One of our training members asked a question recently while we were experimenting with the body movement for slipping past straight punches coming toward our head. His question was about the sequence of body movements and which body part moved first. The question was a very logical question based on the steps of the experiment […]

A question was raised at Festival that required a woman’s touch. So this month I’m going to step aside and let you read a very important post from my friends. -Fuutoshi Everybody On The Mat: Inclusivity Through The Lens of Kunoichi Women Warriors By Theresa Murphy and Amy Tiemann We highly value the benefits of […]

When you are training, are you breathing? Seems like a silly question, you may think of course I am, but are you? If you tense up doing a kata or technique If you lose your focus during training If you start thinking about what you should do If you feel yourself rushing ahead to the […]

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 […]

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 […]

An important concept in our art is the ability to take the attacker’s center from them to control the situation. At our recent seminar with An-shu Stephen and Rumiko Hayes, An-shu Rumiko was demonstrating an angling defense against a punch and then moving in taking the attacker’s center. She did a number of variations taking the […]

I saw an advertisement online offering comedy lessons with Steve Martin. In the opening of the promotional video he says he was talking to students and they were asking him things like how do I get an agent, where can I get my headshots and he thought to himself, shouldn’t the first thing to be […]

Last week we spent alot of time at our dojo working on being a good attacker and throwing real punches at our training partners. Although this doesn’t sound like it would be difficult, from beginning student to highest ranked practitioner, all had a difficult time with this. From my perspective they were all just going […]

It’s always interesting to watch people at festival, new and experienced, while watching a lesson on stage have that moment of what just happened up there. They see something done by An-shu Stephen or An-shu Rumiko and stare in amazement. You hear them ask how did they do that and say it looks like magic. […]

If I were to ask you how much do you think your life will change in the next 10 years, would it be a lot or a little? Most people think that they will change very little. However if I were to ask you how much has your life changed in the past 10 years […]

This weekend as you have already read there was a special training seminar at the home of An-shu Stephen and Rumiko Hayes. It was an amazing event and I wanted to thank everyone who assisted in making it all possible. First and foremost An-shu Stephen and Ruiko Hayes for opening their home, hearts, and heads […]

Go to a mirror and stand close so you can see your eyes. Now move your eyes so you are looking at your left eye then back to your right eye and continue to repeat being aware that you are physically moving your eyes. You will feel your eyes moving but what will you see? […]

This is one of the most important areas of our training and one of the things that sets our training apart from other martial arts. While training in To-Shin Do you are not working on memorizing a series of movements that can be done by yourself. You are learning to understand the cause and effect […]

There’s a Tom Cruise movie that came out in 2014 called Edge of Tomorrow. IMDb describes it as: A military officer is brought into an alien war against an extraterrestrial enemy who can reset the day and know the future. When this officer is enabled with the same power, he teams up with a Special […]

One of the difficulties that English speaking people have when they try to learn the Japanese language is that it is a situational language. How you speak in Japanese depends on the context of the situation. You can’t just translate word for word back and forth from English to Japanese. For example to simply say […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

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 […]

Goals As it says on the back of the book, “DON’T PANIC”. I’m not talking about the things motivational people say like “Goals are the fuel in the furnace of achievement”. When I talk about goals I mean your perception of purpose in our training, from a very broad sense in the meaning of ‘Bu’ […]

Feeling Gravity The Ninja are famous for looking at situations from a different perspective then their contemporary warrior counterparts. Where the conventional warrior may boldly charge in, the Ninja uses subterfuge and observation to accomplish their goal. This different perspective or the ability to perceive more is to me the goal of our training. This […]

I happened on to a martial arts gathering in our area recently, one of the ones where they bring together different martial arts to share with each other. So I went in to watch for a while. There were some martial arts students speaking about an instructor on stage. The comments ranged from how amazing […]

One of our newer students asked if our focus is self-defense why we still train with classical weapons like the katana. They felt it was very unlikely that they would run into anyone with a Japanese sword. I can understand a new person’s perspective believing they may not see these particular weapons in a fight […]

One of the side effects of teaching our ninja martial art is that you get into the habit of observing people, how they move and what they say, not just while training but in every day situations too. I was listening to a number of people talking about politics. One person in particular kept making […]

We had a question about striking in class recently from a newer student who had trained in boxing and karate. We were doing some pad work with jabs and cross punches. He made note of how different it was from what he had done before. It seemed to him that the difference between the styles […]

For many years just like most people I would make resolutions for the new year. Things like try to eat better, lose weight or get more sleep. All of which are excellent ideas but they usually fell by the wayside as the year progressed. In recent years I have given up resolutions and instead made […]

I once saw a cartoon in a magazine that depicted a scene of hell. In it the devil was showing one hell’s new occupants a room with all of the devil’s greatest weapons. All around the room were terrible weapons of torture and destruction. The caption under the cartoon was a quote from the devil […]

At the To-Shin Do Ninja Festival this year I taught a session on Saturday morning. For me, the session was very fun and humbling because of how much effort everyone put in to learning the ideas. We looked at arm positions which allow you to move and strike with great power while expending very little […]

To say that manners are a lost art in our society today would be an understatement. Rudeness runs rampant but do we still need manners? Most martial arts still practice some form of manners but the reasons for it may surprise you. Manners were a form of self-defense. In feudal Japan there was no law […]

When practicing kata or techniques very often students rush “to do” the technique without understanding why the kata or technique exists. Kata in our system are reenactments of battles or are they are drills created to pass on principles of survival. They provide answers to situations that teach lessons to us. They are not things […]

Mr. Hayes often reminds us at training seminars that we should have a personal training question we are trying to answer. I have found many people have a difficult time with this idea. They ask things like, “Can you show me this kamae?” or “I want to learn about this historical ryu.” or “How do […]