I just attended a seminar in the San Francisco Bay Area with Yoshinobu Takeda sensei (7th dan, Shonan Renmei Aikikai, Japan) and I thought I'd write something up about it before I took off to go see Saito sensei this weekend.

I attended this very same seminar series last year in June and had a great time, so I decided to fly back out to the Bay Area and reattended. I can say now that I wasn't disappointed.

The seminars took place at Linday Holiday sensei's North Bay Aikido in Santa Cruz, Frank Doran sensei's Aikido West in Redwood City, and Sunny Skys sensei's Aikido of Fremont in Fremont. All of the days were well attended, although it seemed like there were more people attending last year. People from all over the place came for this seminar including Japan, Canada, Colorado, Washington, Washington DC, and, of course, from all over the Bay Area.

How does his aikido feel? Wonderfully soft. It's the kind of aikido that makes me want to be thrown around by him for hours. It's the kind of aikido that isn't hard on the joints. It's the kind of aikido that makes you relaxed. It's pretty neat.

As last year, pretty much everything he went over was this concept of "gathering." He kept saying, "Imagine yourself in the middle of this gigantic whirlpool with you in the center. Everything gets drawn into your center. When your partner becomes connected to you in this manner, they'll move when you move."

I personally really like the way this "gathering" kind of aikido feels. Rather than a "crushing" manner in which to affect center, there is a certain feeling of being drawn out and elongated when Takeda sensei threw me around. This, of course, doesn't mean that my center wasn't affected; rather, it was just affected in a different way than most people's way of affecting center.

Takeda sensei emphasizes relaxation and the use of the entire body as a whole. Each and every single two hour session over the weekend (two per day), Takeda sensei had us doing suwariwaza for thirty to ninety minutes. In these sessions, rather than trying to "do" ikkyo, we sat and felt it by drawing out partner into our center and then moving to draw them all the way out. We also did a number of interesting exercises that I believe made everyone relaxed and using the entire body by, pretty much, going down into a lying position. Hard to describe, but it was great fun.

One way in which Takeda sensei has been described is that he really takes each principle and allows us to look at it in a longer space of time. We went over things like the concept of connection (musubi), a unified body, relaxation, irimi, and off-balancing (kuzushi) in a manner that really allowed us to take each one of these concepts and stretch them out over a long period of time. Good stuff.

He really didn't do that many techniques throughout the weekend, and that was perfectly OK with me. The running joke was that after every practice, Takeda sensei would say, "OK. We just went over a lot of theoretical stuff, so we'll get more into techniques during the next session." I don't think he every really did any "techniques" per se. Rather than "doing" techniques, he showed by just gathering your partner into your center and then turning were all you needed to do "techniques."

Something else that I will have to say is that what we practiced isn't the most "martial." People taking ukemi in this style pretty much have to be cooperative in order for this kind of practice to occur. However, I think that there is enough space for this kind of practice to happen, and I personally appreciate it quite a lot. Just in the space of a few hours, Takeda sensei had the entire dojo doing stuff that they had never done. I think that this kind of training is very effective in experiencing and delving into these kinds of principles.

After class, Takeda sensei is very happy to stay for a while (about an hour) and just throw people around. Most of his students do the same with each other, too. This kind of after-training training (ato-geiko) is done at his dojo regularly with a junior student asking one of their seniors to throw them around. One catch is that the senior student gets to decide when to stop throwing them around with the number of throws ranging from pretty much a minimum of twenty throws up to uke wanting to crawl into a corner of the dojo and puking. Personally, I wish we did more of this kind of training; I think it's great for building up your ukemi skills.

One of the things Takeda sensei said over the weekend was to go ahead and completely forget about everything he said, as the body has learned and, in fact, knew all of this already. I guess writing stuff like this up sort of goes against that, but I never was a good student...

Special thanks goes out to Neville and Jane who really did a great job of putting this entire seminar series together. I think they did a wonderful job. Thanks also to Paul and Carol at Aikido West for putting on a rather nice dinner party on Sunday evening; I also heard that Yannick and Jennie of North Bay Aikido put on a nice dessert party on Saturday night which I didn't attend.

I'm looking forward to seeing Takeda sensei again sometime.

Jun