Archive | Uncategorized

We are in a time where everyone gets a trophy just for showing up. Where everyone has the ability to spout whatever he or she want about a subject whether they are qualified to or not. Where parents yell at teachers because their child didn’t get an A+ for C- work. Where people want only […]

The other day I heard an exchange between a school teacher friend of mine and one of his students. The student asked the meaning of a word. Rather than give him the definition, the teacher said to look it up on his phone, an answer the student didn’t appreciate. The student felt like he was […]

In January of 1992 I started a training group at the request of my teacher Mark Davis. He told me that teaching this art is about creating an experience for the student so that they discover the principle you are trying to teach them on their own. Take a moment to understand that statement. Teaching […]

With our annual Fall Festival just days away, there is a topic that I often find in the forefront of my mind as I approach any training event. I like to go into these annual events (or really any time I get to work with my teacher) with an eye out for what I call […]

Some people malign the five elemental models we use in To-Shin Do often because they just don’t understand what they are. Almost thirty years ago I was introduced to them as the Go Dai no Kata in one of An-shu Hayes’ early books. Ever since then I have been listening to people say he made […]

I have had many students ask me to comment on getting the most benefit out of their training time invested. Whether you are in a class at your dojo or training on your own with a few friends in a small group, there are a few things to consistently keep an eye on. You may […]

I’ve always been driven to study martial arts. From the first time I knew it existed, I wanted to know more. When I first read a book by my teacher, Stephen K. Hayes, I knew what martial art, out of all the possibilities out there, I wanted to focus on. I was eleven at the […]

Have you ever watched a technique or kata demonstrated and when the teacher says to go try it you stand there and have no idea where to begin? Or you try it and the results are nowhere near what was demonstrated. The problem may be that your brain is tricking you. What you see may […]

Interested in running your own affiliate school? Are you emotionally attached to teaching your hobby – what you like to do as a martial artist? Or are you running a business, earning a dignified living teaching effective martial arts for the most benefit to the largest number of your community members? What is the purpose […]

All of us who have trained for any significant length of time have experienced the feeling of losing momentum or stalling out. We feel that we are just not making any progress and may even come to believe that we have reached the limit of our skill development. If our aspiration is to reach a […]

The other day I was teaching a class, students were having fun and enjoying themselves, and then one student, fairly new to class, laughed at something that had been said. Normally this is not an unusual event, but this new student almost immediately stopped laughing, put on the most serious expression, and sincerely apologized to […]

What does Shi-kin Hara-mitsu Dai-ko-myo mean? I’d like to share some of my research and thoughts about what this phrase means to me. Conventional wisdom around the Takamatsu-den based organizations loosely translates this as “In every moment is the potential for the enlightenment we seek” or “keep going and you can get it.” The question […]

Since To-Shin Do is a realistic approach to street and field violence, we have to take into consideration a lot more than sport martial artists do. In a competitive ring, you know why the other guy is there. He and you have agreed to a contest of fighting skills. All you need to do is […]

Every technique in To-Shin Do ends with hands in our defense ready position, or some other kamae. Often the suggestion is to keep hands up ‘for at least three seconds’ as a symbol for this concept of zan-shin, a reminder that the problem we’re dealing with may not be over just because we’ve finished ‘the […]

The Ever Changing Moment Have you ever noticed while you are training that sometimes your mind is on what you are doing, your kamae, your movement or which hand you are supposed to be using and at these times you lose track of the attacker and get caught off guard. Then there are other times […]