In case you missed this important information from last month it is being reprinted again. Licensed Instructors, we have very few requirements governing your participation as head of a To-Shin Do club or school. The following are not new points. Most people have been observing these for years. But it might be good to state […]
Spreading the Word – Making a Difference
Through our work with the NinjaSelfDefense.com online training courses we have made learning the art of To-Shin Do available to everyone. Back in the early 80’s it was a very different world. I won’t bore you with stories of how I had to walk uphill barefoot in the snow both ways to and from class […]
Are You Really Training?
This recent Ninja Festival was simply amazing. Mr. and Mrs. Hayes took the training to a new level as promised. If you were there you had the opportunity to make significant progress in your training. Provided you were really training. As I watched people at Festival this year I got to see an extreme spectrum […]
Dual Approach to a Common Value
To-Shin Do was developed with two purposes in mind. First, it is a modern adaptation of ancient ninja combat art philosophies. The techniques have been matched to the most common pressing threats of the 21st Century. For that reason, many are not the same as those methods for battling aggressors in 15th Century Japan. We […]
Visceral Training
This year’s Festival theme brings to mind high stakes, terrifying, gut wrenching conditions. That’s what real self-defense feels like. The definition of visceral is: “relating to deep inward feelings rather than the intellect.” In other words, forget about analyzing, calculating, and thinking your way through it. The way you have conditioned yourself, the way you […]
Transitions
Sudden transitions (shifting quickly and unexpectedly from one situation to another) are challenging. Sometimes the brain gets stuck, not wanting to let go of what it was just focused on, even if the new situation is really important. If the change is unexpected enough, such as facing surprise violence when violence is something you only […]
Ready, Willing and Listening?
I recently asked in our To-Shin Do Facebook group, what training question are you trying to get answered at this year’s Ninja Festival. This question is something An-shu Hayes is constantly reminding us to have so that we take responsibility for our training and keep progressing. But a conversation I had with some students made […]
37th Annual Festival – A Special Opportunity
“Visceral Training” is the theme of our 37th annual Festival coming up this October 6-8, 2017. This year you have a chance to focus on honest realistic feeling – inside and out – in your To-Shin Do martial arts. Kata teach us the mechanics of how to do the techniques and how to approach embodying […]
Getting Hooked
In our Black Belt training we have many strategies and principles that rely on ‘hooking’ our attacker, using their emotions or their expectations against them so that they almost can’t help but deliver the very thing to us we need to defeat them. While it may not always implicitly say so in the ‘kata descriptions’ […]
Anniversary, Reward Or Obligation
Festival is coming soon and with it the ability to test for upper ranks. I always find it interesting to see the different attitudes about belt ranking and promotions. There are as many perspectives as there are people but I’ve noticed three, categories if you will, of how people see their rank. The first, and […]
Cross Training; Yes or No?
People who do not practice To-Shin Do cannot figure out why there is so little cross training done by our students. Here are three thoughts as to why we find so little cross-training: Our base martial art is so old, that we predate the Meiji separation of martial disciplines into striking, throwing, sword, etc. specialties. […]
I Get to Do This
How often do we find ourselves griping about necessary tasks in our lives that should or must be done? If you are like most people, the answer is – far more often than you would like. Or, worse yet, you continue to procrastinate and avoid getting things done. Of course, some part of your mind […]
Know Thy Drill
One of the locations I teach at is across the street from a fire station. A couple months ago I happened to look out the window and saw the fire station was running through some sort of training drill. It was three groups of firefighters, four in a group, and they were all working with […]
Martial Arts Magic
I read a book recently called Spellbound by David Kwong, a magician and New York Times crossword puzzle constructor. In it he describes illusion as an ancient art that centers on control: it is the ability to command a room (situation), build anticipation, and appear to work wonders. Illusion works because the human brain is […]
Train Your Mind To Train
Advances in neuroscience are making it possible to understand how our minds function. I like to use these modern science discoveries to put into perspective our ancient wisdom. The interesting part of studying these discoveries, to me, is that they continue to confirm concepts from our art, like Taizokai and Kongkai perspectives. When you train with […]
