Aikido Winter Intensive: Day4, part 1

Aikido Winter Intensive
Day4: What a day!

Ledyard Sensei's morning class:
Focus on empty hand uke-waza, through gaishi-waza practice. This definitely complimented and extended content from his seminar in Bozeman, so I had fun.
I got to train with Katrina most the class. Good lord is she sensitive! I have to totally recalibrate my force scale just to get in the ballpark of where her neutral space is.
Class started with a tenkan-irimi practice we did at the seminar. But wow, there's a lot going on in there. I definaly want to bring this back to my class.
This is where parters are cross hand palm to palm, and the first person tenkans, the second follows, then rolls reverse with NO disconnect.
First there's the center connection...backflow (as he puts it) during all parts of the tenkan from one partner to the other. Add to that proper posture and ma-ai, martially speaking. Then after a few turns uke throws an elbow into the chest to see if nage is connected and flexible.
And in here lies Ledyards concept of "all-ready". Timing and being faster makes no sense if you are all-ready "inside" their attack, and your counter/throw is created from the attack, to which you are connected and physically enformed. "Inside" and "allready" are tough concepts to type into text...but after this class I think I understand them better.
So after the elbow strike test, we get into raising uke up slightly and rolling their palm up, back and down into a simple throw. I tried with a bit of success in raising uke with just hip rotation breath movement...just bearly. What was interesting though is to practice more of the "hip release" Ledyared alway's mentiones. I think this means (for example) from a connected to uke hanmi stance, without letting the connection flow stop or change, releasing the hip so the whole hip girdle changes positions to setup the next force vector.
The last exercise we did was the, cross body connection excercise from katate-dori. To this he added moving from one grasp (katate-dori) to uke grabs a second place on nage's body, and nage switches but maintains the cross body connection. Very worthwile!
So the big take-aways from the class, after training with Katrina were many.
NOT GETTING TENSE is a HUGE one. I have to unlearn all my instincts and years of training. It totally get's in the way as uke and nage.
Once I let go though, knowing that even when things feel bound up, that moving uke is still possible if it's in their dead-space is something new I need to start having trust in.
Spiraling internally from shoulders, arms down through the chest and into the ground does work. This is Olson sensei's drop the belly technique in practice...but once you do that, you have to move it somewhere.
I need more training!...