Hi, my name is Linda Eskin. In May of 2009, at age 46, I came to Aikido to improve my horsemanship. It's become about much more than that for me.
I train with Dave Goldberg Sensei at Aikido of San Diego.
Everything I say here is just what I say. Don't believe me. Find out for yourself.
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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, 2010, 2011, 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.
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Linda Eskin
MORE AIKIDO READING
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 them and the doing them my brain flips from “swoosh” to “wham!”
A few days ago when one of our instructors said we were going to work on high falls (Yay!) a fellow student jokingly suggested that we should “work on low falls instead.”
Huh… I think I like that idea!
The point isn’t to get lots of air, it’s to land comfortably, with as little impact as possible. Keep (or get) your head low to the mat. Reach over and touch the mat as you rotate into rolling down softly. No “wham!”
Thinking of them as “low falls” takes a little of the edge off, and is a handy reminder that the idea is to get low, not high.
I think I’ll call them low falls from now on.
