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Archive | Teacher Insights

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Clever for the Win

A relatively small raccoon can kill a much larger hunting dog with a surprising tactic. The raccoon can run up the front of the dog’s chest under the dog’s jaws and reach around the dog’s muzzle to scratch out the dog’s eyes. This is not specially taught behavior or a “raccoon martial arts secret”. It […]

Advice for Younger To-Shin Do Students

I was asked what advice I have for younger martial artists. I’d have to reply: Take it easy on yourself! Be smart. In my 20s there was a kind of prestige implied in what we called “hard training”. We actually damaged nerve plexuses and joint tissues by hitting and twisting body targets too many times […]