Cam Findlay

Posts Tagged ‘Kendo’

A couple of weekends ago I made a trip to Christchurch to attend a full day intensive Iaido training day a the Canterbury Kendo Club.

We spent the first half of the day teaching all the Kendo students a little Iaido as many of them have never tried (and have usually seen us Iai people practicing our strange moves lol).
It was a really good experience to teach, rather than learn or practice, it really tests how much you really know about the art you are practicing.  I taught the first kata of the Seitei set, Ipponme Mae, a very important one as it is always the first one you learn when starting out in Iaido.
Sensei Eynon Philips has always told me that knowing this kata inside out is like knowing ALL kata as it contains all the elements that make up all kata. I think I must have done this kata 100′s if not 100′s of times now over the last couple of years of training!

The rest for the day was spent training and perfecting our kata and of course doing the ever popular “make up your own kata” kata, a lot of fun!

Since moving to Wellington, I have not managed to find an Iaido club to train at as of yet. Despite enquiring at a few martial arts stores (who all seem to say “yeah someone else asked about that a few months back”).  So I am looking into starting the Wellington Iaido “study group” under guidance of the Canterbury Kendo/Iaido teacher and hopefully talk more with the other Sensei at the Auckland Kendo club (where I attended the very first NZ Iaido seminar last year).

What I am really hoping to achieve is to bring together all those people that may have trained in the past or are looking to start in Wellington.  I still am yet to find a venue, though the Brooklyn Community Centre is looking promising.

So this is a call out to any one in the Wellington area interested in training in Iaido…. get in touch!

Email: iaido@camfindlay.com

It will be great to get something going and build the art of Iaido in New Zealand even stronger!

UPDATE: I have been speaking with the Brooklyn Community Centre in Wellington, they seem very open to the idea of setting up Iaido classes at their venue! Will continue to update once I have met with them and organised some dates and times for possible training sessions.

Last Thursday and Friday (8-9 Oct) I was lucky enough to be part of the very first national New Zealand Iaido Seminar held at the Auckland Kendo Club in of course…. Auckland.
It was a 2 day intensive training, grading and a good opportunity to network and meet the others throughout New Zealand swinging a sword in this age old martial art.

The plans moving forward are to start building numbers and really promoting Iaido in NZ and I am hoping that I can add my knowledge of social networking and online communities to work towards this.

Thursday saw a full day of training and learning some new kata in the Kendo Federation Seitei Iaido which consists of 12 kata (I know up to number 11 at the moment!)
It is interesting learning from others as each teacher does seem to put their own knowledge and spin on each kata.  At the end of it all I think gathering as much knowledge as you can from as many teachers as you can and then combining that with what feels natural with your own movement and focus is the way to go.

Thursday evening I dug deep despite extreme tiredness and a rather painful toe injury I performed the best I could at the grading and came away with a 2nd Kyu (ni-kyu) grading! A jump of 8 grades as I had been previously ungraded.

Friday saw more training and a Shiai (competition) and something even more fun… getting to invent our own kata!

The “build your own” kata concoctions were all very interesting with one of our (chch) dojos students ideas using an umbrella as a sword took it top marks.

The 2 days were a great challenge that everyone who attended met and got something out of…

Before I left for Auckland I flicked to a random page in my copy of Yamamoto Tsunetomo’s “Hagakure” (a classic Japanese warrior code text) and thinking back on it now it shared some insight into the days ahead, it read:

The talented rise to the challenge-
There is a saying, “As the water rises the boat rises”. When a person of talent … encounters a difficulty, his [or her] heart rises to meet the challenge, and the greater the challenge the more he [or she] is spurred to take it on. – Hagakure, Book 2, Line 42

Rather fitting I think! A big thanks to all those at Auckland Kendo as to all those who attended the Seminar. Look forward to next year!

Yesterday was a great lecture, I really enjoyed the concept of flow.  I have definitely found myself in states of flow both in my work as a web developer (with hours of intense coding and creative brainstorming sessions) and in my hobbies of DJ-ing and Iaido.

Flow is that state of mind where time stands still, where you tap into the subconscious in something that your doing but remain in complete control with an intense sense of focus.  This state of mind lets us operate at extraordinary levels of performance where our skills meet the challenge ahead of us.

I found it interesting that many of the people talking about leadership had the same ideas but different ways of saying it.  People like Jim Collins are pushing core values and a sense of purpose, Joseph Campbell’s idea of the “Hero’s Journey” taps into the ideas of an internal and external call to adventure and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi talks about differentiation and integration.  In all cases where our levels of each of the 2 elements intersect we find ourselves in a state of flow or complexity.

It can also be seen as a line in the sand that is our “limits” and by reaching states of flow and pushing past this line in the sand we can draw a new line, this then becomes our new, higher limits.  On a side note a while back while I was at the Canterbury Kendo Dojo for my Iaido session, the Kendo instructor before our class was talking about this very thing.  In Kendo (or to an extent all martial arts) you have a limit of energy, strength or stamina this is your limit, when you are at you most tired and exhausted from training you should push yourself to train that little bit extra. By doing this  you will have pushed past your limit and set a new limit, this is now your limit, which didn’t exist before.  I am thinking there maybe a lot of crossover between ideas of leadership and Japanese Budo ideas, something to explore later I think.

Boiling this all down to me it seems that flow exists where we have internal feelings and abilities or talents if you will, and the world/universe has a hole/need/challenge that only our particular talents fit in.  Perhaps where we can create flow in our work or personal life we can find meaning to what we are doing.

This weeks Journal Questions:

1. Sketch a ‘flow’ flowchart, mark on it at least 3 activities in which you experience flow.
2. Analyse those 3 activities, what core values and sense of purpose are present within each of them? and/or as a result of those 3 activities, how have you or how could you become more integrated and differentiated?
4. Draw a time line of your life, on it record times that may reflect what your ‘creative images’ might be. Also reflect and record what ‘invitations’  might have been present.
5. Use your journaling and time line to reflect on what all this might suggest about your future work or calling.