Relaxed Aikido, 1/3/09

I was able to stick around for the aikido class today. Pat introduced the “theme” or “focus” for the month of January (as far as I know, this is a new thing he’s doing – having a theme for each month…new to me anyway). The theme for January:

Relax.

Pat talked about the concept of “Sensory Motor Amnesia” in relation to relaxation, and how it fits in to our Aikido. I won’t even begin to try to explain it here, although I think I have the vaguest notion of at least the gist of what he was talking about. I really hope he’ll write about it on his blog, and how it relates to aiki, because it’s pretty darn interesting. Wink-wink, nudge-nudge.

We began with Tegatana, then repeated the first 3 steps while focusing on keeping our arms very relaxed…limp, even. This was a good gauge of how well we were controlling our momentum. Then we tried it with a super-relaxed neck, but with the imaginary string pulling us upright from the top of our heads.

We moved on to releases 1 through 4, and then camped out on releases 1 and 2. We worked on the relaxation principle in the releases, and explored how complete relaxation aided the techniques, helped us get into proper positions, etc. I’m constantly amazed at all the cool principles that can be found in these “simple” exercises.

Next we worked on shomen ate. We started by practicing the first motion “template”, then on to the brush-off, and finally shomen ate, from a failed brush-off (failure could be caused by environment, i.e. a wall, or an extra athletic or aggressive attacker). We looked at how the technique works best (and easiest) when tori is truly trying to brush off and create space from uke, not trying to set him up for the technique. The times I was able to really try to separate, and uke came at me anyway, I didn’t have to look for shomen ate, or try to “set it up”…it just….appeared! It’s so cool. Even seeing that in action, there were times I still evaded into an aggressive position, ready to bust uke whether he continued his attack or not. Pat called it a “magnifying glass on our ego”. How true! We also looked at the best time to “catch” uke with shomen ate if he insists on coming after you. There’s a “sweet spot” during the technique for when to catch uke. It’s after he makes the turn to pursue you (after the evasion), but before he’s fully moving in his new direction. We practiced finding that for a little while. Pat and I have played with this before, and last time, we looked at how the throw actually comes from uke’s resistance to what’s happening, it’s not tori shoving him down. I don’t have to “impose my will” on uke to knock him down – I just have to find that sweet spot and fit…synch up…uke will throw himself eventually.

To end the class we played with shihonage coming out of motion template #1, and aikinage out of a less-than-ideal shihonage. This was a super-fun class! The relaxation in the releases was an epiphany, as was the almost-automatic shomen ate when I behaved right, haha!