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 […]

(With thanks to Mark Morgan Ford) Many of us got into martial arts training with the goal of becoming successful, powerful, and free ( as opposed to living at-risk, being weak, and feeling dominated by others). Would you agree? The first step towards the goal of success, power, and freedom is learning how to think […]

In the early 1980’s when I began training with An-shu the world was very, very different. No cell phones, no internet, no skype, no training videos. Back then it was: get on an airplane figure out how to get to where the training was happening try to take it all in take notes (lots of […]

One of the signature skills of To-Shin Do is our ability to use our whole body to generate power, enabling even a smaller person to create amazing results with what seems like little effort. It is a difficult skill to gain, because it can go against conventional thinking, because it doesn’t always look the way […]

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 […]

Hello Friends of To-Shin Do. If you are receiving this email you are either a To-Shin Do Member or subscriber to NinjaSelfDefense.com and have access to a wide range of training material and information. We wanted to make sure you knew how to access some of your benefits. The To-Shin Do Members Page can keep you […]

Hosting our first Ninja Festival back in 1981 was one of the biggest gambles of my life. My ninja taijutsu was a totally new phenomenon on the martial arts scene 35 years ago. Yes, a few folks claimed to be “ninjas”, but only I could present evidence of actually living in Japan as a disciple […]

Festival 34 in Raleigh North Carolina was an exciting, inspiring, and rewarding experience. No surprise there. I have been making the pilgrimage to this event for three decades. I use the word pilgrimage because by definition this is “a journey to a sacred place.” For me, wherever festival is held the space and place are […]

This year my Festival session was about each moment being a new beginning. In fact, the entire Festival theme was “Ninja Reborn”, for several reasons, including marking our dedication to using technology and the internet to even more effectively spread To-Shin Do across the globe. It is an important concept to me personally, as well […]

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 […]

Festival is just two weeks away! This year in Raleigh, the hotel is so close to the airport and other restaurants that there’s no need to rent a car. And with lunch covered both days, along with a free continental breakfast as part of your $119 special room rate, there are almost no meals to […]

There is an old joke about a highly skilled engineer who was hired to solve a very challenging problem that folks had been struggling with for quite some time. As the story goes, this engineer showed up, assessed the problem in about 30 seconds, then pressed a quick series of buttons on a computer and […]

For a martial art that is dedicated to realistic, usable self-defense skills, we need to recognize that we may not be the meanest or strongest person in a confrontation. A true self-defense system has to rely on more than just hitting hard and fast in order to be useful in any situation. Not to discount […]

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 […]