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Through exposure to the physical, intellectual, and spiritual challenges posed in the many facets of our training program, you will gain first-hand experience in identifying and enhancing those aspects of your life that facilitate growth, confidence, peace of mind, and the joy that accompanies living well and powerfully. To-Shin Do martial arts self development promotes a mandala of 5 spheres of life-fulfilling aspects each of us desires to experience:
1. Abundance – Authority to cast your own definition of success – living a rich and important life, seeing the value of all you encounter.
2. Authenticity – Knowledge of your own true nature – realizing personal peace through intelligence, seeing things as they truly are.
3. Association – Connection to friends, family, and allies – expressing who you really are and sharing respect and admiration with others.
4. Accomplishment – A sense that you are needed – fighting the good fight to serve a worthy cause way bigger than you as an individual.
5. Actualization – Personal fulfillment – time and space to live up to your dreams and see the big picture of how significant life is.
To-Shin Do martial arts training is founded on a very strong and bluntly stated code of mindful action—how to live a worthy noble life. You cannot learn how to become a winner by spending time with losers. Ally yourself with proven role models who have been through the battles and can demonstrate what powerful living looks like, and you develop the momentum of accomplishment that leads to being a winner in life.
I am still inspired to this day by those exaggerated images of intelligence, compassion, and strength I saw in those novels, TV shows, and movies of my youth. There is a tradition of inspiration for people longing for the taste of mythic-level self-expansion in pursuit of an ideal so high that we never will surpass it? I have to have that!
Preparation for the cultivation of new strengths begins with intelligence gathering. Enjoy this book, and any new awareness it sparks in your life. Share its ideas with others. Remember to re-read these chapters several times. Look for the direct applications to life right now, and use the insights to plan ahead for future confidence and power. By all means, use it to inspire ever more happiness in your life. The world needs your bright strength.
A To-Shin Do belt rank promotion is an invitation to enter the next phase of personal challenge.
Chapter One
HONEST AND RELIABLE PREPARATION FOR REAL THREATS
I still remember the first time I was threatened with stupid pointless violence. I was in kindergarten, walking down a school hallway in line with classmates in 1954. The boy walking next to me, a complete stranger, turned to me and said, “I bet I can lick you.”
I was perplexed by the boy’s odd comment. “Lick me”? His words made no sense, but I nonetheless felt an ominous ugliness. At home I was used to affection, intelligence, and courtesy, so I could not immediately identify the violence implied by his words. Still, I sensed that something creepy was going on. I had never been assaulted by anyone, but down in my bones I somehow knew the boy did not have friendship in mind.
I was five years old and knew nothing of territorial imperative or a need to assert my manly image. I did not know how or why to act tough. In confused innocence I replied, “Yeah. I bet.”
The boy seemed content with that and we walked on wordlessly. It was over. He had won something he wanted. I was not harmed at all, but something inside me had changed. I had sensed my vulnerability at the hands of another who lived by values far different from mine. The boy had not even touched me, but I felt violated. The icy casualness of his desire to humiliate another child left me unsettled and sent me on a lifetime search for a dignified foundation of personal security.
Healthy people want to live life in a happy, expressive, and positive manner. Therefore, healthy people usually prefer to avoid situations and individuals that would impede the freedom to live a satisfying, stimulating, and meaningful life. For healthy people, the idea of enjoying willfully fighting with others seems odd or perverse or even sad.
Not seeking out fights in life, and thereby having little reference for handling confrontation, can leave us awkwardly unprepared for random violence when it does happen, though. For many people in these days of fragmented communities, transient workplaces, and overcrowded prisons, fear of falling victim to violent crime is a common impediment to the freedom to be happy. Think about it. Do you know anyone who might choose to limit life and avoid certain places or certain activities because of concern for danger?
Conflicts to be avoided are not just physical assaults. There are many ways to be defeated. For some in these days of fierce economic pressures generated by an ever changing international marketplace, danger appears in veiled forms that threaten to undercut the personal financial security needed to sustain a family. For others in these days of disintegrating cultural values and their emerging hollow and disjointed replacements, threats to personal fulfillment take even more subtle guises to sap the energy and defeat the will to prevail.
If we are not careful, without realizing what we are doing, we can end up assisting our adversaries to succeed in their attacks against us. We get in our own way because we do not understand the thinking process in the mind of the kind of person who enjoys violent treatment of others. To add to the difficulty, we do not have a clear picture of how we ourselves operate when under the pressure of threats, whether those threats be physical, economical, or emotional. Indeed, most of the children I went to school with in the 1950s were encouraged to defuse and smooth over confrontation. We were taught to consider threats as misunderstandings. Our mothers admonished us that mean people would go away if we just ignored them long enough. Few of us were taught how to stare danger in the eye and make it fear us.
This volume is an intelligent approach towards learning how to survive encounters with dangerous people, including situations requiring rescue of others from danger. We start with solutions for the most likely and most common forms of assault and build from there. I call it intelligent because it includes a lot of knowledge routinely absent from more primitive systems of self-defense training in how to fight.
Based on over 40 years of observation, I believe that most martial arts books and schools completely overlook the crucial area of training the mind and spirit as an effective part of
