The mind is ungraspable—denial and resistance can overwhelm and cloud the things that are right in front of you. Your training can help cut through this kind of delusion and help you to see things clearly—and seeing things clearly is essential in times like these.
As we’ve been sharing through our blog posts, part of moving forward means developing new routines and new ways of interacting. The longer this lasts, the more essential it becomes to create a daily practice that continues the thread of training you worked so hard to establish when you were physically able to be at the dojo.
To help do that, we are going to begin livestreaming training that we can do together. It will focus on things you can do alone and in a small space, and include conditioning exercises and movements that will help you continue to develop your Aikido body. Classes will be held Monday, Wednesday and Friday from 5:30-6:15pm via Zoom (log in through the streaming section of the Virtual Dojo site). These classes will begin on Wednesday, April 1st.
Also, we have created a chat group on Telegram that will allow you to ask us questions, talk with each other, share photos and videos, etc. This is a private chat, and it would be nice to see how some of you are doing and what you are doing for practice; please limit the conversation to training and any personal updates you’d like to share.
Like many, we had hoped that this crisis would pass quickly and not endanger too many lives. For our part, we had hoped to get in front of it and allow a return to “normal” sooner rather than later. The reality of the situation is that right now we don’t know exactly when this will pass. We only know that we all must do what we can to ensure that, at some point, we do move forward.
Our hope is that we do not have to “meet” this way for long, but it is important for us to continue our bonds as a community so that when we come back together, we will be stronger than ever.