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An Aikido Vacation by Andre Messier There are two schools of thought on what a vacation is supposed to be. The first one is based on the premise that you are to rest on vacation as a reward for all the hard work you do from day to day. The second is to go out and do something so exhausting that it makes your daily grind pale in comparison. If you subscribe to the latter belief, going to aikido Summer Camp is the vacation for you! Camp was a very grueling week of classes taught by the Shihans, Doshu, and some of the shidoin. There were hundreds of people present and it was very interesting working with all kinds of people with completely different backgrounds. I worked with people who have been doing aikido for more than twenty years, as well as people who just began a month ago. It's very enlightening to work with all of these different people because you can learn something from each person. Everyone has their own unique background they bring to the mat and can help you diversify your aikido. It seemed as thought there were as many variations for each technique as there were people present! For some reason I was expecting Doshu's classes to reveal long-lost secrets of Aikido that have been forgotten by most modern practitioners. His lessons were irimi, tenkan, kaiten, and kokyu - all methods taught in every beginner class. In fact, these four principles seem to be the essence of aikido. It makes perfect sense that Doshu's classical aikiod would emphasize these four concepts. At the end of one of the classes I was practicing kokyu-dosa with a man who seemed to embody what I think aikido is all about. We were both quite exhausted. I was struggling to get him to budge even a little bit but he was barely making any effort to send me tumbling over. I asked him how he was doing that and he smiled and said, "It's old man aikido. You don't need to use your muscles to push someone over." He then went on to say the idea was to apply force where your opponent isn't. It was very simple and I knew I had heard it before, but at that time, it made so much more sense. Probably the most exciting part of the week was the dan tests. I was impressed with how many people from our dojo came to support Heidi taking her shodan test. The five opponent randori blew me away. I had never seen aikido applied to such a large group of people and it was amazing to see its fluidity. The week was capped with tests when we returned to our home dojo. It seemed strange not spending the week before tests going over all the techniques over and over. Yet, I think spending that week at camp was much more helpful. I came to realize that you really can do just about any technique from just about any attack. This was very handy when Sensei called out yokomenuchi kotegaishi on my fourth kyu test since it wasn't on the list of techniques. I had a lot of fun that week, even though I was battered and bruised. If people had asked me immediately afterwards whether I would go back, my answer would have been, "Never." After having time to recover, I am beginning to shorten that time frame. And best part of all: on the following Monday morning, I looked forward to returning to work!