Please join The Dojo in Denton and Peaceful Storm Dojo in Weatherford for a special opportunity to train with longtime internal practitioner Christian Moses! This seminar will focus on underlying principles and exercises to better manifest aiki in yourself and in your training. Christian Moses brings over 30 years of training experience with nearly 20 specifically…
by Nick Lowry DOJO is the way place. All the stuff we practice in a DO-jo — the aiki do and ju do and jo do and karate do and ken do and iai do and all the rest, are all just pointers to the DO– different lamps lighting the way. As we train in…
by Nick Lowry Been thinking lately about a three tier curriculum for our dojo– at first was considering the the standard beginner, intermediate, and advanced idea but that seemed a little clumsy, linear and hierarchical — and would probably lead to folks being unnecessarily typed and excluded from work they might enjoy or benefit from….
by Nick Lowry Rank is in the eye of the beholder Where do high ranks come from?what makes a high dan rank in budo, a high dan rank? Is it technical ability? teaching ability? contribution to the art? What does being ranked as a godan, rokudan, nanadan, hachidan, kudan, judan mean? Who decides its meaning?…
by Nick Lowry A wise old sensei once pointed out that if you take a whole variety of different hard stylists and watch their kata, an educated eye can tell them apart , but when you take that same lot of hard stylists and put them in a contest, it all winds up looking like…
by Nick Lowry Innumerable times over the years students have come to ask the difference in JUTSU and DO, and for the most part my answers have always been to describe the basic surface distinctions; the historical, the philosophical, technical — the simple pragmatic basis of JUTSU as the basic military or soldierly training model,…
by Nick Lowry I have known teachers who over teach – they are helpful and giving — serve everything up on silver platters but who consequently have built very dependent students. Such are popular teachers; their students will love them and feel confident that they have “learned” and that they “know the subject”. But there…
by Nick Lowry Head to head in a competition-a real “technician” will probably get beat by a real “champion”- and a real champion will probably be able to repeat that amazing feat a few times in a given day–where the real technician excels is in wiping the floor with everyone else continuously and repeatedly all…
by Nick Lowry There is no such thing as a superior martial art—only superior artists. It is meaningless to say aikido is better than judo or krav maga is better that aikido or MMA is better than Gracie Jujitsu – such statements are ridiculous on the face of them. Each art has its relative strengths…
by Nick Lowry As an institutional device we can say that there is no such thing as rank in an absolute term– institutionally Rank is always based on a relative scale – some systems rank players/practitioners against each other – others systems grade your rank up or down with each performance- it is never absolute…