I attended a seminar with Hiroshi Ikeda sensei this last weekend, and I thought I'd provide a wrapup of my experiences there.

This seminar was the first ASU seminar with Ikeda sensei for some of the local dojo in this area, and it was quite an event. The mat at Aikido of Fremont was quite packed, and people from many different dojo were in attendance.

I had a great time this weekend, perhaps due to the fact that this was the first time Ikeda sensei used me as uke in front of the seminar. And what an experience _that_ was. Wow. There's no feeling like grabbing that man's wrists and feeling I suddenly weighed 500 pounds, or feeling like there was a great big magnet affecting my hips left, right, up, and down. I've felt people who were strong and who could push and pull me around, but Ikeda sensei had a different sort of power of affecting me, what it felt like, directly into the core of my body. And feeling safe all the while he did.

Through the weekend, Ikeda sensei went through the most basic of principles including:

Move from your hips, and your hands shall follow. As Ikeda sensei says, "Hips move, hands move." As in the way that a baseball player swings a bat, his hips move and then his hands move immediately after the hips start moving. Use the power of the hips to aid in the movement of your arms, and don't rely upon the power of your arms alone.

When big movements are condensed into smaller ones, still use the same principles as those used when you perform the big ones. In the same manner as you would take uke's balance through their center line when performing ikkyo, kotegaeshi, or any other technique, make sure you affect uke in the same manner when you shrink these techniques down into smaller and smaller techniques. Contained in that fraction of a second are all of those principles you're working on when you do the big, "beginner" versions of techniques. Anyone who's ever been to any of Ikeda sensei's seminars will probably remember his "tiny spiral" ikkyo.

Unfortunately, we didn't do any weapons this weekend. I was sad.

I was also able to speak to Ikeda sensei a couple of times in Japanese, the longest being at lunch after the seminar on Sunday. As he is not as fluent in English as he is in Japanese, he seemed a lot more inclined to talk more in his native language.

One thing that he told me in Japanese was that he felt that people should not try to imitate him in his every moves but to try to understand what he was doing and try to accomplish the principles through their own bodies. He said that just doing the movements wasn't going to accomplish anything; people obviously have different bodies than he does, and it's not always going to work.

Ikeda sensei excused himself for using such a metaphor, but he said that often times, if you just swallow peanuts, they "come out" as peanuts; but if you chew them really well, they get digested and become a part of your body with its nutrients. In the same way, he said, unless you let your body take in the principles and digest them and not just mindlessly (bodilessly?) mimic others' aikido, your aikido will not work in the long run. In the beginning when you're picking up form, it's OK to just take in other people's forms, but he said that as you progress, you need to develop your own aikido.

Also, I liked what he said about how he felt people should try to train with as many instructors as you can so you can experience a lot of different approaches and interpretations to aikido.

There were five shodan testing candidates on Saturday evening after practice, and I was very happy for all of them as they all passed. I was a bit surprised that Ikeda sensei did not call for uke changes as often as I've seen them do in ASU shodan testing; he let the first candidate do all of his empty-handed techniques with the same uke. In the last batch of tests, they call for uke changes a lot more frequently than that. That coupled with people from the same dojo as the candidates being "ready" to jump in as uke made this a different kind of testing than the other batch of ASU testing I've seen. I was able to uke for my former dojo mate for her jo takeaways, though, and that was fun.

As far as people on the list are concerned, I bumped into Charly Oaks ("Charly in Texas") who is in the Bay Area for a couple of weeks and Michael Speece ("Wandering Aikidoka") formerly of Aikido of Fremont.

I would like to extend thanks to Sunny Skys sensei of Aikido of Fremont and Jim Alvarez sensei of Aikido of Livermore who both did a wonderful job of hosting the seminar. I'm hoping they'll be able to bring over other instructors like Kevin Choate and Tres Hofmeister soon.

Jun