Northern Wind

Howdy, folks. Been a loooooong time, I know. Imagine I wrote about the usual excuses, and let's just move on to what I've got on my mind, shall we? Okie-dokie... So last month, I had the opportunity to teach a few sessions of our kangeiko, or winter training session. I went... well, not like I'd hoped, truth be told. I was assigned four morning sessions. The first morning had a decent number of people show (about six, enough for three pairs), and I got to start delving into the topic which I had chosen for the Friday and Saturday morning sessions, which was aikido jo dori (defense against a jo). In Tomiki aikido, for some reason, we really only deal with weapons in koryu dai san kata and again in roku kata, and that's pretty much it. I don't know about other Tomiki schools, but ours has never spent much time aside from that on it. But I've run across a lot of other interest ideas from the broader aikido world that I thought would be fun to explore. T...

Just a handful of us in the morning, but we had one visitor from out of state, which was a nice change. We spent the class working on the first 4 releases where one person did the release with 3 others attacking him, one after the other, from wherever they stood. After that, we did the same thing over again, but now adding a hand change. The interesting thing to me was the difference in timing between all the participants. The two brown belts tended to be almost startled most of the time, if even in a very subtle way. Even though they knew what release we were supposed to be doing, they weren't sure which hand to stick out, who was attacking next, or even if they had remembered to do the right release (I kept telling them I didn't care; as long as they got off the line and kept moving, aikido would come out). Most of their reactions fell along the lines of, "Oh, crap, I'm being attacked! What do I do?" The shodan, however, seemed a little more in control. He could...

I'm not getting nearly the same cool information as those who are able to attend the mid-morning and mid-afternoon sessions, but I've benefitted from what little I can attend. Yesterday (day 2), I accidentally slept through my alarm and missed morning aikido. I never do that. In fact, for the most part, it takes an act of God to keep me from making morning classes (or maybe illness or broken down car). If anything, I usually wake up on my own before my alarm. I don't really know what happened. Unfortunately, I missed seeing what Nick Lowry Sensei had to offer by way of some randori and multiple attacker instruction. Maybe there will be a video someday =) I made it to the noon class, where Jim Ellison Sensei took everyone through a series of simple exercises that help you "go with the flow" of uke's movement. Great stuff, but stuff I've been through before, so nothing new there. This morning, on the other hand, I woke up for some strange reason at 4 in the...

To be honest, I'm not able to take this week off and participate in the mid-day sessions, but I will be in the morning class as usual, plus the Tuesday and Thursday noon classes. I'd like to make at least one evening block of classes, but we'll see. If you'd like to check out a few pics of today's morning session, which dealt with aikido randori and multiple attackers, as well as the afternoon session, which dealt with a lot of sword work from jodo and aikido's san kata (plus future day sessions), check our Derek Hall's new blog and Kyle Sloan Sensei's blog . For my little morning class, Kyle was nice enough to stop in and he watched us do a little hop randori for a while, and then had him chime in on what we need to work on. After that, I was eager to pick his brain about escape ideas from kazure kamishiho gatame, and ushiro kesa gatame. Tomorrow, for aikido, I have no idea if anyone out of the ordinary will stop by, but otherwise, I think we'll fo...