Aikido stuff

Aikido last night was good. Honda Sensei was in an energetic mood, and he led regular warm-ups. It was the first time I heard him talk about rowing exercise, tenkan undo, and ikkyo undo in detail. Recently, I've been working with a discrepancy between the way we regularly practice the rowing exercise and the way a senior student practices it. Rather than moving his arms and hips forward at the same time, and heaving back, he extends his arms and keeps his hips back, and brings them together for the heaving part. I decided to begin practicing in this way because watching him from the side he seemed to look as if he were actually in a boat, rowing naturally. But when Honda Sensei demonstrated it tonight, he was clearly doing it the first way I mentioned.

I've been focusing on partnered tenkan practice all year. The way we practice here, the grabbed wrist is palm-down, and it curves into uke's center and turns palm-up when uke turns. The angle in the back for the tenkan step emphasizes the angle at which nage can most easily be off-balanced. Ideally, and often occurring in this dojo, there is little stress felt by nage in the wrist in tenkan. The response of nage is based more on the angle of uke's tenkan and the connection maintained through sensitivity in the uke's wrist than by cranking the angle of nage's wrist or tricking or forcing nage to move. It seems like I forget and relearn this every time.

Mostly my concentration has been on increasing the amount of sensitivity I have to my partner's movements, and looking for the 'open spaces' where nage doesn't want to resist and I feel no temptation to force or trick.

We did an interesting variation on kotegaeshi last night that starts out like shihonage and changes to the kotegaeshi movement. The technique ends with nage's face down on the mat, uke's hand pinning the nage's elbow the floor, and uke's elbow pinning nage's neck. Nage's hand is pulled back like kotegaeshi pin to finish.

Maybe I can show some Aikidoka people next time I see you(at summer camp in August?). Of course, all this stuff is hard to describe in words, which is why I've mostly left it out of my blog. I'm thinking about Aikido a lot more than I write about it.