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Last night keiko was a blast. I went in feeling a bit tense and tired. Sleep isn't my strong point these days. My 6mo. old still feeds at night and my 2 y/o woke up the previous night twice with a bloody nose. Then I had some work a friend of ours gave me working on landscaping with concrete blocks, which reminded my back of its nagging aches. The problem with irregular work is the body thinks it's in shape until after it's worked a few hours. I'm not complaining! I loved digging around outside in the good NW weather (a mild, gray drizzle). Still, I had the moment's thought of, "laying down would feel nicer than Aikido." I was wrong though.
I showed up and began warming up. My left-side lower back was barking at me so I focused on loosening that up. Rolling practice is one of the best ways I know to do this so I did that a little. It reminded me of when I trained before: I would always start with a ton of them, going as fast back and forth as I could. It gets the blood pumping and gets me thinking "round." One of my sempai who I had been training with a decade ago asked me to come practice some taijutsu with him and he helped loosen things up quite a bit more. Osae waza does wonders to tight muscles!
Sensei started class so we "warmed up" then started with bokuto as always. We began some negaeshiuchi then went to kiridome. One of the interesting things to me is how tired my feet get from kenjutsu, particularly when I haven't been practicing much. It was nice to feel more
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I have a lot of different thoughts rattling around my head about my training, and most of them are half-formed. I think my posts here have tended to reflect this. Driving home last night from keiko I kept coming back to a handful of thoughts. The most prominent of these wasn't so much a cogent idea as much as a new way of looking at the proportion of thought-to-action I have been manifesting. I have been very "mind-heavy" in my "gyo" and it has led to a very "body-heavy" way of moving. "Intellectually," I've recognized how stiff I am; how tight my shoulders are; how my chronic body aches and injuries are a sign of improper integration of...something. I understood it on a more visceral level last night.
Part of the reason I've been so mentally caught up in this idea of Aikido is that it represents a means which appears profoundly useful to affecting great effects in how one can live one's life. It provides physical stimulation for a healthy body, mental stimulation for a healthy mind, and when approached with a serious attitude, it refines these things to a razor-like edge. It is a way of organizing different functions of the mind and body (i.e. mind-body) and developing them into higher orders of function. The pressures we put ourselves through are a kind of gravity drawing things together, cooking them into new transformations, drawing them together, transforming them again and again until we have something diamond-like...or ore-like dependiing on how much intensity we app
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Funny how stepping on the mat makes me want to...is it pontification I do here?...less. Today felt like day one. Good stuff. Taking a vow of virtual silence for a while. Cheers folks!
02-10-2012 02:10 PM 
