This post is part of the First Year of Budo series

Well this was mighty interesting particularly on the Iaido side of things but jumping straight in.

Jodo

A lot of my techniques were picked to pieces today. Hikiotoshi in particular has a lot of work to be done and this is only concerning the movements not relating to the adjustments made when striking the sword. For a lot of my techniques I need a deeper stance. I don’t have trouble using a deeper stance but often when I strike forward with a technique I don’t move the front foot far enough forward (and I bring the back foot forward) which forces me into a shallow stance. I’d love to be able to just glide across the floor as some do but my feet often seem to catch on the floor. Maybe I need to concentrate on moving more from the center of my body (I’ve been reading a fair bit on the hara and related ki topics).

My techniques where you catch a swordsman’s wrists with the jo near eye height (I’ve forgotten the name) were not too bad. I just need to always remember to move the jo before I move. For Tai atari(I think that is it), when throwing the sword away the left hand pulls down a little breaking the opponents center before you start spinning the jo around. The same goes for all of these techniques, you break the opponents center before you move. Otherwise chances are you will not be able to move the opponent and/or your own center will be broken.

Also with the techniques like this with the body on a 45 degree angle, I need to remember to push off with the ball (closer to toes) of my back foot to help keep my feet parallel. In addition I think I need to be a lot lighter on my feet with these techniques as I tend to drag the back foot as it follows which causes a lot of stress on one of the tendons near my ankle.

Finally I thought I did kata 1 fairly well on the jo side :).

Iaido

Sensei had me using an Iaito again today so it is something serious. I was surprised how heavy it was and the weight caused some issues for my noto. On that, it is so much easier to do sayabiki(moving of the saya) with an iaito saya. Bokken saya (atleast the one I use always gets the sageo(rope) holder caught in my obi (belt).

Once again we were all brutally murdered(not so violently) for cutting too low and not cutting out far enough. So then we did a practice drill where everyone had bokken. One would hold out the bokken horizontally at head height and then the other would strike out at it. An interesting exercise, anyway I just need to keep practicing cutting out when I strike at home, also remembering to hold the katana high above my head (ie. not get lazy when my arms are tired).

I think my drawing cuts were a bit better today (probably thanks to the extra practice I did this week). They felt like they were coming out of the saya much more straight. Also my sliding forward on one knee was rather nice. When moving backwards before doing noto(put sword away) I need to make sure I’m going into a deep enough stance and not leaning backwards. When I go down to kneel the legs need to be parallel and this can only be achieved with the right depth of stance.

The coolest thing happened when I was practicing kata number 6 for the 7th or 8th time. Essentially my mind was locked down, it felt like I was outside of it and I could reach up and tap it inside some sort of box. So the mind was shutdown from its thinking and analysing and then I could feel a little like twirl of energy in my lower spine like fire rising in a whirling wind. So for the next few kata techniques I pushed more with this center sort of energy to do my techniques and low and behold everything I did was much more fluid. My stance deepened and I sunk lower into it. Relaxing more my noto felt pretty awesome as I pushed the sword out in front of me and drew it back. None of my technique was perfect but I was much more relaxed and everything flowed more. And it felt really cool :D. Shame it took 3 hours of practicing to get there.

Next week I will inquire about uniform and an Iaito, which will probably arrive in who knows how many months.