Dan Harden came down again to Randall Smith’s dojo, Aikido of Palm Beach County. Those in attendance came from Aikido, Daitoryu, Systema, Tai Chi, grappling and one newbie who is just starting out and has no background yet. God bless him. He’s off to a good start.

I believe I accomplished a lot this weekend. I feel as though I had a greater understanding of my internal energy. For instance, in one exercise we were doing, where my partner would push my chest trying to push me over backwards, I would raise my hands above my head and drop the energy down from my hands to the ground.

The idea of the lesson was to feel your energy mimicking and matching your partners. To match the yin with the yang. And it was working.

There was without a doubt, a feeling of the energy moving down from my hands, through my arms, body and going underneath my partner. I even told my partner, a Tai Chi guy, that the feeling I had and the accompanying mental image was that of a cold blast of air hitting the heat and billowing out down across the floor.

There was a new exercise that I picked up that I am going to implement in my daily practice. It involved holding your hands in front of your dantian and rotating them first in a clockwise direction and then again in a counter clockwise direction as you intentfully imagine your dantian moving in the same clockwise/counter clockwise fashion.

The idea is to have both moving in conjunction, one influencing the other. Over time and with much practice, and once its natural in your system, your body will move to the expression of the dantian with the ultimate reality being that your dantian influences your whole body movement.

It started making more sense this time around. It was clearer. All the solo practice that I have been continually doing over the last year, is starting to manifest.

I read what I am writing and I think, “how hokey, how new age.” But the facts are that there is something powerfully sublime happening and its real.

I will keep practicing Dan’s stuff and keep attending his seminars. Its got me.