Aikido 2-7-09

The dojo's theme for the month of February is POSTURE. You can read more about it on Pat's blog (specifically, here, here, here, here, and here). This is good info for more than just your martial arts practice.

We started with tegatana, focusing on our posture. I found it very helpful to think about the keel-of-a-boat analogy Pat talked about in one of the posts linked above. In fact, that analogy helped a lot with the hip switch movement in tegatana. It used to throw me off balance. I was so impressed with how stable it was this time, I screwed up the next movement! We also focused on keeping our feet under our centers. I think my arm motions in the "pushes" are better after last week's discussion about moving our arms in conjunction (and cooperation) with the rise and fall of our steps.

Next we did releases. Releases 1 - 4 were okay for me. Remembering to relax really helps. One thing I noticed about staying relaxed during releases is that I tend to be able to synch up with uke's steps from the very beginning. It's not 100%, but it's much better than it used to be for me. More on that in a minute...

Releases 5 - 8 are kind of weird for me. The thing is, I used to practice them regularly at my previous dojo. But the way they taught them there and the way Pat teaches them are as different as night and day. The way I learned them before, we were really just going through the motions of the releases. Consequently, I had been using way too much muscle...really forcing the technique. It was like that for all the releases there. They were really taught as 8 separate and unrelated techniques. Pat teaches them in such a way that they make sense, and seem much more effective. Turns out these releases are related, and come out of common principles. It's like I used to know what the releases looked like, and now I'm learning how they work, and how to do them. I stink at them right now. I'll need more practice with them, but I'm very excited about learning them from a much more aiki perspective.

Next we worked on Chain 1. Chains confound the heck out of me. Not that I don't understand the concept, it's just a completely new (to me) set of motions. I think it's a combination of getting used to a new way of moving in the releases, paying attention to uke's rhythm and trying to synch up, and remembering the parts of the chain. Remember how I said I was synching up well during releases? The chain blew that out of the water. Seemed like I couldn't synch up to save my life. Don't get me wrong, chains are super cool, and I want to learn to do them well...like some other things, it's just going to take time and practice. Pat demonstrated how there's a few different rhythms going on: left-right, up-down, near-far, and straight arm - bent arm. He said that when you can follow and synch up with 2 or 3 of these rhythms all at once, and use them, that's when the magic starts to happen. I need to remember not to force the next technique in the chain, but to read what's happening and follow it. That and fifty other things about chains!