We opened with tegatana, focusing on relaxation and posture.
We played with releases 1-8 for a while, and while certain parts of 6 and 8 still felt better to me, other aspects (that I used to have less trouble with) seemed to give me problems. Sometimes it feels like when one thing gets fixed, it pushes 2 or 3 other things out of line. Ah well, there's time enough to "master" this stuff, right?
We played with our "continuous Junana" cycle, for Junana 1-5. That's really good practice. It just feels way more awkward when done on the weak side.
We looked at a few tai chi exercises to demonstrate deflection, angles, evasion, etc, and that's always neat. This led into a little bit of light randori, and I was amazed at how different randori can feel when you're looking at / thinking of different principles. We stayed in motion, and focused on yielding... "out-wussing" the other guy. You can't always be stronger than your opponent, but you can be weaker - and neat things can happen when you do that. This art continuously blows my mind.
We worked on Junana 11 quite a bit, from the perspective of it being a modified number 6. I need to focus on taking the slack out of uke's arm and pushing through him.
As I'm hitting stride as a sankyu, I'm really struck by how different the art feels now. Pat described the feeling in terms of learning letters, then words, then sentences (and learning to write in cursive somewhere in there). In any case, it definitely feels different. Sankyu feels as different from previous ranks as white belt through green belt felt different from knowing nothing about aikido at all. I'm very excited about where my aiki will go from here.
Sounds like you're making great progress! I've always been impressed by skilled aikidoka and try to implement as many aikido principles as possible in my own training.
ReplyDeleteSlowly but surely, bro...
ReplyDelete:o)