Taken from the cover of a book, Adam Mitchell purchased at an antique book store in Japan, the "Kikusui" logo literally translates to “Chrysanthemum water”. It's original reference is to a Chinese legend and Japanese noh theater play, attributing eternal youth to...
"I am invincible" Maciej said as we were leaving the Dojo on Saturday morning. I knew what he meant, I think maybe more than he realized.
After morning training, I asked Maciej if he wouldn’t mind helping to film some Jutaijutsu forms we’d used that week as a sort of framework to...
練習, renshu. To train repetitively. Knowing with the mind and knowing with the body are different things. I’m not interested in talking about a martial art I can’t realize and perform physically. Talk is cheap.
In order to fully understand budo, it’s takes unreasonable amounts of...
In 2014, I was led into an old Japanese tea house, by Sensei.
Accompanying me were a dozen or so folks I really knew nothing about, other than I’d trust my life with each one of them without a thought.
Together, we were about to be awestruck by a timeless discipline we knew little about,...
Observing a student. You have to know each one in a way they do not know themselves. This is what separates a teacher from a charlatan, it’s the willingness to learn about the individual student.
It begins with seeing what type of learner they are. Then, pushing to uncover their limitations...
It just took some time to learn this.
“What the superior man seeks is in himself; what the small man seeks is in others” - Confucius
I spent almost all of my life looking to fight, face some confrontation, defeat an unseen bad guy, to be mindfully prepared for the worse ... to find out...
20 years ago, I had my first training experience with my martial arts teacher, and in this episode I want to share with you some observations that I took from that experience and how it really helped me to understand this saying,
Keep going.
What does it truly mean? I dig into some...
About 15 years ago, I was at a martial arts seminar in Virginia that Manaka Sensei was teaching.
