In Bloomington the night before the Dalai Lama teachings on the Heart Sutra?
Do not miss this opportunity to experience the soul-stirring artistry of Michael Fitzpatrick. Check the poster. I certainly will be there.

Daughter Reina is the safest happy girl in Atlantic City between friends Chuck Zito (see him on “Entourage” with Dennis Hopper?) and Dan Severn (see him win the UFC TV cagefight championship?), our neighbors on the Action Martial Arts Hall of Fame celebrity table aisle

A business friend recently asked how my family was doing, and I told him we had a reunion with both our east coast daughters at the Action Martial Arts convention in Atlantic City.

He was surprised. “Martial arts convention?! Over 1,000 cage fighters, fung-fu wizards, kendo swordsmen, MMA pounders, jujutsu wrestlers, karate champs, movie star action heroes, and well, yes, some ninja too, all in one spot? I can imagine all those tough guys with huge champion egos must have made for the most dangerous place to be on the east coast that weekend.”

Interesting how many of my non-martial friends have this belief about the connection between toughness and fighting prowess and ego.

From my perspective, I find just the opposite to be true. Get a bunch of hardcore total commitment to excellence fighting champions together and you’ve got one of the best parties imaginable. That’s been my experience.

If you know you are a winner because you have proven yourself for years, being tough in everyone’s eyes is no longer the point of life. You are looking for friends and allies with whom to celebrate further advancement and success.

On the other hand, if you seriously doubt your ability to command the space when a possible threat confronts you, you will constantly be posing as an angry tough guy in hopes of bluffing others into balking at a face-off. I’ve known some sad characters like that.

Daughter Marissa with our friend Michael Jai White (see him in “Batman; the Dark Knight”?) our other neighbor on the Action Martial Arts Hall of Fame celebrity table aisle

Event sponsor Alan Goldberg, himself a Wing Chun Kung-fu master teacher, told me this event and banquet brought in record-breaking numbers of martial artists, even in the midsts of the economic hardships so many face in America today. Positive martial artists want to spend time around others who inspire them and make them proud of their commitment to the warrior arts.

Strong aspirations seeking out strong inspirations. How noble is that spirit!

I asked some of my training friends what keeps them going in their To-Shin Do martial arts study. Why are you doing this? If you are not anticipating a lot of life-or-death fights in the next few weeks, what is the pull to keep on training? Give it to me straight. What is the pay-off beyond the exceptional physical combat efficiency we offer? My friend Russ Nemhauser sent me some heart-warming thoughts of how To-Shin training reaches beyond combat and addresses other realms of chance-taking and risky exploration.

Here’s what Russ had to say:

Since beginning To-Shin Do I have noticed that my personal growth has really taken off. I was growing and succeeding in my work life, something that nearly monopolized my attention for twenty years, but I was at a near stand-still when it came to personal growth.

At 37 years old, I made my first trip to Europe. While there I toured buildings that have been standing four times longer than the United States has been a country. I engaged with the locals in their culture and history. At times I could literally feel the bigness of where I was. I found it most invigorating. Ironically, for my first 30-plus years I had no interest in exploring other countries. Now I can’t wait to get out there and see more.

Since my trip I wake up in the morning eager to find ways to expand my horizons. I’m ready for new ways of thinking instead of the same old repetition. I like to use the Internet to learn more about why things are the way they are in today’s world. What happened? How can I use that information as a lesson before I need to learn that lesson?

When we’re bored by routines, it’s easy to become distracted by the next fancy car, the fastest new computer, or that next promotion and raise. Sometimes we begin to think those material goals are what life is all about. It‘s easy to forget that the toys often serve as a “treatment” for unhappiness. By the time you notice it, the daily grind defines your life and it can be difficult to break out and start a new, fresh path. The lucky ones realize that material rewards are a treatment and not a cure, and much like for an addict on drugs, the rewards need to get bigger and bigger in order for you to feel enough happiness.

To-Shin Do opened this door for me and helped me to realize new horizons. It helped me to think beyond the boundaries of what I accepted as my life. I encourage everyone to do what I’ve only just started to do: break the mental routine. Instead of obsessing over work tomorrow, spend 20 minutes feeding your own interests. It may be a book you want to read (or write), a long quiet walk, meeting new people, exploring areas you generally don’t frequent, or anything that isn’t part of your normal day. Do something fresh and stimulating. You’ll find something new and exciting to add to your life. I think you’ll be surprised at how good it feels to add to your internal toy chest new things that aren’t made of metal or wood and can’t be measured by money. It made me feel ten years younger, and I’ve only just begun.

One associate of mine (cannot honestly call him a “friend”) thought our dojo holiday classes were “unnecessarily frivolous”. The ninja martial art is a serious thing, he scolded. I chided back that we were indeed so very serious and our techniques so scaldingly deadly that we did not have to go around acting serious and deadly; only those who doubted their authenticity needed to maintain a grim and righteous look.

A friend once asked me in light of all my work with Tibetan Buddhist monks and Japanese yamabushi priests if I was offended by receiving Christmas cards.

Astonished, I replied, “No! Not at all!”

My family loves the Christmas celebration. We have two Christmas trees in two different living rooms in our house, both with haloed angles at the top. Rumiko loves to have pine boughs and red satin ribbons everywhere. When the girls were tiny, we used to go to a living Bethlehem manger display, complete with live donkeys, wisepersons, and baby Jesus. We get into the season.

In elementary school, my daughters brought home year-end dreidels that their Jewish friends had given them.

And early December is a Japanese celebration of Buddha enlightenment day. We’ve got that in there too.

Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, Kwanzaa Joy, Akemashite Omedetou Gozaimasu, Tashi Delek, Solstice Brightness.

I never turn down an opportunity to join a celebration of anyone’s approach to brightness, warmth, family, and spiritual advancement.

Greetings of the appropriate season to you!

When I was a child in the late 1950s, my TV cowboy hero was Bat Masterson. I watched the show every week and never failed to be enthralled. The Bat Masterson show was based on a real character who lived in the old West. Born in 1853 in Quebec, Masterson worked as a US Army Indian fighter, a sports writer, newspaper columnist, and US Marshal. He died in New York City in 1921 at the age of 67.

The TV show featured a somewhat fictionalized Bat Masterson as a gunfighter gambler during his days in Dodge City. Actor Gene Barry played Bat with a look distinctive among TV Westerns in the 1950s. Rather than a dust-blown 10 gallon hat, Bat wore a derby. Rather than a cowboy jacket, Bat wore an elegant silk vest. More often than not when it came to fighting, Gene Barry’s TV Bat Masterson preferred to take out attackers with his gold-topped walking stick cane as opposed to shooting a gun. The TV Bat Masterson was cool, incredibly suave for 1950s television, and… well, real different from all the rest.

Even as a 10 year old, I liked that “real different from all the rest.” In a realm of scruffy, unsophisticated, scuffling barroom brawling cowboys, Bat Masterson had class. Bat knew the finer aspects of living, dining, and dressing well. And yet he was one real tough guy (history claims he killed 6 men in one-on-one gunfights, aside from the Indian wars, though legends have him in lots more gunfights).

I bought a souvenir child’s toy Bat Masterson 3-foot cane and got my start at hanbo fight training with a 4th grade school chum in my backyard. We took turns whacking each other with that cowboy hanbo as the other tried to draw and fire his pistol. I liked that silk brocade vest, too, and wore one for my Halloween costume one year dressed as my favorite TV western star.

I still really like different, fifty years after watching Gene Barry’s Bat Masterson on TV. In a martial arts world full of crass scufflers, I want there to be room for a cool but deadly gentleman combatant. In a pay per view realm of screaming profanity, I want there to be a place for a poetically spoken ultimate warrior.

After hanging up the cane weapon and brocade vest, Barry went on to a new TV series where he played police captain Amos Burke who instead of wearing blue serge and driving a cruiser with siren and dome light, travelled in custom tailored suits to crime scenes in a Rolls-Royce. I instantly became a fan of the show Burke’s Law. I couldn’t help it. I really do enjoy “different”.

Actor Gene Barry died peacefully at 90 years old last week.

I still have my hanbo and gold brocade vest and my car – in newer form – maybe just a little bit because Gene Barry’s elegant fighters so impressed me on the small screen of my youth. I salute the wonderful actor for his iconoclast roles that defied a cookie-cutter conformity on an older generation’s TV, and helped prepare me to see that wild possibilities sometimes open up for the bold of spirit.

Back in the 1980s, I encouraged my friends and students to take our ninja historical martial arts into new areas where our knowledge could help others. How about military applications, police work, health restoration, corporate leadership training, running a local community dojo, and yes of course movie, TV, or novel entertainment? Take this art and do things with it.

Do things that I would not be the best one to do, I urged them. I was the guy who wrote books and conducted seminars and published the newsletter (that was how we communicated way back before the internet) and generally proved the art to the greater martial arts world. I was very good at that apparently, based on the resulting reputation of the ninja martial arts up to the end of the 1980s, and the massive river of American and European students who poured into my teacher’s dojos in Japan.

Yes but… It used to surprise me how many students did not take my suggestion. Instead, many tried to do just what I did. They started to publish newsletters and write books and conduct seminars – all the things that I was already doing. Whoa! Don’t compete with my work, I urged them. That just forces too many similar opportunities on too few consumers, I warned. Do something new and different from what I am doing. That way, instead of us all having to settle for increasingly smaller pieces of a shrinking pie, we could create a massive ever-growing-in-size pie.

By the end of the 1980s, the once-impressive image of the ninja had fragmented with so many voices competing against one another for authority in the art. With all that confusion, much of the world concluded we must not be for real, and the ninja boom faded.

But then a wonderful thing happened. Now out of intense public scrutiny, many students began to look for new ways to bring our gift to more lives. 5th Degree Black Belt Richard Sears is one of those special students who started with me as a teen back in the barn dojo days, went through years of personal growth and exploration, and is now doing what I had encouraged so many to do those decades ago.

I asked Rick to reflect and write on why he stuck with our training all these years, and where he has taken his passion for the art as his own personal contribution to a better world. Give it to me straight, I urged him. What are you doing now with all you have studied, and where are you headed, and why was this so important to you?

Here is Dr. Richard Sears reply:
 
I first began studying with An-shu Hayes as a teenager in 1986. For many years, I delved deeply into the art of the ninja, and even ran my own school for about seven years as one of the very first SKH Quest Centers. I also began studying the mikkyo esoteric mind tradition with one of An-shu’s teachers, and was ordained at age 21.
 
As I grew older, I realized that there was so much more to learn than what would be taught in the training hall. In the dojo, I learned principles that were timeless, and through the example of An-Shu, I came to appreciate the importance of translating the principles to a broader audience.
 
Because of my interest in the mind, I began to study Western psychology, and eventually earned a doctorate degree and board certification. I also obtained a master’s degree in business administration, helping me to understand how to effect change at the organizational and systems levels.
 
Today I am a professor, and I teach others who study to become psychologists. It is fascinating how psychology is now doing empirical research on the forms of meditation that I had first learned from An-shu, techniques that have been passed down for thousands of years.
 
Putting together all of my training and experiences, I have worked with Union University to start the Center for Clinical Mindfulness & Meditation. Already I have been asked to conduct several professional training sessions, and to contribute regularly to a local magazine. I hope to create a forum where scientists, clinicians, and practitioners can work together to share knowledge and experience and develop new ways to improve the well-being of the general public. An-shu has agreed to join as one of the first members of our advisory board.
 
It is an exciting time to be alive. For the first time in history, we now have access to thousands of years of historical knowledge, cutting edge science, and access to amazing teachers.
 
While there is a need to preserve tradition, how can you take what you learn and put it to use in the world? How can you positively affect your own community? What unique skills and interests can you leverage? How can you be of help in a sometimes confusing world? Finding your own way to share and encourage strength is the true ninja legacy that An-shu brought to us from Japan those decades ago.

(Read an interview with Dr. Sears in Natural Awakenings on pages 8-9)
 

Here are a lot of my senior Black Belt students and SKH Quest licensed school leaders. Several folks came in before for my 9-9-’09 60th birthday party at the Dayton dojo and then we all got together for some high-level practice the Friday afternoon before our 29th annual Festival.

Some of these Black Belts have been training with me since the early 1980s. Some have traveled to Japan with me for training and visits to inspirational training halls and mountaintops and temples at the roots of our ninja warrior tradition.

Especially in this year of unprecedented financial devastation in the small businesses and lives of so many Americans (and world citizens), I emphasized a hearty salute to my Black Belt training partners for making it back to Ohio for our yearly gathering.

These are the ones who carry our To-Shin Do out to their communities to serve the call for heightened life mastery quality through martial arts training. These strong people saw the importance and beauty of the message I carried from what I studied with my teacher and my teacher’s teacher. Certainly they do not “have to” stay with me and my program; easier lessons and easier belts and easier trophy titles could certainly be had elsewhere. But they vowed not to take the cheap and easy route, and promised that no matter how difficult the lessons, they would persevere, they would prevail, they would master.

I am proud of my friends. You can see their schools listed on this web site under TRAIN WITH US.

Here is my red suit photo. My teacher chose a red tux for his 60th in Japan to make a statement unique to the needs of the Japanese martial arts world of the early 1990s – more creativity, freshness, aliveness, and startling thinking.

At my 60th birthday party thrown by the students at the Dayton Quest Center dojo right before our 29th annual Festival, I chose a red gi and battle vest to show what I think we in late 2000s America need more of in our martial arts – more nobility, dignity, heroic presence, and pledge to ancient timeless ideals.

(That is my old “1980s barn dojo days” friend Bud Malmstrom next to me there with my family and friends; he drove in from Atlanta to celebrate our 32 years of friendship on our personal paths of warrior service.)

Here is a birthday greeting note from my teacher Masaaki Hatsumi:

Hayes-san, I hear this year is your Kanreki birthday.

A Kabuku actor considers 60 years old as the beginning for mastery of their art.
Zeami, famous Noh actor, says that you will return to the beginning at age 80.

Becoming old is wonderful.
You may lose your eyesight but your eyes will see the truth and authenticity.
I wish you health and long life.

A couple is like having eyes together.
Rumiko-san, enjoy the journey with Hayes-san, together.

Congratulation on your Kanreki birthday.

Heisei 21st Year September 9th.

Masaaki Hatsumi

One of my friends at the Sakya Pema Ts’al Monastic Institute, just outside Pokhara, Nepal, sent me some photos of senior students of the shedra (monk college) in their computer training class.

As from a description of meditation for beginners, they sit in perfect upright posture, focused in unswerving meditative concentration, letting go of the previous moment’s self and becoming yet a new and expanded version of themselves. Right there in front of the tiny screen.

These are my monk friends who live south of the forbidden Tibet border at the foot of the Himalayas. They and their head abbot Lama Kunga Dhondup are my coaches, trainers, and teachers in my study of the Vajrakilaya tantra practices, a set of powerful mind transformation methods in which the image of a sacred 3-edged dagger is a symbol of the power of awakening depth consciousness as to how human weaknesses can become enlightened powers.

These highest yoga tantra methods are said to be invisible to those not ready to grasp them. They dwell secretly in plain sight in a way that those unprepared will not even think of seeking their insights into power. These practices seem so out of the ordinary, so unfathomable, so ungraspable by conventional Western thought processes, that few of my friends and students have ever even asked me what they entail and what I am getting out of it.

Odd how many martial arts professionals my age feel the same way about computer technology. “It’s all superstition and voodoo to me,” replied one friend when I gently probed the rationale behind the design of his school’s ugly and discouraging web site.

You have to be ready to learn and advance.  Without the proper motivation such growth can be seen as a chore or a bore, and the power of the technology to bring you needed benefits – either Eastern inner technology or Western outer technology – remains a mystery.

Pema Ts’al Monastery senior students study arcane Western technological mind to mind knowledge transfer technique

2009 is the Asian zodiac year of the earth ox, my sixty first calendar year, and my sixtieth birthday this year on 9/9/9, and thereby my celebration of Kanreki. 60 years. Made it! 

Traditionally in Japan, when a person reaches their sixty-first year, they have lived through the entire sixty-year cycle of the traditional eto calendar of ten stems and twelve branches, and returned to the same year and horoscope sign in which they were born. The celebration of this not-small triumph is called Kanreki (pronounced kahn reh-kee). Kan means cycle, and reki means calendar. The celebration is also referred to as Honke gaeri “return to birth-year sign”. It has been popular in Japan since the Edo period hundreds of years ago.

Along with the 12-animal Asian zodiac, each person is born under one of 5 elemental signs (Wood, Fire, Earth, Metal, Water). These two cycles reset every 60 years. The honoree has been 5 times around the Asian zodiac with its 12 animal years, and so we get 12 x 5 = 60. As a result, a person is said to be starting their second cycle of life at 60. 

Here is a description of this coming year from my friend Koichi Barrish, chief priest of Tsubaki Jinja Shrine  northeast of Seattle:

HEISEI 21/TSUCHINOTO/USHI DOSHI/KYUSHI KASEI meaning the 21st year of the Heisei reign of current Emperor, 6th of the Ji-Kan 10 Celestial Stems Inner Aspect of Earth, Year of the Ox and a Nine Purple Fire Ki Year.

Year of the Ox, Signifies leadership, strength, power and stability. As for Kyushi Kasei it is the 9th number of the cycle of 9. It is situated in the south position which is at the top or head of the 9-star compass so it implies mental development and intelligence. 9 is the highest number compared to 1. Its color is purple which implies high rank. It is common sense that happiness visits the family who treasures life, ancestors and Kami. It is the sun above your head at noon and implies vigorous ki, especially mental ki. In terms of fortune it is the time to make a plan, to sow, to fertilize and to prepare for the future.

Kanreki is connected to the idea of rebirth, and so it is customary to give the celebrant a red cap, a red zabuton seat cushion, and a red chanchanko vest, all similar to those used as a newborn. Red is the color most often associated with children in Japan, the way we in America might use the term green as in “greenhorn”. Aka-chan – literally “little red one” – means baby in Japanese. In a symbolic rebirth then, donning red represents a return to the potentials of youth.

A 60-year old is expected to use Kanreki as a year of reflection. We examine our lives, evaluate our achievements, and use the time as a good opportunity to plan the direction in which we move as we begin the next sixty-year cycle of life. Thus dressed in red, the old one takes the seat of honor as children, grandchildren, relatives, and friends gather to wish a happy new life and many more years of joy and vitality.

An-shu Rumiko and I have a series of seminars, trips, special events, and our 29th annual Festival of training planned for my Kanreki 60th birthday year. I hope you will be able to join us at many of these.

On beyond Kanreki, there are additional longevity celebrations in Japan. I plan someday to enjoy telling you all about Chaju, the party year celebrated upon reaching “one hundred eight” in age.