LET'S TRY IT AGAIN, THIS WAY

I've worked with a variety of metaphors to help me better understand the aikido principle that in every tenkan there is an irimi (how one turns without a hint of "moving back." I've started with the New York u-turn into a parking space across the street and tried to translate that into hip movement. I've played with weighting and pointing and a bunch of things. My understanding improves but my doing it invariable lags behind (bodies are soooo uncooperative).

The other evening, a different approach was presented to this problem. The teacher clearly knew what she was aiming for us to try, and she was presenting it pretty clearly, but most of us were having trouble embodying it. I don't think it was a weakness in the teaching; rather, for those of us who did "get it" in our heads, we were having trouble getting it from our heads to our bodies.

I finally had the "aha' mental moment in which I could reduce it to a simple mantra for how to move. I still couldn't do it well, certainly couldn't do it with a person attached to me who I should throw, because it felt so different that it took all my concentration to just get my center, hips, and feet working together the way the teacher was suggesting.

Coincidentally, I was planning all day to write on this subject tonight, and just before sitting down to write I went over to check my friend, the budo bum's, blog and found his posting on the question of kata. I commented: "Personally, the kata that have the most meaning for me are those that comprise the movements that constitute the most basic building blocks of the art. It lets all from newbie to master to have a base to which to return for reality testing, muscle memory, polishing, refinement."

Having written that, I realized as I clicked over here to write, that what would serve best with this new teaching is for me to treat it as a solo kata, working on it alone at home, so I can internalize the movement. Then I can try incorporating it into technique at the dojo.