (come visit us at 1934 Bonita Avenue). We just hosted a very successful "The Future of Aikido" seminar with Paul Linden and Bob Frager and visits by several other luminaries from the Bay Area aikido scene (Stan Pranin had to bow out due to obligations following his father's death, and we missed Don Levine who had spoken of coming). Aikido of Berkeley (training with Kayla Sensei) continues to be a great pleasure, and I have a proposal in to teach aikido to elementary age kids as the beginning of my Martial Nonviolence curriculum in an Oakland private school. Most workdays I support the work of Margaret Paloma Pavel and Carl Anthony at Earth House Center - Breakthrough Communities in Oakland and enjoy a more direct positive impact on social justice organizations working for vulnerable communities and people of color. Please make contact by email to brandon at culturesmith dot com if any of this inspires you!
Aikido mythology at Aikido Journal
Just weighed in on the conversation at Aikido Journal about writings attributed to Morihei Ueshiba http://www.aikidojournal.com/blog/2011/03/03/o-senseis-spiritual-writings-where-did-they-really-come-from-by-stanley-pranin/.
My comment:
Thanks again for your faithful ongoing work in clarifying where literal history intersects with the interpretation of ideas associated with aikido. In my experience, there are often very different expectations when professional martial artists and professional scholars end up in the same conversation (or even in the same personality).
I sometimes see martial artists presupposing that truth can only be found in simplicity of expression (perhaps “either he said these words or he didn’t - which is it?”), whereas those accustomed to treating language critically have been trained to assume that any use of language is a complex of meanings (literal, figurative, factual, imaginal) which second hand transmission and translation make even more problematic.
It has been my delight to discover in many martial artists one particular virtue that applies here, and from which scholars certainly benefit. That is the assumption that, while helpful ideas may come from many sources, there is only one place to receive communication with certain provenance, and that is the mouth of the person claiming the ideas involved. Even so, any speaker, no matter how precise, makes mythology: an imaginative way of cultivating understanding and building systems through language with enough room for the full range of both fact and fiction.
Please Comment on Caliban Dreams
Please check out my Examiner.com review of Caliban Dreams, spread the word, and let me know what you think. http://exm.nr/oDsmEo
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