Instructors
I am in my 21st year of training in Aikido, and my 10th year of practicing Iaido. I am grateful for the martial arts knowledge transmitted to me by Harvey Konigsberg at Woodstock Aikido, Bob Wilcox at Kingston Aikido and Seiichi Sugano at New York Aikikai as I attempt to impart the relevance and benefits of these disciplines to those who want to learn. After being in a large organization for many years, and independent for 4 years, I’m enjoying using my experience to shape our trajectory into a pertinent, modern martial arts journey.
I find that my yoga practice has informed my Aikido ideas and has kept my body ready to employ them! I believe having a mind and body trained in many different situations is the way to a healthy, interesting and adaptable life. Hopefully through my obsession with mountain biking, consistent weight training, yoga and martial arts practice I’m on the right track. Join me at Rivertide and we can make it happen together!
Patrick A. Gaucher Chief Instructor & Co-Founder.
Arielle Herman Yoga, Iaido & Kids’ Program Director & Co-Founder
As both practitioner and teacher, i am an avid proponent of the Post-Lineage movements in yoga and aikido. A core element of my practice is the study of how different lineages and even different arts intersect and inform each other. I believe that the deepest learning occurs by investigating rather than receiving information, and that the communities in which we practice are the heart from which we grow. Training in martial arts since 2001, my practices also include gardening and foraging, wildcrafted herbalism, following the mycelium threads of intersection and asking too many questions (or perhaps too many is always one too few).
Increasingly skeptical of traditional ideations of lineage and hierarchy, i chose to step away from standard ranking and certification entities of the aikido and yoga communities, as these structures feel discordant with the most valuable elements of the practices themselves. In the spirit of Tikkun Olam, i take inspiration in the eternally hopeful-even-while-broken nature of our aikido communities and believe that only in recognizing the ways in which our practice is most deeply flawed can we fulfill the ideals of aikido.