Welcome to South Austin Aikido

We were honored this past weekend to have Sunny Skys Sensei from Fremont, California come for a seminar at our dojo. It always amazes me how Sunny Sensei can relate his aikido to everyday life experiences. It helps us see how important our training is for our lives outside of the dojo as well as on the mat.

We started with three different approaches to tenkan. This became a recurring theme over the weekend for us to focus on specifics of what was being shown as opposed to using our pattern recognition and simply doing what we think was shown. This is always a problem for students who quickly recognize a technique, then go to practicing exactly the way they always perform that technique instead of looking for the principle being shown and attempting to look at their own training with a new perspective. Sunny Sensei encourages us to let ourselves investigate different ideas about our practice to open our eyes to new growth possibilities. It was truly a great weekend of practice!

Saturday evening we had a pot luck at Darrell White's beautiful home. As always, we shared lots of good food, fun conversations and many laughs. Thank you Darrell for being such a gracious host for our potluck.

It is hard to believe that this was Sunny Sensei’s 7th annual trip to Austin. Time goes by way too fast... However, this was the first time in seven years that we actually needed jackets due to some very pleasant rain and cooler temperatures. Thanks you Sunny Sensei for a wonderful weekend of training and for sharing your Aikido and life experiences with us.

Check out the pictures on our Phanfare site.

We are eagerly waiting for the arrival of Sunny Skys sensei for his 7th annual visit to Austin. Sunny sensei will teach class for our Aikido community on Thursday evening during our normal class schedule and then the seminar will start on Friday, September 11th, continuing through Sunday, September 13th. See our seminar flyer for more information. 

We will be having a potluck Saturday evening at Darrell White's home.  This is a great opportunity to enjoy good food and good fun with our friends and we may even find a few Aikido videos to watch :-)   SAA members can get more information about this potluck in the member section of our website.

I highly recommend this seminar to everyone in our Aikido community, regardless of where you may be in your training.   Sunny sensei is simply a wonderful teacher.  His energetic, fun-loving nature and warm willingness to interact with students of all levels, creates an atmosphere for lively and productive training.

See y'all on the mat. 

We have just concluded our fourth annual Aiki Week with seven consecutive days of training in August. Wow. What a great week!

We started the week with a enjoyable potluck Saturday evening after our first day of training. During the week we focused on areas that we normally don’t seem to get around to do during our normal training classes, including koshi and randori. In addition, we added four weapons classes that included tachi waza and tanto waza.

The week went really fast and even though I was tired at the beginning of this year’s training week, the energy on the mat quickly picked me up, propelling us all through the week. The training was amazing! I do not remember training so hard in years past, but this year the energy just kept building, pushing us harder and harder each day. We all certainly did our fair share of rolls during the week.

Thanks to everyone who participated in making this one of the best training weeks I can remember, with excellent fun for all. Also thank you Darrell White for hosting a great evening of good food, friendship and plenty of Aikido videos.

South Austin Aikido's 4th annual Aiki Week kicks off Saturday, August 22nd. With seven days of training and a different focus for each class, Aiki Week is a great opportunity to get in some extra rolling.

We'll celebrate the first day of Aiki Week with a Potluck at Darrell White's house. Directions in the Member's section.

Saturday, August 22nd

• 10:00am – 11:00am Basics
• 11:15am – 12:00pm Weapons (Bokken)
• 6:00pm – 10:00pm Potluck Party

Sunday, August 23rd

• 1:00pm – 2:00pm All Levels
• 2:15pm – 3:00pm Advanced

Monday, August 24th

• 6:00pm – 7:00pm Ukemi
• 7:15pm – 8:00pm Koshi

Tuesday, August 25th

• 6:00pm – 7:00pm All Levels
• 7:15pm – 8:00pm Advanced

Wednesday, August 26th

• 6:00pm – 7:00pm Rolling
• 7:15pm – 8:00pm Randori

Thursday, August 27th

• 6:00pm – 7:00pm Basics
• 7:15pm – 8:00pm Weapons (Jo)

Friday, August 28th

• 6:00pm – 7:00pm All Levels
• 7:15pm – 8:00pm Tanto/Tachi/Jo Dori
• 8:30pm - 9:30pm Go out for dinner after class

On Monday Mark McDonald rolled 50 times to celebrate his birthday.  Mark did a wonderful job rolling for the many energetic aikidoka who helped with the special birthday rolls. Great Job Mark and Happy Birthday!