Sunday, January 24, 2010

Aikido, 1/23/10


Yesterday we did nothing but aikido, to balance last week's all-judo class. We did a quick review of Junana 1-10, then Pat previewed 11-17 for me (Actually, it was all of Nijusan, but I'm still a little unclear as to where the extra techniques are, so I still tend to think in terms of "junana").


I've seen 11-17 before, but never played with them much. I look forward to getting into those. After running through all 17, we went back and practiced 6-10 in more detail, since those are the ones I'll need to demo for 3rd brown belt.


I'm always amazed by how robust the system is. Pat and I talked about how you have all these techniques that live in different places, but there are many roads to get to each of them. Some roads are cruddy, muddy dirt roads (less likely), others are nice paved highways (more likely/common).


That discussion led into a brief practice of Chain 1, then lots of randori. Little by little, chains and randori are making more sense to me. Pat talked about how in chains, we explore the common things that happen - the probable. But in randori, we can explore anything that might happen - the possible. He talked about how I shouldn't worry about forcing myself stop making mistakes, but to let them happen so my mind can learn the consequences and teach itself.

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