Alison and Sunter Sensei
A real pleasure to have Andrew Sunter sensei visit our dojo again. We have been exploring internal strength and its ‘Ura’? existence in our school for some time now, and so the opportunity to practice with him after he had a chance to work with Gleason Shihan in Sydney was a terrific opportunity and quite a few more concepts to add to our existing tools
The classes were well supported and there was some opportunity for dialogue too which often bring serendipitous insights. Thus unsurprisingly (but with great delight) Anthony Sensei shared the similarity this had with the Nanba exercise brought by Will Reed sensei a year or so back. This was a stunning revelation not only that here is another influence already in Aikido Yuishinkai ( in additoion to Daitoryu from Okajama Sensei) but also because Reed sensei will return to Brisbane in August and we are yet to finalise the programme. But I digress, here in Nanba is the concept and physical practice of the moveable tandem within the abdominal cavity, together with familiar internal strength concepts of winding and binding too. (In fact friday night Anthony and i caught up with Will sensei for a skype chat about the coming seminar and we got to pick his brain a bit more on this.
Slowly as a dojo we build on the internal strength baseline and hope to be reasonably prepared for the next visitor or seminar from the internal strength community, but for now there is now plenty more material for the sunday morning study group.
Who forgot to bring the middle mat? 😉
