I taught karate-do in regular dojos from 1974 till 2001. In 2001, I finally answered a tugging I had in my heart for a couple of years, to teach karate-do as a ministry. Here it is, 2006… how time flies when you’re having fun, and the ministry is five years old. I look back, and try to figure out what’s the same and what’s not, between running a dojo and leading a karate ministry. Not surprisingly, in both cases, much of the environment, many of the students, much of what is taught, really is pretty much the same. Of course, in our ministry, we don’t emphasize sports competition, tournaments, nor advanced sparring techniques as much as we might in a secular dojo… but the essence of what is shared, at least for me, is very much the same. Beyond the de-emphasis on sports and kumite, however, the biggest difference I can discern between my dojo experience and my ministry experience is…in me. During the years that my friend and I started and ran our own dojo, we both felt the same thing…that it was his dojo and that it was my dojo. This was very natural, since we started it, [...]

Whenever people try to do their impression of the late Pat Morita’s “Mr Miyagi”, they often use the old, “Wax on, Wax off” phrase, while making circular motions with both hands in front of them. I always chuckle when I hear that saying… then start thinking about a lesson that lies within second and last words… on and off. I guess that the real beginnings of computers, as we know them, could be said to have begun during WWII, a few years before I was born. These were large, crude machines powered by vacuum tubes, and generating a tremendous amount of heat. Yet, the most sophisticated of these behemoths possessed less computing capacity than today’s disposable hand held calculators. This is a story we all know. What I always remember, though, is that at the heart of the incredible things that today’s video games, pc’s, servers, mainframes and even the super number crunchers can do, is a simple principle…. On and Off.The reason that the computers of the 1940’s used vacuum tubes was that these lights would have two states at any given time, these would either be on or off. Multiplied by thousands of little tubes and using binary [...]

It’s sort of weird, the timing of things. I was planning to write a note entitled “Balance and Force Projection”, sharing some of my thoughts on center-of-gravity, as it relates to karate-do. On Tuesday, I attended a motivational training seminar (ho-hum, I thought)…which turned out to be an extremely entertaining session, taught by a professional juggler, unicyclist, drummer, etc entertainer, who also taught some profound lessons in life. He also gave some short references to his church and pastor and talked about spiritual growth being one of the five major areas we balance in life. What struck me was that his lessons centered around the very subject I was planning to share, except where I was thinking about Balance vs Force Projection, he was talking about Balance vs being Off-Balance with a Purpose. He talked about learning to balance on a 6-foot high unicycle, then learning to move where ever one wanted to go, by leaning in the direction one aimed at. He also talked about the intracacies of juggling 3, then 4, then 5 objects and the necessary change-ups in patterns to do so. He talked about faith in taking risk, added to the responsibilities of due diligence prior [...]