Day three of Aikido started out with my first “breathing excercises,” AKA Meditation. I was interested in doing some meditationy stuff but never really got around to it before, so it was nice to be force-fed it. I have some issues kneeling for long periods though, and it’s hard for me to stay relaxed while sitting cross-legged, but it gives me something to work on.

Besides that though, meditating didn’t work at all. The particular excercise we were doing was imagining a grape-sized sphere in the middle of your being, and with every exhale it doubles in size. I started getting self conscious that my ‘being’ was starting to touch other peoples beings; then I started wondering how big doubling it would be (if it’s the size of Victoria, would doubling it take it to Saltspring or Galiano?), and finally I started thinking about how fast it would have to be expanding to cross half the country in a single exhale, and I found myself slowing my breathing as I didn’t want to break the laws of physics.

Yeah that’s a relaxing excercise. “Tear the universe apart at the seams! Now breath calmly in through your nose…” Right.

One of the students has a blackbelt from a different brand of Aikido, and Sensei allowed him to show two or three different throws that he had learned. They were geared for a large attacker to be taken down by a small/light defender, and since I’m a big guy… well… heh.

I found one particular throw really, really effective:

That’s a much more flourishey version with lots of spinning around - my basic variant did the same particular motions but with a taste of minimalism.

I found it really interesting as the attacker, as your leading leg is like a solid tree trunk nailed to the ground - if the defender tried to push you back it just wouldn’t work. So the defender first pulls you a bit off balance, does a half step to yank your head down (which makes your leading leg buckle), and once your leading leg is gone a tiny shove backwards makes you topple. It was really cool.

After that we did more Jo training. I think the word is - kata? Which means single-person doing a routine with a Jo. I did 3 steps last time, and this day got up to 13 steps. It feels really neat to swing that piece of wood around in a controlled fashion (and having it effective as well).