“The unexamined life is not worth the living”

Socrates 470 BC – 399 BC

What is a ‘Dojo?’

‘Meikai’ means ‘clarity’, and a Dojo is a place in which a ‘Way’ of life is studied – a ‘Way place’.   So, at the Meikai Dojo  (pronounced ‘make-eye’) we are seeking a clear and calm mind with which to better understand both ourselves and the world about us.  ‘The Clear Way’.

All too often we leave school or university believing that we are now equipped for life, but these institutions give us knowledge about ‘subjects’, not (!) about how to live our lives well. Consciously or subconsciously, we often keep searching for meaning and purpose to our lives. Some find it in family and work, but many need something else, and often don’t quite know what.

We mistake monetary wealth, and the amount and quality of our possessions, for personal development, submitting to our own ego’s insistence that we are the center of reality (and therefore more important than everyone else), or falling prey to superstitious belief systems which save us the expense of attempting to think, or develop as individuals.

A ‘Way’ allows us to develop our potential, regardless of the culture that we are raised in (programmed by), and it should be based in reality, for our own sake and that of those around us. This has to include an understanding of our social reality, but it shouldn’t be all of it. A ‘Way’ has to address a philosophy of life and give us what novelists would call internal plausibility, or a coherent world view, while at the same time accepting that there is no way to understand every little detail of existence (our brains are not big enough, nor our lives long enough).

Any honestly taken ‘Way’ is liable to get tough on occasion, they are full of pitfalls, mental, emotional, and physical. Sometimes we cannot see where to step next in the surrounding mist, but at other times the path lifts us up above the world and then we know why we train.

Udundi and Shiatsu are Okinawan ‘Ways’, and Yoga – an Indian ‘Way’ – complements and adds depth to them perfectly. Combined, these arts form a comprehensive therapeutic bodywork system.

There is nothing to fear, but fear itself

Martial Art Maxim