Greetings, It’s a new year for those of us who count our years from Winter Retreat to Winter Retreat. Yesterday I returned home after 3 days of martial arts, meditation, contests, cultural studies, cold weather, hot rooms and not much sleep. Those of you who have experienced the Shin Ho Kwan Winter Retreat know how […]

Weekly Greetings. Yes, it has also been my plan to write about the winter retreat this week. As Master Pearson said we do share a lot about it, and though it may become repetitive for people who do not attend our annual Winter Retreat, it is such a perspective- changing experience that I want to […]

I’m sorry.  I know I was suppose to post part 2 of last week’s post, this week but I went and assigned a post topic to all of us without thinking.  I promise that next week’s post will be part 2. For this week, I assigned everyone (well not Master Shaffer) to write about the […]

Greetings, My trainer at the gym always uses the word “amped” to describe how he’s feeling.  What does that mean exactly…amped?   By the way, it gets underlined in red every time I write it so I’m pretty sure it’s a made up word.  Amped…it sounds so weird to me.  Is this a music reference?  […]

Greetings, In case it has not yet been made abundantly clear…I am soooooooooo excited for this year’s Winter Retreat!  People who have not yet had the privilege of attending this spectacular event perhaps to not understand the enormity of impact that this program has upon its participants.  In my line of work, we talk repeatedly […]

Let me apologize up front for such a short weekly post. My classes start in two days and I have meetings tomorrow. I’m teaching 5 classes this semester and although it is less than I normally teach I still have a lot of stuff to get done tonight. Several days ago I came across a […]

For this week’s post I thought I would talk about the “work” everyone does at the winter retreat.  In an effort to become a more traditional retreat, last year we started to assign people “chores” to be done at the retreat. These “chores” are called Jumu (주무) in Korean.  Ju (주) is the hanja for […]

This week I would like to discuss an aspect of meditation that will be added this year to the Winter Retreat. It is called “Dokcham” (독참). “Dok” comes from the Chinese character 獨 which means “alone” or “by oneself”. “Cham” comes from the Chinese character 參 which means “take part in” (It should be noted […]

For this week’s post I am going to touch on a very high level subject within the Shin Ho Kwan Curriculum.  We will be covering the rest of this at the Winter Retreat. The Four Minds of Shin Ho Kwan Cho Sim (초심) – Beginner Mind Before I go into detail about Cho Sim, lets […]

Below is the schedule for the upcoming Shin Ho Kwan Black Belt Winter Retreat. The reason it is being posted on the Hagsaeng Naebu Blog is because if you look closely, the 4 “Inside Students” will be teaching a couple of classes this time around.