Aikido for 01/21/2009

Last night Jake and I had a shortened class because he had to leave early for a class project. None of the other students showed up so I was able to show Jake some of the things I learned from the Aikido Bridge Friendship Seminar. The first new addition was including an irmi exercise along with tenkan exercise at the beginning of the class. I tried to incorporated something I learned from each Shihan so...

• From Ikeda Sensei - we worked on morotetori kokyu ho leading with the elbow and I also worked with Jake on establishing unity with uke that Ikeda Sensei emphasized in his classes
• From Doran Sensei - we worked on the direct, palm-up opening he taught from katatetori and yokomenuchi attacks. We just did an ikkyo opening when practicing but most of the other techniques also flow from this opening as well.
• From Tissier Sensei - from katatetori, we practiced moving to each major point in clean and crisp fashion being conscious of each point and the transition between the points. We ended up doing a katatetori kaitenage omote technique.

Our next class will be on Saturday at 2:00 at the Gunnison Community Center. This should give us more time to explore more of what I learned at Aikido Bridge Seminar. It is important that I practice enough so that what I have learned in the past week does not disappear into the ether but become integrated into my own teaching and practice.

(The winter graphic comes via a BoingBoing post of public-domain children's graphic site of http://www.grandmasgraphics.com/)