On the topic of being supple....

[yvannairie]

I've been reading Aikido and the Dynamic Sphere -- my teacher loaned it to me after I mentioned that I'm a highly verbal learner -- and while it's a bit of a struggle, reading it and trying to filter out the cultural preconceptions it projects onto its readers, it's been making stuff coalesce into words and helped me understand a bit better what exactly it is that I'm struggling with.

In the introduction, the book talks about the concept of extension and "ki" -- things that are also important in the style of karate I used to practice. We used to do a lot of projection and breathing excercises -- a lot of it during kata, but also stuff like balance, meditation and striking excercises (yeah, we used to break roof tiles, I still think with the right focus I can break three at once) and the extension of your strike through the object you're striking is key to a lot of those techniques.

One of my favourite excercises to do was grasshopper strikes -- you bounce on your feet, and every time your heels touch the floor, you strike, then switch hands -- which is almost entirely an extension excercise. You make yourself "weightless", and then on the moment of grounding you direct all the weight forward, through your strike. I'm used to always extending myself either downwards or forwards, because to get that "explosive" strike that was typical of our style. Ki, the way I've learned it, is... "static" is not entirely the correct word, but it's definitely linear, whereas the ki of aikido is largely spherical, and also never grounded the way ours is.

But you know what is something I do almost daily that... kind of has that kind of ki? Cycling. I cycle year around, and especially during the winter months, you honestly develop an entirely new kind of way of reckoning balance while you're biking, because wheels don't really grip down, they sort of grip... forward? Your center of balance -- the source of ki, the point from which you extend yourself -- isn't static, but rather a point that moves forward, and that's how you maintain your balance. Like, it's not a source, it's a vector.

So that sort of gives me an idea of why my motions feel weird even when they're right. A lot of my motions are super straight, direct, linear, and even when I'm doing the technique correctly, that's what distorts the feeling of the move enough for me to not understand how it actually works. It's really making me wish we had katas that didn't use the staff, so I'd have something I could do by myself to teach me a more appropriate way of moving.