This morning's first class was taught by Whited Sensei from Chicago Aikikai. After warming-up, Whited Sensei had us practice various kokyunages with very sharp ukemi. From her demostrations and explaniations, her karate background is clearly evident with the types of direct punches and kicks that she incorpates into her Aikido. My mood was off for her class, although I felt fine coming out of 25-minutes of Zen sitting, I really wasn't prepared for the hard style Whited Sensei was teaching. It was a good class but not really my style first thing in the morning.
The second class was Saotome Sensei's outdoors bokken practice. During the paired bokken kata techniques, Saotome Sensei had nage always started with the bokken sheathed and then responded to uke's attack either before uke's sword actually left the scabbard. A couple of the technqiues we practiced involved ducking under uke's sword yokomen strike to the neck and then nage withdrawing the bokken to upward groin cut uke from the bottom, the second is drawing the sword
Doran Sensei taught the third class on the indoors mat. We spent most of the class practicing katatetori katennage uchi and soto (inside and outside) omote and ura variations. Due to the density of people on the mat, most of the time I didn't actual throw my partner but practiced the technique up to the point of throwing uke. I learned some new katennage variations and the last technique of class was a surawaza koshunage (breath throw).
The forth class was taught by Saotome Sensei. Saotome Sensei started class by telling us a story about O'Sensei. When doing iriminage, O'Sensei would not touch uke but still uke would follow him when O'Sensei did a tenkan. Saotome Sensei wondered why uke would follow and just continue straight. Saotome Sensei said that when a human being is focused on the goal, they will narrow their focus to achieve their goal which is different from a machine that continues straight and ignores intention of the attacker. We then practiced iriminage in a number of different variations and continued to on an exercise where four ukes lined up behind each other and nage had to tenkan and try to do iriminage on the whole line. While Saotome Sensei was able to easily throw all of the ukes, when I was doing the exercise, I felt lucky to break the balance of all four of the ukes. We also worked on a number of kokyunages and Saotome Sensei emphasized that kokyunages as breath throws comes from internal to nage and not some external force.
The fifth and final class was an outdoors weapons class taught by Murashige Sensei. We paired up with bokken verse jo. I learned a number of new jo techniques for responding to bokken attack, how to get out of the way and to deliver a counter-strikes to break up uke's shomen or tsuki bokken attack.
Tonight is the dinner and dance at Hotel Colorado in Glenwood Springs. I had a good time last year and I am looking forward to going again this year.
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