Aikido, 7/18/09

For tegatana no kata yesterday morning, the emphasis was on falling into the step instead of shifting weight and lunging. I've heard I-don't-know-how-many-times that I'm supposed to just turn off one leg and fall that direction, instead of first shifting my weight left to move to the right. One of the reasons is to take out extra motion. The trouble I've had is that it's pretty ingrained in me to compensate with one leg when the weight comes off the other one. I get the concept, but couldn't make myself do it. Pat directed my attention to my center when doing the lunging step, and sure enough, it moved one way before moving the other way. By thinking about my center, and not letting it move in that opposite direction before taking the step, I was finally able to get the feel for the "falling" step. I think I had been thinking of the means (falling step) as the end (eliminating wasteful motion), and it just wasn't working for me.

We played with releases 1 - 4. We talked about being in synch (timing tori's footfalls with uke's) and being in phase (tori's footfall is on the same side as tori's...their footfalls "match"). In releases 1 & 2, tori tends to end up both in synch (assuming good timing) and in phase. In releases 3 & 4, tori tends to end up in synch, but out of phase. A pretty neat thing happened: Coming off a release #1, my feet ended up in synch, but out of phase with Pat's. It was a really awkward feeling, but I didn't know why at first. Pat explained that through a ton of reps of release 1, my brain knows how it's supposed to feel. So when something went wrong with it, it was as if my subconscious said "Whoa, something's not right - I'd better not attack right now...let me flow with him and see what happens." It was encouraging...like my brain was making a withdrawal on stuff we've been depositing in my subconscious all along. I knew something was wrong before I noticed we were out of phase. Pat talked about the concept of "Not knowing what you know". That's deep.

We moved on to Chain 1, and I probably felt better about this chain than I ever have. We talked about the concept of the chain being divided into certain sections, but also the existence of "wormholes" where you could skip from one place in the chain to a later section without passing through the sections in between. Pretty neat stuff.

We ended this lesson with a technique called gokyu gyakugamaeate (or kokyunage). It was a slick shomen ate / brush off to uke's face without shomen ate's normal off-balance.