It's All Connected!

Yesterday was my 11th Aikido lesson at Mokuren Dojo. We started with the walking kata, then moved to aiki brush-off practice. From the brush-off, we moved into Releases 1 – 4, then KiHara’s 2 motion templates. In the motion templates we focused on linear vs. circular motion (to pop open that can of worms on Pat's blog, click here). It was hard to think in terms of linear movement while I’m moving around uke… but Pat demonstrated how trying for circular movement has a tendency to pull tori and uke apart, while going for linear motion helps tori stay in the “safe spot” behind uke’s arm.

We also focused on controlling our eyes and where we look during the techniques to avoid dizziness. If I focus on uke’s head, that provides a constant while everything else (the room, other people, etc) are moving all around, from my perspective. Pat showed how constantly shifting our gaze confuses our brain, and it has to “reset” each time we re-focus. He said when we’re just walking around day-to-day, our brain compensates for how our eyes move to follow moving objects, but if you take a picture of something while moving the camera, the scene is blurry. Our brains compensate for the blur so we usually don’t see it when we’re looking around.
That is so much like what I’ve been learning about with regard to “white balance” in photography. Different kinds of light (incandescent, florescent, etc) give different qualities to what we see. Under florescent lights, a white sheet of paper is given a bluish tint. Under incandescent, it’s given a more yellow, or orange tint. Now, our brains know what “white” is, and our brains know that paper is white, so they compensate, and make our eyes think “Yeah, that paper is white”. But if you photograph it, the camera doesn’t know any better – it shows you the tinted paper. If you adjust the “white balance” on the camera, you can take a picture with truer color and compare it to the unadjusted shot – there’s a noticeable difference.

Sorry to get on such a tangent - I just thought it was interesting how I was JUST learning about the brain’s compensation for our eyes in an unrelated area, and here the same principle pops up in Aikido. It’s so cosmic. Here's another link to my photography blog.

For the end of class, we worked on the second motion template transitioning to aigamaeate.