Being busted by shomeate is cool!

We did some shomenate drills last night in class. Tori would stand in front of uke with a hand in uke's face and tori would walk backwards stopping at some point along the exercise to cause uke's head to lock backwards usually off balancing uke. Pat Sensei got me good with a couple, and though they was barely more force in them than usual i climbed off of the mat impressed.

Randori was pretty cool last night as well. In our style of aikido we stand at ma'ai and SLOWLY move to attack or defend. Some of the things sensei focused on this time around was how force causes us to stop moving. I was amazed how even the smallest ammount created a pause in the movments. Kristof and i generally spinned away from each other when we were partners. Gary and i on the other hand usually devolved into a mess. One of use would either speed up or just switch to something else, often breaking the speed of light as i think it was called. When you're trying to avoid an attack in slow motion that you know is going to connect it's hard to realize "ok, i'm screwed on this on, maybe next time". As mentioned a second ago any force or resistance caused us to stop or pause or generally "not flow" during randori. We tried the first kihara chain while both uke and tori were constantly moving and i couldn't quiet get the hang of it. Uke and tori just sort of seemed to stalemate. After getting into shikaku at point 2 we ended up rotating around each other. I could be missing something.

More on this later. Cafeteria for food then back to class.

The shell revisited

Saturday's class presented a new challenge for me. Trying to do backward rolls without any momentum means that i have to try and breath life into the muscles i have insulated under a protective layer of donuts and cookies over my stomach.

The two new people showed for class and they did alright.

Glad i got to make it since i've been out for a couple of weeks.

Food for thought

" A man may learn a poem one day, and remember almost nothing of it the next. A few days later, and without and further study, he may suddenly know it perfectly.

We must not become discouraged, therefore, if we find we have slippedback to the original condition at any time; these regressions will become rarer and return to the improved condition easier as the learning process continues." - Moshe Feldenkrais

I kept that in mind all day in class today.

Kristof, the exchange student that lives at Pat's now is pretty good. It's cool to see how two different "ideas" of aikido interatct. Not sure how great a representative i was but hopefully he'll enjoy class.

I'm have some things to work on with honasu but atleast i still have the backward roll!

The neutral zone.

In class yesterday we went over tegatana and hanasu and (from my Kihara sheet) we did pattern number one. Or at least the one where we go from release 1 to 2 or 5 and some of the fun inbetween. Sensei added some more fruit for thought to change what i thought i knew about what i knew. I have decided that the process of learning Aikido is one of deconstruction of momentarily held beliefs causing me to constantly change my ideas on what i'm doing until (and this is the part i assume atm) it's all as natural/comfortable as how i started out. It's like a masochistic learning process but i do enjoy it.

Anyway, the thing that sort of blew my mind the most was during our kihara practice. As we slowly broke down the first pattern i got to see more and more how that little neutral pause at the end of the line works. I have all sorts of theories on it and how my palm being up or down limits where uke will end up but i could just as easily be thinking out of my ass.

Learning, it's a process.