The reflections of a 47-year old beginner in Aikido, about training, learning, aiki, horsemanship, and life.
Linda Eskin is horse person (dressage/trails), user experience planner (Web/apps), and a student at Aikido of San Diego.
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ADDITIONAL RESOURCES
A LITTLE ABOUT ME
Most of the posts here are duplicates of my posts from
my blog on AikiWeb.com, a very active and friendly community of Aikido students and teachers. If you are a member of AikiWeb, and would like to comment, please do so there.
I am a beginning student of Aikido, a martial art that, like horsemanship, takes a lifetime to master. These posts are only my own observations on my own experience. You should not rely on anything I say here. Any inept or incorrect information is my own responsibility, and should not be a reflection on others.
I am grateful to
Dave Goldberg Sensei for being an extraordinary teacher, and for creating an engaged, thinking, and compassionate community of students and teachers at
Aikido of San Diego. If you are in the area, visitors are always welcome to observe classes. If you are a student at another local dojo, keep an eye on
our dojo calendar for upcoming seminars and other events.
Copyright 2009, Linda Eskin. Please feel free to share any of my poetry, online, or in print, keeping my name and any other acknowledgments with it. I will almost certainly be happy to let you use anything else I've posted here, with proper attribution, but please ask first.
Contact me via e-mail
Linda Eskin
MORE AIKIDO READING
Whew! (day 16 of 16)
This is a quick post about today’s classes. Tomorrow I’ll put down some thoughts about the whole 16 days.
There were 2 classes today: Weapons, and open hand.
In the weapons class we did the first 10 jo suburi. I think I’d done them all before, but at any rate none were a mystery, so I was able to focus on doing them correctly. I need to work on my timing. I was coming in ahead of the strike, which isn’t a terribly good idea. I’m feeling pretty good about most of the jo techniques I’ve learned. I’m sure they are very crude at this point, but I think I have the concepts down enough to practice a bit on my own, and recognize at least some of the things I might be doing wrong.
In the second class we worked mostly (entirely?) on preparing to do breakfalls. (Yay! Something I have done nearly none of before today.) Not exactly like this video shows, but that’s the idea. I was with a group doing really easy, low stuff (like early in that video), while most of the class did more advance practice (like later in that video). Even the “easy” stuff feels really awkward and scary at first! Like “no way, I’ll die.” LOL But by the end of class it was feeling much more natural.
It’s not that I’m in any hurry to be doing spectacular high falls, but I feel a little “at risk” not knowing the basics. Like driving a car without knowing where the brakes are. So I was really glad to start working on this a little.
More tomorrow about the whole experience of my 16-day “Personal Aikido Intensive” experiment.
