Approach to gekken....

Recently we practiced gekken. During that practice, it was dominated by what I call suicidal gekken. When we practice gekken, the weapons that we use are foam swords. In a sense they do hurt but due to the nature of the weapon I think it is easy to lose the feeling of why we do gekken. The practice of gekken is to replicate the feel of a sword fight. It is one way of doing it in a safe manner. When you practice gekken, you have to believe that it is a real sword you are facing not a blue foam sword. So you have to ask yourself, would you approach the confrontation the same if it wasn't a foam sword but a real sword. That is half the practice.

When I got to practice gekken with the real swords, all the practice that came into play from gekken felt transformed. So when I came back to the foam swords after using the real ones, I realized how my technique changed and became more efficient, because I learned to win the fight first and then cut not the other way around and remember what ai - uchi means.