Aikido, 1-31-09

On a whim, we decided to do an Aikido lesson after Judo yesterday. I had written in a previous post how I've been liking Judo a lot more, and wanting to spend more time training it, but after having spent a few weeks with no Aikido, I found I missed it. I'm going to still try to work in the occasional Aikido lesson as well.

We started with tegatana no kata, with emphasis on relaxing again. This time, Pat talked about how to coordinate our arm motions with our steps, for maximum flow. Turns out using the up and down motions of walking with the arm motions rather than against them makes a big difference. I look forward to developing this in my walking. I need to remember not to try to lift my arm up while my center is moving down.

We went through releases 1 through 4, and I got hung up again by being tense and not relaxing. After pounding "Relax" into my head, and making my body listen, my releases were feeling and working much, much better. I found that when I was able to truly relax with the release, it was much easier to synch up with uke. We camped out a while on Release 1 just to warm up (or is it "chill out"?) to this feeling of relaxed releases. We focused on what I'll call "tactile invisibility" (fitting with uke so well that he barely knows you're there). It was amazing to see how this idea really helps you deal with whatever the bad guy tries to do to you, even when he changes the script. Bruce Lee quotes about water come to mind, haha. Speaking of water, I reflected on how it takes the shape of its container, but what we were doing with the releases felt more like I (as tori) was a container that was taking the shape of the...energy (for lack of a less "new-age" term) that uke was putting into the system. I hope my meaning comes across. It's difficult to explain. A few more reps of releases 1 - 4 rounded out that portion of class.

Next we moved on to brush-off practice, and moved from there into shomen-ate. We did lots of repetitions of that, followed by lots of repetitions of aigamae-ate. This took us up to the end of class. Pat said "Well, that was your yellow belt demo. Did you have any questions?" It took me completely by surprise! As in my Judo demo, I asked what deficiencies he saw in my Aikido demo. He surprised me again by saying "None". Obviously that doesn't mean I don't have things to work on. Pat pointed out that my Aikido is far more polished than my Judo, and he'll get no argument from me there. I think that's due to the fact that I came from a dojo in an organization that's an off-shoot of Fugakukai. My wife and I both trained there for months, and that was before we had our daughter, so we went to class 2 to 3 times per week. We also trained together constantly at home, so I got lots of practice back then. Now that our daughter's here, I find it's much more rare to find a training partner outside the dojo (but one of my nephews if getting more and more interested, and we get together for some Judo stuff occasionally).

So I'm now a yellow belt in both Judo and Aikido. It's been a good weekend. One small step, a beginning. Thanks, Pat, for the good times, great instruction, and friendship. I look forward to what's next.

/bow