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.

Again, I must admit that I dropped the ball in posting my thoughts and experiences for this particular Dan Harden Seminar. A late post, but here goes.

The more seminars I take from Dan, the more I get out of it. I have attended a few of his classes. But with each one, I experience a new level of understanding about what he is teaching. For instance, spiraling used to confound me. Every time I worked on it, it felt like all I was doing was stretching. (A great stretch by the way.)

Now though, I can feel the spiral working through my system. And its a feeling that the spiral is infused into the musculature such that a I can feel sublime energy working its way from the inside out. Essentially, generating internal power to drive the physical structure.

I would have no way of identifying this properly if not for the continual training with Dan and the reaffirmation of his teachings. Browbeat comes to mind. And I say this with all due respect. If you take a Dan Harden seminar you will understand. He’s got a great way of teaching.

One of the things I took away this time was Training, Timing and Distance. This is how I remember it; training to be soft, timing to engage your opponent and distance in order to activate the other two. If you are too distant from your opponent, then training and timing are moot as it applies to engagement. On the other hand, if your distance is too close, then you have to activate your softness and time yourself to your opponent’s attack.

Easier said than done. Believe me. My constant issue is not being soft. I carry my shoulders high and muscles tense. Can’t help it. They have actually nick named me “gorilla hands” among other things, which I can’t repeat here in polite society. All good though. It builds camaraderie.

Right or wrong, this is what I took away this time and how I continue to process it.

One more thing. We have formulated a great training group. We might not look like much, but that’s a good thing. You won’t see it coming.