January 5, 2003
Recovering from Doug Wilson seminar: great time had by all!
Doug Wilson is in town from Tokyo, and took a day at the San Francisco Buyu Center to do a "Takagi Yoshin Ryu Jutaijutsu year in review" seminar. About 15 or so of us took advantage of this rare opportunity to train with him; some of those smiling faces include me, Dale Seago, Doug Wilson, Teri Seago, and Morgan Webb:
Doug's a young guy, around 30, but has been training in the Bujinkan arts for about 17 years, many of them in Japan, where he's spent most of his adult life. He started training under now-shihan Bill Atkins, one of the world's (rightly!) most highly-regarded teachers in the Bujinkan. Non-Bujinkan readers may find this incredible, but Buj people will understand this easily: Bill came as a student for this seminar, as he always does when excellent teachers come in from out of town. This is one of the many reasons, aside from Bill's incredible level of taijutsu, that I really feel at home in this art: the best "teachers" are lifelong students. Dale Seago shares that view, which is one of the reasons I train with him.
I had the pleasure (?) of being used as uke for many of Doug's demonstrations. What a trip (so to speak)! There's nothing like being on the receiving end of a technique to steepen the psychomotor learning curve. A good thing these seminars are usually held on Saturdays: this makes Sunday the perfect Day of Recovery. I do take that day to recover - today most of it in front of the keyboard - because I plan to keep on doing this stuff until I'm way past Ed Martin's age (hey this blog is about "Freedom, Immortality, and the Stars": guns are only part of the picture)!
I look forward to seeing Doug again in the next few months, the next time, I hope, in Tokyo. I'll likely bug him relentlessly to come back and share his skills and insight with us again soon. I've managed to trap Ben Cole, Jeff Mueller, and Shawn Gray into doing the same in the last couple of years.
Posted by Russell Whitaker at January 5, 2003 7:19 PM | TrackBack