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Ok so I am having that stressed out about Aikido feeling that I get every time that I am going to test. I ask myself questions like why am I testing? Am I really ready for this? All that kind of thing. Seems to be normal for most of the people that test. You want to make sure that your test looks as good as it can in a room full of people that are either looking at your demonstration to learn something, or are more advanced than you are and are able to see the things that could use more practice. :-)
The worst of it seems to be remembering the three vbariations that I have for each of the techniques that I have to do… Why is that so hard?
Tuesday night we were working on rolling, and I was trying to roll across the mat without changing my feet, and doing one side then the other side. I ended up doing cross body rolls for half of my rolls. This was strange, they were all good rolls, but some of them felt harder to do than others and I couldn't figure out why until Sensei came by and pointed out that half of them were cross body rolls, and said that they were hard, but looked good. I think that he thought that I was confused about rolling correctly. I remember when I was doing cross body rolls before and felt like a square, these were not like that at all, I must have gotten a little better at it. :-)
Yesterdays weapons class went worse than normal. I think that I am going backwards with every weapons class that I do….Egads!!!!
I have agreed to Uke for Linda K and Mike O for 5th and 4th Kyu respectively. Most of the dojo apparently is looking forward to watching Linda's test due to the size difference between us. Working with her is a blast, I see all the places that I can work on taking upper body strength out of my techniques all together. ( Yes I know that it should not be there at all!!!!) Yesterday Mike told me that he can't be there on the Saturday for the tests, and wondered if we could do them during the week, this was Oked by sensei. Wow that is quite a relief, I was worried a little about doing a 5th and 4th Kyu test as Uke, and then a 2nd Kyu test as Nage all in the same day. I think that I can handle the 5th Kyu test as Uke and the 2nd Kyu test as Nage in the same day, but all of them together were starting to worry me.
Turns out too that I have been calling one of the teenagers in the Dojo the wrong name for a YEAR!!! Really! how embarrassing, and he has never corrected me; probably has something to do with being a teenager and not correcting adults. EGADS!!!!!!
Missed a chance to blend with a stranger emotionally and make the world a better place on Tuesday. I could not get off the line of my own energy, enough even to ask them the question back that they were litterly screaming at me over and over again. I am really disappointed in myself for the failure to do so. Felt like failing a major test handed out by the universe. Maybe in it there was a place to practice some real world Aikido like Terry Dobson discovered on the train in Japan. I was feeling truly depressed about it, until I realized that Terry's story came out of his own failure to do real world Aikido, and the success of the old man in contrast to it. So maybe it was more of a lesson than a test. I hope the other person got what they needed which was for someone to listen to them for a while.