July 2010 Journal Entries (10)

Compassion must be practiced. You see, our school is about much more

than kicking and punching. Kindness is self-defense. Helping others is

self-defense. This video shows just one of the many ways that our

Karate Kids PRACTICE compassion… Continue

Jack, a Sacramento 3rd Grader, organizes "Operation Backpack" at Zen

Martial Arts in order to earn his next belt rank. At Zen Martial Arts

students are required to choose a Community Leadership Project that

demonstrates compassion. Jack chose to collect Backpacks for homeless

children in the Sacramento area. This is the news coverage from… Continue

The Project: 100 ACTS OF KINDNESS



Outline: Jane is a 10-year-old white belt. Her project is to get 10 of her friends and/or classmates at school to do 10 acts of kindness each; recording each act in log that she supplies them. Ten students doing 10 acts of kindness each, equals 100 acts of kindness! Jane and her mother will design their own kindness log--and Jane will have an experiential lesson in… Continue

Today I realized how compassion truly is everywhere.



Sabrina and I are visiting her family in Germany. We are in a small rural town, similar to Nevada City or Grass Valley in both size and location. Her family is not well off. They live simply, eat well, work hard, and love life. They also are a model of compassion.



Her mother invited us to 'shop in the basement.' Sabrina got all excited. I had no idea why. Was this another mistranslation? Nope. The basement is like a store!… Continue

Helping this group would make a for a great adult project for Green-Belt.

Women Take Back the Night is an international tradition with marches and rallies occurring around the world since 1976. That year, in Belgium, women attending the International Tribunal on Crimes Against

Women marched together in solidarity, holding candles to protest the ways in which violence permeates the lives of women worldwide.…

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10 Acts of Kindness

1. Help my dad move his office
2. Helping make dinner, and set the table
3. Helping my sister drop off lunches at the mustard seed school
4. Respecting people in the dojo and outside of it…

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Master Gichin Funakoshi wrote Karate-Do: My Way of Life. His book is required reading for adult yellow belts, and rightly so as Master Funakoshi records his time in history. The narrative details how karate impacted him personally from a young age, how he brought karate-do to Japan from Okinawa, and his experiences along the way.

To me, the most poignant section of the book was Master Funakoshi's description of his wife's karate. There was no formal training as we might…

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You may or may not know about a program called Ride To Walk. The organization is dear to my heart. Located in Lincoln off of Hwy 193, it is a nonprofit organization which enables children, teens and young adults with nuerological disabilities to participate in equine assisted therapy. In easy terms, children with autism, cerebral palsy and deep brain injuries ride horses for fun and therapy. Its amazing.



My experiences with the horses on site have been very educational.… Continue

Every office has one - loud, rude, egotistical, two-faced, and sometimes even dangerous. Left to their own devices, an office bully can turn your livelihood into a living nightmare. Carrie Clark, co-founder of the California Healthy Workplace Advocates, who promotes anti-bullying policy throughout the country, defines what qualifies as bullying and how to stand up to a growing problem that she describes as a national "epidemic".…



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