Misogi

Just back from Misogi. This is a ritual undertaken by aikio practitioners on the anniversary of O Sensei's (Aikido's founder) death every year.

This year we spent 50 minutes doing saburi, or sword cuts with bokken. Interesting when you do something like this in that after about ten minutes, wherever your technique is flawed it will start to give out. But as you've started and committed and everyone else is doing it you must keep going. So you alter your technique and then after about twenty minutes your shouting the count out using aggression to keep going and get through it.

This gets you so far but not far enough. After half an hour your in and out of a state of no mind (mu shin) and egoic reeling and ranting and complaining about the pain and the blisters. It's then that you either join the people wobbling and flailing about but keeping going and getting through it or get really clever with your cutting and improve it enough to make it to the finish. Either way, no one gets off at this stop.

Would be interesting to do misogi more often and take an aikido technique and do that one technique a thousand times, see where you fail, what you have to do to make through the wall.