"I turned up for my Ryuseikan Dojo class on Monday at midday as usual, put the mats out and changed into my dogi. One of my students had already sent a text message to my cellphone to say that his work was going to keep him away that day. Then I got a call from another student to tell me that his meeting in town had gone on much longer than expected, and he could not make it.
At that point, I could have packed up and gone home BUT I decided to follow Sensei's example and do what he does early on Monday mornings when there is no class.
I warmed up on my own, then someone else came in to the hall. She asked my permission if she could do her boxing training if it would not disturb me, and of course I agreed. The punchbag was very heavy so I assisted her in hanging it from its ceiling support. She started training on her own and I continued with a hundred cuts with my bokken, shumats dosa ichi and ni, kihon dosa renzoku with bokken, etc.
After a while, the lady who was doing her boxing training said "you are doing aikido, aren't you?". It turned out that many years ago, she too had done aikido when she was a student at university. She asked if she could train with me and of course I agreed. She showed me what she recalled from the dim recesses of memory of many years before, then we worked on katate mochi shiho nage ichi, shomen uchi shomen irimi nage ichi and then katate mochi tae no henko ni kokyu nage. She especially loved the grace, simplicity and elegance of this last technique, we did it over and over again. Each time she or I did it, she enjoyed it more and more.
After an hour of training together she offered to teach me boxing. She taped up my wrists with the special strapping and put the gloves on me. Then she showed me their "kamae" which is of course very different from what we are used to. She taught me how to keep my guard up at all times, to use the rotational energy from my hips rather than upper body power and this all sounded quite familiar. However, the movements are all very different, and I enjoyed training myself to move in a very different way to what we are all accustomed to.
When I asked how come she did boxing, that it was not so common to find females training in that area, she explained that many years before, she had entered herself for a charity boxing match event and in order to prepare herself, had persuaded trainers from the UK Olympic team to train her. Subsequently she had continued with her boxing and had progressed to become an Olympic team trainer herself.
After an hour of aikido and an hour of boxing, we were both well warmed up. We had so enjoyed training with one another, even though we did such very different martial arts.
As we cleared away the mats I thought to myself that my training had turned out so well that day ONLY because I had a mental image of Sensei in my mind and decided to do what he would have done in those circumstances - that despite the other students not turning up, I was going to train anyway.
In the evening we had the Meidokan Dojo special 18th anniversary training followed by a meal out and our Annual General Meeting. Rubens Sensei asked each of his shodan and nidan students in turn to teach the class of sixteen students. When the class was over he told us that he was really proud of his students, that they were living proof that his last eighteen years of teaching had produced excellent students who would continue to pass on the teachings of Kancho Gozo Shioda Sensei in the dojos which they had founded.
All in all it was a Very Good Day."
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