For the last 15 years, I have been packing up and taking off early from work on the first Friday of October to head out to the woods of Sudbury, Massachusetts for New England Warrior Camp (NEWC). This year, I’m not. Why? New England Warrior Camp retired last year, after an amazing 15 year run.…
A master practitioner is someone who can practice and demonstrate their abilities at the highest levels, from martial artists who can handle multiple armed attackers to Olympians who can defy world records and our imaginations at their feats of strength and speed. We admire these master practitioners for their skills that transcend technical competence to…
It’s said that the students of Aikido founder and grandmaster Morihei Ueshiba once asked him, “Sensei, how is it that you are never out of balance?“, to which Ueshiba-sensei replied, “I am constantly out of balance. You never see it because I am constantly correcting it.” This is an incredibly powerful lesson for life, for…
… to learn something new. That’s a Japanese idiom from the martial arts, one which I learned from my martial arts teacher, Mark Davis of the Boston Martial Arts Center. Today, I want to highlight something amusing that illustrates this point very well. Rewind the clock 20 years. If you asked a conference room full…
Here’s a fun exercise to try at your next in-person marketing event. The difficulty of this exercise scales with how centered on your product, service, or business you are, and its value scales inversely to that self-centeredness. The more you can lose yourself, the more you’ll gain from the exercise. This trick is also an…
Last night at the Boston Martial Arts Center I had an interesting experience while coaching one of the green belt students on some avoidance techniques. The drill was simple: I swung at the student with a foam-padded bopper and after avoiding a relatively slow swing, they had to hit a padded target. It’s a drill…
For those who follow such things, yesterday marked the new year for billions of people as the year of the Yin Water Snake, exiting the year of the Yang Water Dragon. The year of the Yang Water Dragon was to have been marked by the dragon’s energy shaking itself out in our world, and we…
In class last night, one of the white belt students asked me about whether the ninja mind control stories he’s heard were real or not, what the secrets to ninja mind control were. I laughed a bit and explained that the ninja mind control method is fairly straightforward: gain control over your own mind and…
December 5th, of course, is International Day of the Ninja. Aside from the usual frivolous fun of wrapping a t-shirt around your head, here’s a fun opportunity to watch how the ninja might have operated, featuring both a SEAL team using lethal force, and senior master teacher Stephen K. Hayes, completely unarmed. Watch and enjoy:…
Giving financial aid guidance at College Goal Sunday Halloween is the one holiday of the year that has interesting practical applications for the ninja art of hensojutsu, the art of disguise. As you get ready to celebrate the day, consider dipping a toe into the water of actual disguise and impersonation. In old Japan, hensojutsu,…
