Dojo Thoughts
The other day I had a painting show on the PBS station playing in the back ground while I did my house chores. You know the kind that teaches you how to put brush to canvass and create a scene. To me landscape painting is fun once you know how to hold the brush and stroke or dab the canvass. As long as you know that you’re working from the back ground out. In this lesson a statement made by the teacher struck home for me. It was really not indented for why it started me thinking. Like the painting my thoughts started to build from statement into aikido.
The instructor was talking about how painting will make a headache go away. Really!!! Now he has got my attention, why does this happen? His reason was simple yet complicated when you try to apply it. The instructor said that headaches are on one side of the brain and when you paint you use the other side of the brain. Maybe he is on to something. How many times have you been told to just train and leave your problems at the door? In reality you can’t leave your problems at the door if you don’t want too. Are you just can’t because of the severity of the stress that goes with them.
Now you know that as an aikidoka you can never truly turn off the thought process of aikido. I started to think about those times I have trained with something wrong whether it is a headache brought on by stress or some minor injury. If the lesson was “good” (that is the key word here, you have to be totally engulfed in the lesson) I never thought about the headache or injury until well after the class. Now this does not mean that if the injury is reinjured or the subject that was giving me stress was reintroduce during this class my mind does not switch back to the pain. I bet you all have done this in the past and wondered why it really does seem to work that way.
Sensei Mike Swederska
Instructor: Soto-Deshi, San-Kawa Dojo
Shin-Gane Dojo Cho
314 799-1998
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