Training log

Aikido with Kel

• Everything ebbs and flows - including my motivation for practicing. lately I've been ratcheting my workouts up to try to beat the middle-aged flabbosity and I have been feeling tired and sore and generally blah. But Kel showed up for training with an in-person response to my question, "Why do you train?" that floored and humbled me. Kel said he does it as a meditation - a way to get to that extraordinary state of in-the-moment-ness where the burdens of the world dissolve. I had been thinking about begging off of practice today until I heard that.
• ROM, ukemi
• tegatana with emphasis on hara - moving from the center as if all your mass were concentrated in one spot
• hanasu with emphasis on the concept of monitoring the distance (ma-ai) between centers (hara) and moving when ma-ai is breached. We homed in on the last 4 releases, practicing reversing #5 into #6 and vice versa and reversing #7 into #8 and vice versa. Cool practice.
• oshitaoshi from R1 as in ichikata. This was a cool practice in trandferring energy between tori and uke instantaneoudly and changing directions if it doesn't work. This sorta feels like tring all the directions in rapid succession to see which one will work. Alternately, you can think about this as alost programming the attacker to resist in a given plane, then overturning that plane on a perpendicular. Again, cool practice.