Holy crap, life got busy all of a sudden. I think I've been home about 3 hours all day: aikido, then brunch, then buying some storage thingies at a store closeout, then a party I was helping to work in SF, then another party, and finally home. I'm moving some stuff for Noah and Veevi tomorrow, I start work on Monday, one of the guys in the dojo is taking a test on Tuesday so I should be there, and Thursday night sometime I'll head up to Grass Valley for family visiting and Friday night's healing clinic. Saturday is the cocktail party, the following Saturday is the Fresno seminar, the weekend after that is the Denver seminar. Then I think there's a bit of a break.
I have something written on my forehead tonight that was causing people to make passes at me. Maybe it's the vibe of semi-detached unavailability, I dunno. Easy to resist, though. Things just don't get to me any more. The world isn't a burden, it just is, and I'm moving through it like it's not there, like me and everything around me are made of the same stuff, which we are. I'm still living for me and not for all sentient beings, though: the tiniest little beginning of bodhisattva mind. I'm helping people, and able to engage with the world a bit better. I can see what I'm causing by thinking, and what I have to pay attention to and deal with seriously.
I had a wonderful aikido class, because I trained Wednesday through Friday, so today I was just too tired to muscle my way through anything. There's a technique you can use on a tense muscle where you temporarily cut off the flow of blood to the muscle: it takes a lot of energy to maintain tension, and eventually the muscle runs out of oxygen and releases, whereupon you restore the bloodflow. That's sort of what happened today: I ran out of energy to use brute force, so I had to relax everything and do the techniques correctly. I got to train with Mina, an advanced student who hasn't been to the dojo in a long time, and Saille, another more advanced student who plays pretty hard unless you ask her not to. She's great for learning techniques properly: she's not quite as strong as me, but she's plenty strong enough to make me work if I'm not relaxing into a technique.
I get to teach people some stuff, too, in the limited domain of techniques I know (kotegaeshi, kokyu ho/nage, and some irimi nage, for those of you following along at home). That's a really nice feeling, to know something well enough to be able to help someone else get it.
And now I'm absolutely exhausted. It's been an exciting week of limits, and now I'm going to bed.