Aikido Seiryukan Spring Seminar

 

This weekend just passed, our aikido club hosted a two-day seminar featuring Atsushi Mimuro Shihan, plus his wife Cathy and some of his students from Yokohama. We had a whole bunch of other guests as well, from Australia and around New Zealand.

It was a fantastic weekend. Mimuro Shihan's concepts and technique are very interesting to me, and he conveyed them very well.

I haven't written much at all about aikido on this blog, but it's been a major part of my life for many years — 36 years as of October 2nd this year.  (October 1st is our club's anniversary, but I couldn't find the dojo on that first day of training and didn't turn up until the next day).

I've tried several martial arts since I was a child — judo, karate, taekwondo, kung-fu — but aikido is the one that resonates most with me and that I enjoy the most. Which is why I've kept at it for three and a half decades; life is too short to spend on things you don't enjoy.

I started judo as a child, and had some competition success at a very junior level. But it was really just an after-school activity for me. I enjoyed it well enough, but had no particular affection for it.

Later on, as a teenager and young adult, I was interested in martial arts as a means of self-defence. Also, kung-fu movies were very popular at that time, which no doubt also had an influence on me. But again, I had no deeper interest than that.

I had a couple of friends who had practised aikido, and I knew of its existence, but I didn't try it until 1990 when I was 28. I was hooked immediately. I can't say exactly what it was that appealed to me about it so much, but it did, and it kept me at it over the years until I gradually became interested in the less obvious ways in which it works — biomechanical aspects of course, but also the ways in which our minds govern and respond to both our own movements and actions and those of our partners. It is endlessly fascinating to me.

I am a lot less strong and flexible than I was when I was 28, but I know myself much better now. And I think I'm beginning to get the hang of some of the basic bits of aikido. There's so much more to learn though.