Gyroscope was the analogy the Shintaido teacher used for the distribution of energy within. Minimal motion of the external body, the energy shift occuring inside.

The next week, he had us running around and around the gym, raising, then lowering our wood swords as we ran. At first we were all in synch, moving at the same time in the same way, in single file. Then people passed me, I passed others, some slowed to a stumbling walk. More laps the teacher wanted, and we kept moving.

I had moved fairly fast and felt good stamina, but was largely unaware of who was where doing what, focused as I was on running and holding the heavy sword. I heard noises people made, and sometimes followed a voice sound. I'd slow down, speed up, slow down, speed up. Then, I felt a complete drain of energy, could hardly hold the sword up, came nearly to a stop. I walked slowly. Now, the others walked as though the exercise were coming to an end, but a wind came through me, and I was running again, full tilt.

When we were done, it came to me that as a group within the solid walls of the gym, we had become a gyroscope, the energy transferring among us as we moved in circles. Individuals within a gym. Gyroscopes within a gyroscope.

I wonder now if the different shintaido classes in the city have similar energy fluctuations among them, and if we watched the classes in the many cities around the world if there would not be similar pulsing variations on an even larger scale.

Just playing with the thought. I really don't have a good grasp of the physics of a gyroscope, but I am physically aware of energy conservation, expression, and depletion when we do this.

The experience also suggests we are not individuals each doing our own thing--in a shintaido dojo, or on a soccer field, or in this world. We are more permeable and interrelated than that. Expression or depletion of energy in one of us is just a shift within the gyroscope. No matter how much we may be loners, we are interconnected with the same juice, the same light, the same life, the same God, the same spirit within us all.