A Reflection on Teaching with Humility
What does it mean to lead others through a practice you're still unraveling yourself? After four decades of training across multiple martial arts, I still find myself questioning my role as a teacher—and yet, that questioning has become part of the practice.
In the dojo, the mirror doesn’t reassure or correct.
It simply watches—still, silent, honest.
It waits as I adjust my uniform, clear my throat, and prepare to teach techniques that continue to reveal new layers each time I practice them. The first time I caught my reflection while standing at the front of the class, a quiet voice inside asked: Who let this guy run things?
Four decades of training—across different systems, different dojos—and some days that voice still hasn’t shut up.
THE WEIGHT OF INVISIBLE DOUBTS
They don't tell you how heavy the uniform feels when you're the one leading the class.
There's a particular pressure that settles on your shoulders when the room falls still and all eyes turn toward you. It's not fear—not exactly. It's something quieter, older. An invisible weight that gathers in the space between knowing and becoming.
The tension of being both student and teacher at the same time.
The quiet responsibility of knowing some of your students may one day carry the art further than you did—and hoping they do.
When I was younger, I thought experience would eventually feel like certainty.
That after enough years, the movements would lock in, and I’d carry them with the ease I once saw in my seniors.
That day never came.
What I’ve learned instead is that every technique—every principle—continues to shift.
They reveal new layers with time, not because they change, but because you do.
Your body ages. Your priorities shift. You stop chasing sharpness and start listening for rhythm.
Movements you thought you’d mastered years ago begin to whisper things you weren’t ready to hear back then.
What I've learned is that experience doesn't always quiet doubt.
Sometimes, it sharpens it.
We who started in the analog age of martial arts, before YouTube tutorials and Instagram highlights, were conditioned differently.
Stand in the back. Observe. Let your seniors demonstrate. Don't speak unless spoken to. Humility above all.
And now here we are, tasked with guiding others while still feeling like we belong in the back row—when every cell in our bodies has been programmed to question our readiness to lead.
THE GHOSTS IN THE DOJO
I meet them when I bow in before class, these ghosts.
They don’t belong to this dojo, exactly—but to all the spaces I’ve trained in over the years.
Dojos with hardwood floors and dusty corners.
Community centers with hard linoleum and fluorescent lights.
School gyms echoing with corrections I still carry.
Quiet garages where we trained year-round, sweating through summers and shivering through winters, chasing clarity under bare bulbs.
There’s no one wall of photographs—just a collage of memories I’ve pieced together over time.
And some days, when I step onto the floor, I feel them all watching.
There's the ghost of my twenty-year-old self, fortunate enough to have trained briefly in Japan, wide-eyed and overwhelmed by how much there was to learn.
He watches me teach with arms crossed.
Not judgmental—just puzzled.
Back then, he thought we’d keep going in one direction. Same system, same structure. He wouldn’t recognize much of what I practice now. The forms are different. The movement’s changed.
But I think he'd see something familiar in the way I hold the space.
In what I try to pass on.
Beside him stand the ghosts of those early teachers—the traditionalists.
Stern. Exacting. Serious in ways that made everything feel heavy and sacred.
They rarely smiled. Corrections came bluntly, if at all.
You earned your progress in silence, with repetition. No shortcuts. No soft landings.
I sometimes wonder what they'd think of how I teach now—slower, more curious, more open to dialogue.
Not softer, exactly. Just... human in a different way.
I don’t think they’d disapprove. But I do think they’d stand quietly and wait—watching to see what I’ve chosen to preserve.
And there, in the corner, almost transparent but somehow the loudest: the ghost of what my students might be thinking.
The gaps in my understanding.
The questions I still haven't fully answered in my own body.
But they keep showing up.
Every week, they bow in, tie their belts, and give me the gift of their attention.
They don’t seem to want a guru—just someone to walk the path with them, honestly.
THE WAY THE BODY REMEMBERS
There's something humbling about being corrected by your own body.
You think you've got a technique down, and then one day your hip doesn't rotate the way it used to.
The ankles send a polite but firm no.
These are the new teachers: joints, breath, time itself.
They speak in aches and hesitations.
It's not the techniques that stop us from teaching confidently. Not really.
The reality of long practice means we've collected experiences worth sharing, movements that have become part of us, insights that only revealed themselves after the ten-thousandth repetition.
When you're teaching, it gets complicated.
Because you're not just demonstrating technique—you're trying to transmit understanding. Trying to bridge that strange gap between knowing something well enough to feel it...
and explaining it clearly enough that someone else can feel it too.
Sometimes I demonstrate a movement, then step aside while the students drill.
I watch them with their fresh knees, their sharp lines.
And I think, Maybe they'll surpass me in not too long.
And weirdly, that thought comforts me.
Because that's the point, isn't it?
To be a link in the chain.
To pass along what you can, knowing it won't be perfect, but it'll be enough to keep the fire going.
THE PERMISSION SCROLL
There's a belt I wear that no one can see.
It's not black or white or colored by rank.
It's woven from every doubt I've carried into the dojo, every time I bowed in while feeling unworthy, every class I taught while a small voice whispered, You're not ready.
It's a belt made of moments I almost stayed quiet... but didn't.
Moments I said "I don't know—let's explore that together."
Moments I taught through injury, through grief, through days when my body felt like it belonged to someone else.
Moments when I saw a spark in a student's eyes and realized that they saw something in me—even if I couldn't feel it yet myself.
That belt won't earn me any rank. But it holds me together in a different way.
I've stopped waiting to feel ready.
The martial path, as I understand it now, is not a staircase. It's a tide.
Some days you're centered. Some days you're spinning.
Some days your students teach you, and all you can do is bow in gratitude.
I still struggle with the word "teacher."
It feels too formal, too fixed.
I'd rather be a companion. A witness.
Someone who walks the path openly, letting others see the stumbles as well as the strides.
We don't need more experts.
We need more honest practitioners—people willing to share the middle chapters, the ones where doubt and discipline live side by side.
Tomorrow, I'll enter the dojo differently.
I'll tie my belt, straighten my uniform, and step forward—aware, unfinished, ready.
Maybe I’ll offer what I know, without pretending it’s the whole story.
Maybe I’ll listen more closely, stay curious, and let the questions lead us forward.
Because it’s not about having all the answers.
It’s about remaining open.
Letting students see that learning never stops.
To keep growing, not behind closed doors—but out in the open, where it matters.
Teaching is one of the best ways I know to keep training.
It sharpens the questions.
It humbles the ego.
And if I ever stop learning, I know I’ve stopped leading.
So maybe that’s the role, after all.
Not expert. Not master.
Just someone who keeps showing up.
Still learning. Still bowing in.