Archive | Warrior Philosophy

“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 […]

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 […]

In recent years many professional athletes and teams have discovered the power of visualization training. This is a tool I used quite a bit myself when my career at the time had me travelling to an average of two to three cities a week. Needless to say, my time in the dojo was very limited. […]

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 […]

A friend of mine who studies Shito Ryu karate relates how their founder developed a set of approaches to combat. Though he does not know about our 5 elements, he explains that the Shito Ryu approaches cover 5 different responses to fighting. It is debatable how many Shito Ryu students are aware of this. What […]

As many of you know, it is standard procedure in our training halls to do a short meditation at the end of class. If you are training on your own or with a small group we recommend that you do this as well. There are endless ways to turn these quick meditations into valuable exercises. […]

I am occasionally asked this question. The truth is I do not consider those exercises very important at all for new students looking for realistic self-defense fighting capability. The San-Shin kata were never intended for real fighting; not now or not never. No Japanese warrior ever fought using a kata from that set. They were […]

For the past year, An-shu Rumiko has enjoyed a connection to the Japanese concept of Danshari – willfully and deliberately letting go of things that no longer serve you. We are enjoying our progressively “zenified” home and dojo. Want to bring abundance into your life? First let go of no-longer-needed stuff. Get rid of the […]

Have you noticed how negative and nasty Facebook can be? Sure, some people put up inspiring or hopeful material. But look at how many are there solely to express their anger at life or other people, relate negative experiences in their days, or criticize and pick apart otherwise happy people. Hard to remain positive, isn’t […]

This year at my annual two day training camp I devoted the first day entirely to developing more effective communication skills. Clearly we will all fight many more verbal battles throughout our lives than physical ones. The key measure of our skills as communicators is our ability to effectively employ our ability to communicate to […]

January will be my 25th anniversary teaching taijutsu. My teacher, Mark Davis, had me start a training group for some people, who couldn’t make it to Boston, in New Hampshire in January 1992. I can honestly say I didn’t have a clue what I was doing as a teacher at that time. It was okay […]

We just finished Festival 36. 36! That’s a lot of years. There is time for 2 generations of people to become involved, 3 if you include me as the founder back in the 1970s. Reviewing feedback from Festival 36, I was a bit puzzled at first. “What did you like most about Festival 36? What […]

Thirty-four years ago I wandered in to a boy scout camp in Hamilton Ohio with my belongings on my back in an old backpack, and a sense of adventure in my heart. I could not wait to train again with the man who had totally blown my mind at our first meeting a couple of […]

At this summer’s private seminar for 15 friends at my personal house dojo, I explored 3 specific open-ended topics the high rankers in To-Shin Do will focus on this year. As a first consideration, we are challenged to translate a late 1500s Japanese martial art into relevance in 2016. I wrote about this challenge two […]

I was doing an interview on a local television show. I was asked what was so unique about our marital art. I found myself struggling to indentify and communicate the specifics. As I began outlining the key elements, for example, using gravity rather than fighting against it, understanding unified body movement, perfecting balance breaking skills, […]