January 2012
7 posts
2 tags
My Aikido Teachers
This is sort of a sister post to My Aikido Timeline. Here I’ll try to keep track of all the teachers I’ve had the privilege of training under. They are listed starting at the beginning, with most recent additions at the bottom, in order by the first time I trained with each. I will be adding to this post over time. Putting this list together just reminds me of how extraordinarily...
1 tag
Have Fun
From the Aikido of San Diego Membership Handbook, by Dave Goldberg Sensei:
Have fun.
Aikido practice should be a joyful experience, and playful most of the time. If you aren’t having fun, you may be treating yourself too seriously. Don’t be in a hurry to master anything. You have the rest of your life to enjoy your training, benefit by it, discover, and grow.
True for Aikido training, and for...
1 tag
1 tag
The Bridge Seminar 2012, Days 2-5
Well, fine. I can’t train 6 hours a day and keep up with blogging at the same time. So, here’s a bit of catching up.
The seminar was a wonderful experience, with the ouchy exception of some persistent leg muscle spasms that started a couple of weeks ago. I got through most of it, and had a good deal of fun, but was also pretty limited in what I could do, and distracted, which was...
1 tag
The Bridge Seminar 2012, Day 1
For the third year running, I am participating in the Aikido Bridge Friendship Seminar in San Diego, with Doran Sensei, Ikeda Sensei, Tissier Sensei, and 6 guest instructors. sandiego.aikidobridge.com
Today, Thursday, was the first of five days, and just ran from 6-8 p.m., but I’m exhausted, so this is going to be quick. :-) I’m taking vacation time (Thursday-Monday) for the seminar,...
2 tags
2 tags
Hearing My Own Advice
My 2nd kyu exam is coming up in two weeks. Today a friend sent me my own advice, from my email to her before her first exam, a while back. If you are an aikidoka, you might hear echos of Robert Nadeau Shihan, via George Leonard Sensei’s book “The Way of Aikido”. If you are a horseperson, you might recognize the teachings of Olympic Dressage Coach, Jane Savoie. I try to train this...
December 2011
3 posts
1 tag
1 tag
Expectations, Failure, and Persistence
A friend from work shared a link today to this article: The Trouble with Bright Kids. It describes some research on the kind of positive, praising feedback we get when we succeed, and how that can influence our chances of success on future attempts. It’s also interesting to read how girls/women and boys/men are affected differently.
It really rings true for me. Or hits a nerve. Or maybe...
November 2011
3 posts
2 tags
No 2012 Aiki Retreat. Now what?
Well, bummer. It’s official. The CAA “Menlo Retreat” is on sabbatical for 2012. The hope is it will return, in some new form, in 2013.
I’m disappointed to not be going next summer. I was really looking forward to seeing everyone, and doing nothing but training for a whole week. My dorm things are still/already packed from last summer.
I feel very fortunate to have had the...
"Lessons from Missed Classes" →
I’m part of the team of women who write the column “The Mirror” on AikiWeb. This month was my turn again, so I wrote about something I learned from having had to miss class a few times recently. Enjoy.
Click the title of this post to jump to the column on AikiWeb.
Back to Just Training
I can’t believe it’s been months since I’ve posted anything here. There has been plenty going on, I just haven’t had the time to slow down enough to write much.
I did update my running post, My Aikido Timeline, with some recent and upcoming events. In September, Sensei led us in an Aikido In Focus workshop, Aikido, Fear, and Freedom. It’s hard to put into words the...
August 2011
12 posts
Enjoy Reading This Post.
“Breathe in, and enjoy breathing in.” “Breathe out, and enjoy breathing out.”
Patrick Cassidy Sensei, from Aikido Montreux, was here teaching a seminar recently. While instructing us in an ukemi exercise he told us to do something (basically a way of rolling around smoothly on the mat), and then he added the instruction to “enjoy doing” what we were doing.
...
2 tags
“Post-class racing mind
An impatient beginner
Summer moon rises”
– Linda Eskin
1 tag
“Happiness is when what you think, what you say and what you do are in harmony.”
– Mahatma Gandhi
1 tag
“Every day we slaughter our finest impulses. That is why we get a heart-ache when...”
– ~Henry Miller, Sexus
(via Roos View, on Facebook)
Everything is OK →
This is really too good to keep to myself. Click the title, above to go to a very simple, elegant, and reassuring website. Enjoy.
1 tag
Ten Things You Can Learn from Aikido
How to be soft.
How to be firm.
How to move.
How to be still.
How to teach.
How to learn.
How to flow around obstacles.
How to be the center around which things flow.
How to fall.
How to fly.
1 tag
Ten Ways to Help Out at the Dojo
As a member of the dojo community we often want to make a contribution in some way. As a beginner there’s often precious little we can do. We can’t teach. We often don’t know enough to jump in and take on dojo projects. But there are little ways we can help out. Keeping the dojo nice is one way any of us can do a little something. Sometimes we don’t notice the little details because we are...
2 tags
Ten Tips for Your First Weapons Class
When I first started in Aikido weapons held no fascination for me at all. I never watched Samurai movies. I was not fascinated by Ninjas. OK, so yeah, I had a throwing star years ago, but that’s about as far as it went. I wasn’t planning on training with weapons at all, in fact. And then one time I had my days mixed up, and ended up in a weapons class by accident. And I loved it. Go...
1 tag
2 tags
1 tag
Ten Tips for Visiting Another Dojo
[I’ve been meaning to write up a series of “Ten Tips” posts, for all those subjects where I have a little of this and that to say. This is as good a topic as any for the first one.] I love it when aikidoka from other dojo come play with us. It’s fun to meet people from all over the world, and to learn a little about how things are done in other places. I don’t...
2 tags
Train as Fast as You Can
One of the things we focused on in Cyril Poissonnet’s class tonight was speed. We worked on training only at a pace where we could still do the technique well. We noticed how we would often get impatient and rush, and our form would fall apart. It was a really useful exercise to train keeping an awareness of that. I should incorporate it into my day-to-day training.
Cyril demonstrated doing...
2 tags
Weapons Words - The Big Picture
Weapons work shares many words with open-hand training, but weapons also have a lot of words of their own. There are a bunch of numbered things, too, and those can be really confusing until you have a sort of framework for understanding them.
So here are some words about weapons stuff, starting with the basics. There will be another couple of posts going into jo words and bokken words. Often...
July 2011
8 posts
1 tag
Tolerating Bullshit
The article “Open-Minded Man Grimly Realizes How Much Life He’s Wasted Listening To Bullshit” on the parody news site, TheOnion.com, begins:
“CLEVELAND—During an unexpected moment of clarity Tuesday, open-minded man Blake Richman was suddenly struck by the grim realization that he’s squandered a significant portion of his life listening to everyone’s bullshit,...
2 tags
1 tag
Practicing "Low Falls"
High falls, hard falls, break falls…
Just the names conjure up tension. I have fun practicing them, and am improving (softer/safer). But I also end up with some interesting bruises and sore spots now and then, from doing them in a slappy, braced, breath-holding, brute-force-ish kind of way.
We go about learning to do them in a relaxed, easy way, but at some point between the working up to...
2 tags
1 tag
3rd Kyu Test Prep - The Real Story
A few days ago I posted a note to myself on preparing for my upcoming 3rd kyu exam. My test is tomorrow morning. Here’s how things have really gone:
Do laundry and cut your nails two or three days ahead. [check]
Go to class on Friday night.
Stay after to work out a few questions on some techniques.
Pick out a jo and bokken to use, and put them where you can find them on the rack.
Decide...
1 tag
Freeing Ourselves from "I Can't..."
Recently a teacher wrote a frustrated blog post about their students not training enough to really improve, not participating in seminars with visiting instructors, and not supporting the dojo community.
The context was Aikido, but it could have been music, horsemanship, or anything else. I see the same thing happen all over.
We mostly live in the same world. We have jobs, families, and other...
1 tag
3rd Kyu Test Prep - Notes to Self
Test Date: Saturday, 9 July, 2011, Test Time: Immediately following a 9 a.m. class
Dear Self,
You will have a happier day, and a more successful test, if you follow these instructions:
Do laundry and cut your nails two or three days ahead.
Go to class on Friday night, then go home.
Set out gi, clothes for going to lunch, weapons, Gatorade, banana, & a protein bar.
Review your Giant...
June 2011
13 posts
2 tags
1 tag
1 tag
WatchSome late-night fun after a day of training at the Aiki Retreat.
1 tag
1 tag
1 tag
1 tag
Aiki Retreat 2011, Monday
Today’s classes were Doran and Nadeau in the morning, Ikeda and Mary Heiny in the afternoon. I can’t begin to report what they taught, but in each case it was an in-depth exploration of something. It’s nice to be able to slow down and really pay attention to the details.
Doran Sensei showed a lot of techniques, and demonstrated for many of them how they are derived from sword...
1 tag
1 tag
1 tag
Getting to the Aiki Retreat
This will be brief, because I’m wiped out, and morning comes early! I had a few adventures on the way up, saw a lot of California, met up with a few friends, and all in all had a great trip north. It was 479.9 miles, door to door.
On the way I listened to The Four Agreements, and The Mastery of Love, both by Don Miguel Ruiz. Toward the end of the trip, coming over Pacheco Pass, I listened...
1 tag
Aiki Retreat Road Trip!
On Saturday morning I head off on my big Aikido adventure of the year, a road trip to the week-long Aiki Retreat at Menlo College in the Bay Area. This is my first live-in, out-of-town Aikido seminar, and I’m really excited to be going! Summer camp! Woohooo!
The instructors are Robert Nadeau Shihan, Frank Doran Shihan, and Hiroshi Ikeda Shihan, and Mary Heiny Sensei. I’ve been in...
3 tags
6th Kyu Words
This post is meant to help beginning students listen for, and understand, the technique names we hear in class (especially those on our 6th Kyu exam), and to give those names a little context. “Katate-dori shihonage omote” can sound a little overwhelming if you don’t know how to break it down!
[First, a reminder: Here is an introduction to my Words posts, if you haven’t read it...
May 2011
9 posts
“Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever...”
– Mr Steve Jobs (quoted by whereisthecoool)
1 tag
Resistance
A friend recently gave me a book she thought I might enjoy, and I really have. It’s the sort of book that whatever you open it up to, there’s something relevant to whatever’s going on. It’s poetic without being sappy, and inspiring without being preachy. Calming. Sensible.
Just yesterday day a friend on Facebook mentioned that it must have been really sad for me to give up...
2 tags
Who will we have become?
Sick with an ordinary cold Nothing to do but wait it out And feel sorry for myself For missing class
Instead I settle in with videos Random classes decades ago Years before even my teacher First heard of Aikido
Awkward, white-belted beginners Fresh-faced, eager, nameless ukes Who have these people become? Teachers? Writers? Leaders?
Do I know them? Are they the ones showing the way now? Do I...