Practice night at our downtown dojo. The last technique of the evening was yonkyo on shomen uchi, aka the moment where the air gets filled with more or less loud shouts of pain, from every corner of the room.
Still everybody *laughs* and is having a good time at the same time! And if you don’t do it properly, then you continue, switch, adapt, aim better until it doesn’t just hurt your uke -- until the pain is debilitating and has them crumbling down, begging.
Ah, aikido what an odd way to pass your time... a time and place where you get to share a laugh and smirk with your elderly sempai, and he mouthes “yikes, that must hurt so much” while watching our GM demonstrate it on a poor white belt (over 40s) wriggling on the floor. And you can *see* the energy flow from his entire body to focus on that very small area on the inside of his uke’s twisted wrist.
Then, you blink and next thing you know you’re the one on your stomach tapping furiously for release. OK OK OK I get it now, *this* is where you press on the nerve, not *there*, *here*.
