(Coming by the Fall of 2021)

How Do You Teach Someone to Be Kind and Gentle While Teaching Them to Kill?

This is the single most important question we as Sensei who teach self-defense need to answer. We hold the future of the world in our hands. As Sensei we are obligated by our traditions, the world we live in, and our personal responsibility to our fellow human beings to provide the world with the best students we can produce. This book is your one-stop shop for training our students in the soft skills of martial arts. It provides five full courses:  Violence and Self Protection, Managing Your Fear and Anger, Ethics in a Violent World, Principles of Teaching Physical Skills, and Fast Track Meditation for Busy Martial Artists.

Bookended by two short pieces of fiction, this collection of over 70 sayings, proverbs, and short commentaries provide bits of wisdom of how to live life as a Warrior in a time where peace is longed for but not yet come. These short sayings provide penetrating ideas for all to contemplate and integrate into their life values. For Sensei they provide short answers to questions raised in the midst of class until there is time for further clarification and discussion.

Told as mythology, this allegorical tale follows a young man’s journey to find his personal power. Having killed two men in order to save a woman from being kidnapped, he struggles through the stages of recovery from PTSD, growth and re-entry into society, and ultimately finding the source of his inner strength, power, and peace deep within himself. As allegory, this story illuminates and gives direction to finding a middle way to deal with our society’s struggles with binary thinking about use of force vs. violence, dove vs. hawk, becoming powerful vs. becoming controlling, and the process of overcoming denial about our culture’s violent undertones.