Читать книгу Complete Aikido. Aikido Kyohan: The Definitive Guide to the Way of Harmony онлайн

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The office staff was dumbfounded at the reception the usually formal and reserved O’Sensei afforded this young man from Hawaii. Suenaka recalls the staff telling him later that they had never before seen O’Sensei embrace anyone, and Suenaka himself cannot recall ever again seeing the Founder greet anyone in that way. Yet that warm encounter set a precedent between the two. “Every time I would see him, I would run up to him and say, ‘O’Sensei!,’ and hug him, and he just loved that!” Indeed, to this day, at all of Suenaka Sensei’s schools, at the end of class all students embrace each and every fellow aikidoka before leaving the mat. The tradition is as essential to dojo etiquette as bowing to the kamiza before and after each practice session, and is a direct result of that first Hombu encounter. One may also consider it, as Suenaka Sensei does, another demonstration of O’Sensei’s guiding philosophy that “The true nature of budo lies in the loving protection of all things.” When new students, at first uncomfortable with the practice, ask why they must embrace at the end of class, always Suenaka Sensei’s reply is, “Because O’Sensei hugged me.”