“Yossi Ben Yoezer said, “Let your home be a gathering place for scholars, get yourself dusty in the dust of their feet, and drink in their words with thirst.”  Without going into too much detail, this is a quote from the Mishnah (Avot 4:1), a collection of rabbinic commentary and a sacred text in my […]

Greetings, This past weekend I had the pleasure of hosting Master Pearson once again in West Hartford, CT.  My students were thrilled to have the chance to meet him and learn with him.  They were horribly behaved however and I was embarrassed…something to work on for the future. As much as I love teaching martial […]

Back in the early 90′s I attended a 10 day martial art retreat in northern Vermont. It was a traditional japanese martial art retreat, in that we all wore kimonos and hakama. We dressed like that the majority of the time. One day I decided that I would run and get gas for my car […]

A couple of posts ago I talked about manners, a topic of importance to me. Now, I’d like to talk about the teacher and student relationship within martial arts. This relationship is very misunderstood by non-martial artists and even by a lot of students and instructors. As an instructor it is my job to transfer […]

Bodhidharma once said: In countless ages gone by, I’ve turned from the essential to the trivial and wandered through all manner of existence, often angry without cause and guilty of numberless transgressions.  Now, though I do no wrong, I’m punished by my past.  Neither gods nor men can foresee when an evil deed will bear […]