Ishido cup - my second 杖道 taikai

Back to Utrecht to have some fun :)

I had the Saturday off, which was great, I had time to do some sightseeing. Utrecht is beautiful! I could live there for some time.

Sunday was about jodo.
We did not have a lot of participants which resulted in having the shodan and nidan taikai together. The advantage of this was a longer seminar in the morning :)
Mansfield sensei was in charge of the day. We had a great seminar with him.
He emphasized the importance of the kihons and we did repeat a some of them several times.
After a kihon, we were quite curious if we will get a shake of a head with a smile or he will just laugh at what we did :) And after each of this he explained us a lot of important points, a few of them weren't even new, but sinked more in this time, or maybe I just heard/understood them better now.
He was very honest and direct through the whole day. Didn't spare anybody, we have been laughed at a few times. I really enjoyed this. His attitude and way of teaching. Not the ever nice European style with pats on our head (and ego), but honest, direct, thorough and very much down to earth.

We heard again that makiotoshi is one of the easiest kihons, but still none of us could make it right. :)

The main message for me was:
Jodo is simple. Plain simple. Do not overcomplicate it for yourself.
We have to be loose, without power and too much strength
Big movement are essential for having seme, meaning and good jodo
Timing is the most important thing. You do not have to be fast, just move at the right time.
When practicing alone, we have to have the imaginary opponent just like in iai. And just like in iai, without that, it's meaningless and soulless.

The taikai was fun too. My second one so far. At the end I will grow to like it :)
I won one and lost two with 2/1 flags if I remember well. It was a good opportunity to try to implement what we learned in the seminar. I tried to make it big, loose, not hasty and better timed. Maybe taikai is not the best place to apply new knowledge, but anyway, why not :)  I enjoyed it :)
The result was that I flustered, I lost my jo a few times, and big wasn't that big because of the excitement. :)

I learned a lot, understood a lot of things from I already forgot a few (yes, I did take notes) but it builds in to my body. It learns better than I ever did :)

It was good to practice with experienced jodokas again. It was sharp again.

ごくろさまでした