#kogen dojo

Master One Thing To Master Oneself

“To know ten thousand things, know one well.”

—Musashi Miyamoto, The Book of Five Rings

It has been said many times and in many different ways that a person cannot serve two masters well. It is very difficult for our minds to hold two conflicting truths simultaneously. It is even harder still for our bodies to seamlessly shift back and forth between two different types of movement. For this…

As The Group Develops, So Do I

Are you training for yourself or something more?

Some activities are individual pursuits, solitary paths for personal enrichment and improvement. Other activities are intended for and best experienced in groups, whether with family, friends, or, in some cases even strangers. Martial arts lie somewhere in the middle of this spectrum.

Most often, martial arts are sought out as an individual pursuit…

Fun and Freedom with Four Limbs

Four limbs are better than two.

In Brazilan jiu-jitsu (BJJ), one of the distinguishing characteristics of the ‘little guy jiu-jitsu’ used by smaller BJJ practitioners is that smaller folks in BJJ tend to use their legs a lot more for manipulations, attacks, and defenses than larger practitioners do. In my observation and experience, a larger jiu-jitsu practitioner is more likely to use his or…

Non-Competition for Mutual Benefit

We are a collective of training brothers and sisters joined together with the goal of mutually beneficial martial improvement.

One of the things that attracted me to traditional martial arts was the feeling of family and belonging within the group. We all worked together to make each other better and, through that, to make the group stronger. We knew each others’ families, had dinner at each…

Outsourcing A Single Leg Takedown

If you do not know something, ask someone who does.

The open source nature of the Taikyoku Budo framework allows us to draw information from various experts or journeymen from other martial arts. The information is then filtered through our core principles and integrated or pared away as appropriate, always looking to see what is useful and beneficial to our overall vision.

Here we see John, a…