Great start Amanda. You have a lot of good thoughts here. I like this journal very much. I'd like you to consider the following.
1) Aikido practice is a marathon, not a sprint, and the people who make deep progress are those who are able to train consistently over a very long period of time. This means avoiding physical and emotional burnout issues such as those you mention.
2) Aikido requires hardness as well as softness, and these have to be in balance---the more we have strength, the more we also need sensitivity.
3) In general, people tend to focus only on their strengths, or only on their weaknesses, but not both.
So.... in your balanced diet of a sustainable aikido practice, I'd like you to consider where softness/receptiveness/sensitivity will fit in. This is as important as hard/fast/intense, and I would like to see you prioritize both from the outset. If you wish, you can choose this topic as a writing assignment. Enjoy Barcelona---see you next week!
Barcelona was wonderful. The seminar was great, but short, in terms of hours trained (in comparison to other seminars I've attended (4 hours on Saturday, 2 the other two days). I trained with a variety of people, including lots of locals, some Santa Barbarians (Tinka and Christy) and Hemmings Sensei, who was giving me a little bit of a hard time (but I was engrossed in the point he was making, which was the correct application of nikkyo — the same point you were making about compressing the forearm and wrist together toward your center).
Over a couple days of group practice, I managed to get into some mostly-yudansha lines. On the last day, we did a katatedori kokyunage variation, and the breakfalls finally worked — I was tired and relaxed, and my this and the repetition helped me to be more fluid. Hemmings Sensei made the comment to Malory that I had "lovely soft breakfalls," which I hope to be able to replicate at home. ;)
To Jonathan's question, about aikido requiring hardness and softness in training, there are a couple of ways this question can be approached. As far as training goes, I think I mentioned "training hard." By that, I meant training to the full extent of your abilities, learning to take ukemi which is fast and relaxed in response to nage giving you a good hard throw. In other words, not being lazy with regard to ukemi.
I think that if you can learn to take ukemi correctly, it does stop being quite so hard, you actually work less, and it's easier on your body. But getting to that point is a challenge. Once those pieces fall into place, you can move faster — get thrown and get back up again to attack again faster. To me, that's "training hard," which is different than hardness in the technique.
Within the technique, hardness and softness do need to be in balance. I feel that the attack must be sincere, and can be hard (depending on the level of your nage, of course), but there is a turning point (this could be like the crest of a sine wave), a reversal of power within the technique which occurs at the point where uke's attack is engaged.* Once you reach that point, you must have softness in order to receive the technique without resistance. If nage's technique doesn't engage with movement and fluidity, the opportunity should still be there for uke to reverse the technique. But that doesn't necessarily require hardness, but more like elasticity.
Also, too much strength or hardness in the attack can stifle the attack, which can lead nage to explore an alternative attack, or an atemi to help redirect or get uke off balance. If you come in hard, and remain hard, he or she really has little choice but to do this. You can't grab nage's wrist with all your strength and prevent them from moving, because at that point, they will "explore other alternatives." This could be painful for uke. So uke needs sensitivity from the very beginning, along with the very sincere attack, in order to be able to connect and engage with nage so that they can be receptive whatever movement comes next.
On to the next question ("In general, people tend to focus only on their strengths, or only on their weaknesses, but not both").
True for me. I tend to focus on my weaknesses, which I feel are flexibility and responsiveness (speed of). I am actually not sure what my strengths are, maybe one. I know what a lot of my weaknesses are. I think I am "strong," but only wrt to my gender and size. But relying on physical strength doesn't count for much when people are bigger than you are, of course, which is why we do aikido I guess, and not MMA.
I guess one of my strengths is that I can feel a good trajectory in a technique most of the time, if I can get the timing right. Like ikkyo, I see a line of movement that works based on the momentum. Most of the time I can get it right. But my timing needs to improve (a weakness).
Another weakness is that I tend to attack with too much strength and not enough sensitivity. Another is that I tend to favor my knees, which often leads to not getting low enough in a technique where getting lower would help unbalance uke. Another is stiffness in the arms and shoulders. One solution to these that I talked about in an earlier post is working on strength training so that I can use these body parts without as much fear of injury. But at the same time I'd need to work on flexibility and sensitivity so that the strength training doesn't override that.
*But yesterday we worked on maintaining a connection with weight behind it, with the idea that a reversal could happen, so I'm not sure anymore about anything. I guess it's all situational.
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