senshincenter

I thought the article was very good. I especially liked Part 2. Excellent.

These are by no means objections to what was said in the article, only further applications of what Mr. Threadgill was saying: I have also found such training to take place in weapons training - even when the weapons are wood. Wood weapons traveling at full or near to full speed, where poor technique, be it for mental/emotional and/or physical reasons, warrants that one will be struck and struck hard often amounts to the same kind of training; I would also like to suggest that ukemi from intense applications of technique - where all Angles of Cancellations are present and especially where Kuzushi is created by Nage and not contrived by Uke - can also amount to such training and/or conditioning. In our dojo, this is one of the first places where one begins to tackle such issues.

An interesting aside, one I think I'm only beginning to get a grasp on, Chiba Sensei once said that it was for these reasons that practices his Zazen - because his mat training could no longer get intense enough for this kind of training to continue. That point always reminded me of what my mentor used to say about Zen - (paraphrasing) "Zen is not touchy-feeling feel good, Zen is like vinegar through the nose!"