AIKIDO
Aikido
The Peaceful Martial Art                             Stefan Stenudd
CONTENTS

AIKIDO PRACTICE
Aikido Basics
Ki exercises
Koshinage
Kotegaeshi
Yonkyo
Ikkyo
Nikyo
Sankyo
Attacks in Aikido
Aikido Video Clips
Nishio videos
Tantodori - knife defense
Jo 31 Kata
Aikibatto sword exercises
Aikido Photos
My seminars   NEW!

AIKIDO THEORY
Aikido Glossary
Ki energy
Tanden, the Center
Running a Dojo
My Aikido Book   NEW!
My Aikido Book in German
Books about aikido
Aikido is True
Osensei and Einstein
Aikido Links
About me
Visitor Response

AIKIDO PÅ SVENSKA

STENUDD.COM



Aikido - the book by Stefan Stenudd.
AIKIDO
The Peaceful Martial Art
The book about aikido principles, philosophy and basic concepts.
Buy the book at Amazon.


Aikibatto - the book.
AIKIBATTO
The book about the aikibatto sword and staff exercises, practical and spiritual aspects of the sword arts, equip­ment for training, etc.
More about the book here.


QI - increase your life energy.
QI
Increase your life energy
The book about the life energy qi, with exercises on how to awaken and use it.
More about the book here.



Tao Te Ching - the Taoist source.
TAOIST SOURCE
The Taoist source. The complete Tao Te Ching and Chuang Tzu.


Shinken - get a sharp steel katana sword.
Shinken - live blade
Get a sharp steel katana sword for your iaido or aikibatto solo exercises. Here is how.


Aikido is true
Jakobsberg, circa 1974.
Foreword to the Swedish book "Aikido - the peaceful martial art" by Stefan Stenudd, published 1992 and 1998.


I was seventeen when I first heard about the remarkable Japanese martial art Aikido. It was Krister, a friend some years my senior, who told me that he had practiced it.
     Just how seriously he regarded Aikido, I understood partly from how long he had taken to reveal his knowledge of it - although he must be convinced that it would impress a teen age boy - and partly from his elaborate and solemn way of talking about it. What Krister described was something completely different from a series of tricks to defeat an opponent of twice one's own size, also something different from the concept of athletics for a sound mind in a sound body. What Krister described was a way of living - an art, a philosophy, yes, kind of a religion.
     After listening with widening eyes to Krister's equally fascinating and incomprehensible elaboration on the subject, I had to make him show me just how it worked. Also with this he was remarkably reluctant. When I had repeated my wish over and over, he conceded and showed me one of the simpler techniques, nikyo, wherein my wrist was turned in such a way that I fell to the floor in sudden pain.
     My wrist hurt as if it were broken, although it was unharmed, and surely my knees had been bruised from the sudden fall to the floor, but I was overcome by one thing only: the beauty of the technique. Krister had only turned his hand around mine, as simply as the butterfly, when sitting on a straw of grass, gently flaps its wings. That was all. And I fell to the floor as abruptly as if I were hit with a blacksmith's hammer.
     It was delightful, in the midst of the pain. It was magical, incomprehensible although it looked so simple. This I wanted to learn. When the beginner's course started in the fall, I showed up in my blue gym suit, anxious and excited.

Jakobsberg, circa 1974.
Me as an adolescent, experimenting wildly with training buddy Lennart Linder, at least equally mesmerized by aikido, c.1974.

     Like a darkening sky, where one star after the other becomes visible to the eye, Aikido has through the years revealed increasing riches to me. Yet I think that the teen age boy who fell suddenly to the floor by Krister's nikyo, really saw absolutely everything that the years of training have since made me acquainted to. Everything was present in that first, painful encounter. What followed was neither more nor less than confirmations - delightful confirmations.


The aikido technique nikyo, from a seminar in the Czech Republic.

     However exotic some of the Aikido movements may be, they are permeated by a sense of recognition. When you pull it off alright and the technique works somewhat, it's not at all like a foreign term you've finally learned by heart, after hours of repetition. No, it's an old friend making his entrance, or a small muscle that has rested for a long time but is once again put to work. All the secrets of Aikido are dèja vu - they are recognizable.
     How can this be? Maybe we must say like Plato, that man cannot learn anything he did not essentially know from the beginning. All wisdom is contained in our heads from the very moment of birth, we only have to be reminded of it. That's not a bit more odd than the thesis that something must come out of something, never out of nothing.
     Such a conception of reality is not strange to me, but more precisely I do, from within, perceive it so that the recognition springs from one firm condition: what I can initially recognize and see clearly - no matter how little I have practiced it - is true.
     What is true, completely true, is immediately recognized by every human being - if he just wants to. So, if my senses were at all to be trusted, I knew from the first moment: Aikido is true.
Stefan Stenudd



Aikido - den fredliga kampkonsten.
Aikido, den fredliga kampkonsten
More about the book - in Swedish only.

email
stenudd.com



Cosmos of the Ancients, by Stefan Stenudd.
COSMOS OF THE ANCIENTS
The Greek philosophers' theories about the gods, the myths, and cosmology.
More about the book here.


All's End, by Stefan Stenudd.
ALL'S END
A science fiction novel by Stefan Stenudd, about the quest for a perfect world.
More about the book here.


Murder, by Stefan Stenudd.
MURDER
Thoughts on life, death, and the meaning of it all - by Stefan Stenudd.
More about the book here.


Aikido - den fredliga kampkonsten, av Stefan Stenudd.
Den svenska
aikidoboken.


More on this website:
Aikido
Aikibatto sword exercises
Myth
Greek Philosophers
Aristotle and his Poetics
The Taoist source
Qi - life energy
Fiction by Stenudd
Art by Stenudd
Astrology and horoscopes