on the way to the dojo i called my legal-brains friend and told him that i have a problem. he offered to meet me after training at my home. on the way back from the training i stopped by at the restaurant around the corner where my round of colleagues, the old boys club, were meeting and told them that i could not join them as i was not feeling well. from one of them i did get a look of serious concern, and i very much appreciated that look. yes, that is how it was. there was no way that i could sit for a couple of hours and talk geeky and science stuff around a couple of beers and some french fries. i am tired of keeping up appearances when my innards are being thorn to pieces.
when i got to the dojo i thought that there was no way that i was going to make it through one and half hours of training without hopelessly breaking down because i could not concentrate. the minute that i sat down in seiza while waiting for sensei to enter the tatami, i felt like i was being pulled straight up through my spine and that there was a lightness that i had not felt in a long long while. still, how on earth was i going to survive the training? training means concentration. i took ukemi like a fool, and i rolled and rolled forwards and backwards like a perpetuum mobile, and i got dizzy. the words of another aikidoka from our dojo kept on repeating themselves in my head "I do not dwell on problems with thought; I rather let my body "work" on these problems" that he wrote on his shodan essay which i translated from german to english. i remember clearly from when i translated it, that sentence left an impression on me. when i looked at the clock on the wall yesterday during training i was alarmed for i thought that there was still an hour to go. i can not read a clock on the wall without glasses and i train without glasses and very rarely do i wear contacts during training, so i can see where the big hand of the clock is but i can not really see where the small hand is. shortly after i had looked at the clock sensei starts the last exercise that we usually do (suwari wasa ryote tori kokyo ho) and i am a bit startled. not half an hour had gone by, rather one and half hours of demanding training.
having released my apprehensions to the demands of aikido training, and after my brief stop at the round table i was finally home again. my legal-brains friend arrived shortly thereafter. we had tea, we talked, i cried, he listened, i argued. when i went to bed after i just slept. my head still feels heavy and this is far from over, still the cacophony inside my head is starting to make sense and i start to distinguish that which is mine, truly mine, from the horrors of abusive imprinting. i learn with my body.
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