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My girlfriend just bought a couple of Pilates CDs (Brooke Siler) and we've been playing with them. It's a lot of fun. Mostly it seems to have a lot to do with grounding the center of your body and then using extending out through different parts of the body in a way that engages core muscles. For me, what's really interesting right now is this idea of grounding and extending.
In Contact Improv class yesterday, we workd on strength and lightness. We focused a lot on the idea that some part of our body had to be connected to the ground (perhaps through our partner) and that other parts were not. If we could 'rebound' (or yield and push or connect solidly) from the parts that were supporting our weight, we could try to extend that out into the parts that were not. Any limb that was not actively being used for support was free to feel light and float up and away from the ground. This was actually a really powerful idea, because it put me in touch with how little I tend to think about the other limbs and also how much potential for lightness they have.
In Aikido, I guess the same ideas apply. I generally think of Aikido as being all about heaviness ('weight underside'), but, in fact, the goal here is also to work the strong connection to teh ground against a mobility, lightness and freedom in the rest of the body, particularly the limbs and the head (which I'm now used to thinkin of as another limb).
05-29-2003 03:48 PM 