What I Learned Standing Perfectly StillI paid good money to learn ancient Chinese fighting techniques from a master with impossible green eyes. What I got instead was an unexpected lesson in facing my own mind. Here's how standing perfectly still for weeks ...

Six years after losing the man who taught me how to turn scars into storiesIt's been several years now since Chef Anthony Bourdain passed. This isn't a martial arts piece. It's not one of my usual reflections on training or discipline. It's ...

What an hour on wooden floors taught me about enduranceThere are lessons you don’t learn from books or teachers. You absorb them quietly... through repetition, discomfort, and silence. In Japan, we call it gaman - a kind of quiet endurance. Not flashy. ...

The deadliest fights don’t happen in the streets.We think of self-defense as something dramatic. A mugger in an alley, a stranger in a parking lot. But most of us are preparing for the wrong fight.Because the truth is, it's not the imagined ...

How martial arts taught me to keep practicing; through life, not just in it.What does it mean to keep training, even when you're nowhere near the dojo? In this essay, I reflect on how everyday moments: frustration in traffic, creative blocks, tense ...