Category: Martial Arts

            My Istan Blues
               
                       I
I walked where empires left their shadows,
where stone remembers every name.
An oud was crying somewhere in the evening,
and the Bosphorus was playing the same old blues.
                         II
Greek feet had walked these streets,
Turkish horses had thundered through,
Saints had watched from ancient walls,
and the muezzin called the morning new.

                          III
Europe and Asia beneath my footsteps,
two faiths speaking in my heart—
and Istanbul whispered softly:
“Nothing beautiful was ever truly apart.”

  ——————————————

Istanbul — Walking Inside the Mind of a City

A Journal of Reflections Between Continents, Empires and Faiths

There are cities one visits. And there are cities one enters.
Istanbul was the second kind.
During my stay from the middle of July into the middle of August 2026, I gradually discovered that I was not simply traveling through a historical city. I was walking through layers of human memory.
Everywhere I turned, another civilization seemed to be speaking.
The ancient Greek world. Byzantium. Constantinople. Christianity. The Turkic peoples of Central Asia and Anatolia. The rise of Osman and the Ottoman dynasty. Islam. The great sultans. The architects, musicians, craftsmen, merchants and ordinary people who transformed the city into something neither entirely East nor entirely West.
And beneath all these great names and empires were people whose names history never recorded—fishermen, farmers, craftsmen, traders and families who had lived around these waters thousands of years before today’s Istanbul had acquired its many names.
Perhaps this is what fascinated me most.
History was not dead here. It was layered.
And somehow, the layers had remained visible.

Day One — Entering the City
My first impressions of Istanbul were not those of a historian.
They were those of a walker.
I wanted to feel the city before trying to understand it.
I walked. I watched. I listened. And walked again.
I smelled the food coming from small restaurants and kebab stands. I watched people moving through narrow streets and crowded squares. I saw cafés filled with conversations, merchants calling to customers, tourists carrying cameras, elderly men sitting together, young people passing quickly through the streets.
And above all of this was the peculiar atmosphere of Istanbul—a city that seemed simultaneously ancient and completely alive.
Taksim Square and Istiklal Caddesi, a street that never sleeps, became part of my daily geography.
The great avenue was busy, sometimes overwhelmingly so, yet there was something warm and human about it. Behind the major streets were smaller alleys, cafés and restaurants tucked into old buildings, little shops and passages where the enormous historical city suddenly became intimate.
I began to understand something:
A city is not only its monuments.
A city is also the ordinary life happening between them.

Day Two — The City Beneath the City

The more I learned about Istanbul, the more I realized that its Ottoman identity was only one chapter.
Before the Turks, there was Byzantium.
Before Constantinople became Constantinople, there was the Greek settlement associated with King Byzas.
And before the great Greek city, there were much older human communities living from the land and the surrounding waters.
The Bosphorus itself must have attracted human beings for thousands of years.
Fishing. Farming.Trade. Migration.
The movement of peoples, ideas, gods, armies, languages…
I began  to imagine Istanbul not as a city built once, but as a human palimpsest—one civilization writing upon another while never completely erasing what came before.
Perhaps this is why walking through Istanbul felt different from walking through an ordinary modern city.
The ground itself seemed to remember.

Day Three — Discovering the Turks

My historical curiosity carried me backward into the story of the Turkic peoples.
I found myself following a long and complicated movement—from the early Turkic tribal worlds through Central Asia and Anatolia, eventually toward the emergence of Osman and the Ottoman state.
At first I had thought of the Ottoman Empire almost as something that suddenly appeared in history.
But history rarely happens that way.
Empires have childhoods.
They have ancestors.
They inherit languages, military traditions, religious ideas, artistic forms and political institutions.
Osman’s small principality eventually developed into something immense.
The Ottoman Empire would become one of the great imperial formations of world history.
But standing in Istanbul, I became less interested in the empire as an abstract political structure.
I became interested in the human beings who built it:
Warriors.
Sultans.
Scholars.
Architects.
Calligraphers.
Musicians.
Craftsmen.
Farmers.
Merchants.
And millions of ordinary people whose lives created the civilization we now call Ottoman.

Day Seven — The Sound of the Oud

Then Istanbul began speaking to me through music.
The oud.
I had heard the instrument before, but hearing it in Istanbul was different.
Its sound seemed to contain something ancient.
Its voice was intimate rather than monumental. It did not seem to announce itself.
It seemed to remember.
There was something bluesy in it.
That surprised me.
As a blues guitar player, I am accustomed to the sound of an instrument carrying human emotion through a few simple notes. The blues does not need many notes.
Neither did the oud.
Its melancholy seemed to belong to no single nation.
It was the melancholy of humanity.
Perhaps this is why it touched something in me.
The oud seemed to say:
We have all lost something.
We have all searched for something.
We have all loved.
We have all departed.
And suddenly the distance between Istanbul and my own musical world became very small.
The oud and the blues were separated by geography and history.
But emotionally?
They were cousins.

Day Ten — The Mosques

I began entering mosques.
I watched men perform their ritual washing before prayer.
There was something deeply human in the gesture.
Before entering a sacred space, the body is prepared.
The hands.
The face.
The arms.
The feet.
A purification.
A transition.
The ordinary world is left outside.
Inside, another order begins.
As a practitioner of martial arts, I recognized something in this discipline.
The body prepares the mind.
The gesture becomes intentional.
Repetition becomes consciousness.
And consciousness transforms ordinary movement into something almost sacred.
I did not enter these mosques as a Muslim.
I entered them as a human being searching for beauty and understanding.
And something unexpected happened.
Islam and Christianity began speaking to one another inside me.
Not as competing systems.
But as two great streams of human spiritual experience.
I thought of churches I had entered.
I thought of Christian prayer.
I thought of Islamic prayer.
Different forms.
Different languages.
Different symbols.
And yet beneath the differences was the same human gesture:
the turning of the human being toward something greater than himself.

Day Twelve — Mimar Sinan

One of the great discoveries of my Istanbul journey was a man whose name had previously been almost unknown to me:
Mimar Sinan.
The architect.
The master builder.
The man who transformed stone, space, light and proportion into spiritual experience.
I had visited mosques before.
But now I began looking at them differently.
Architecture was no longer simply architecture.
It was philosophy expressed through matter.
The dome rises.
The human being stands beneath it.
The walls appear to carry the weight of heaven.
Light enters.
Sound travels.
The eye is drawn upward.
And the body suddenly becomes aware of its own smallness.
Yet it is not humiliated.
It is embraced.
This reminded me of something I have experienced in martial arts.
A great master does not make you feel insignificant.
He makes you aware of possibilities within yourself that you had not previously seen.
Perhaps great architecture does something similar.
It enlarges the human being by placing him within something greater.

Day Fifteen — Hagia Sophia

And then came Hagia Sophia.
There are historical buildings that one studies.
And there are buildings that one experiences.
Hagia Sophia was the second kind.
When I entered, I had the strange sensation that I was entering not merely a building but a memory.
The stones beneath my feet had been touched by countless feet.
The walls had been looked upon by countless eyes.
Generations had stood beneath that enormous dome.
Emperors.
Priests.
Worshippers.
Soldiers.
Sultans.
Travelers.
Muslims.
Christians.
And countless ordinary men and women.
The building had witnessed them all.
Here was Christianity.
Here was Byzantium.
Here was Constantinople.
Here was Islam.
Here was the Ottoman world.
Here was modern Turkey.
One building.
Many histories.
Many meanings.
And suddenly my earlier idea returned to me:
I was inside the mind of Istanbul.
The building seemed to contain contradiction without needing to resolve it.
Christian mosaics and Islamic calligraphy.
Crosses and crescents.
Byzantine forms and Ottoman additions.
Ancient stones and modern visitors.
Light and shadow.
Silence and remembered music.
Instead of asking which layer was the “real” Hagia Sophia, I began asking a different question:
Could all these layers be part of its reality?
Perhaps they could.
Perhaps that is the deeper lesson of civilization.
We are not made only from what we create.
We are also made from what we inherit.

Day Eighteen — Across the Bosphorus

Several times I crossed the Bosphorus by ship.
And from the water, Istanbul changed again.
The city seemed to reveal itself from another dimension.
From the ship I could see the city stretched along two continents.
Europe behind me.
Asia before me.
And the water between them.
I found that image almost irresistible.
Two worlds separated by water.
And yet connected by the same city.
I visited the eastern side, its markets, streets and mosques.
Again I encountered the rituals of purification before prayer.
Again I entered sacred spaces.
Again I felt that strange inner dialogue between Christianity and Islam.
But now I began to understand that the Bosphorus itself could be read as a metaphor.
A boundary.
But also a bridge.
A separation.
But also a connection.
Perhaps human beings have always made the mistake of seeing boundaries only as divisions.
Sometimes a boundary is precisely where two worlds meet.

Day Twenty-One — The Peaceful Warrior Walks

Walking through Istanbul, I could not leave my martial-arts self behind.
A martial artist sees differently.
One observes posture.
Movement.
Balance.
Rhythm.
Space.
Breathing.
Stillness.
Even a crowded street becomes a kind of choreography.
People move around one another.
They stop.
They turn.
They accelerate.
They avoid collisions.
They occupy space.
And in the mosques, the body becomes even more conscious of movement.
Standing.
Bowing.
Kneeling.
Prostrating.
Rising.
The sequence is physical, but it carries spiritual meaning.
This reminded me of Tai Chi and Qi Gong.
The body can become a doorway to the mind.
Movement can become meditation.
Breathing can become prayer.
Discipline can become a path toward inner freedom.
I began to wonder whether different civilizations had discovered variations of the same human truth:
The body is not merely something we possess.
It is something through which we experience the world.

Day Twenty-Four — The Search for Beauty

I have always considered myself a searcher of Beauty and Harmony.
Perhaps this explains why Istanbul affected me so deeply.
I did not want to judge everything according to categories of East and West, Christian and Muslim, ancient and modern, Greek and Turkish.
I wanted to see how the contrasts could belong to a larger harmony.
This does not mean that the differences disappear.
They remain.
History contains conflict.
Religions have disagreed.
Empires have conquered one another.
Cities have been destroyed and rebuilt.
People have suffered.
We should not romanticize history.
But neither should we allow conflict to become the only lens through which we see civilization.
Because civilization also means transmission.
One people inherits something from another.
A form of architecture travels.
A musical instrument crosses borders.
A word enters another language.
A religious symbol is reinterpreted.
A mathematical idea travels from one civilization to another.
A cooking tradition becomes something new.
Humanity is constantly borrowing from itself.

Day Twenty-Seven — The City at Night

There were evenings when I simply walked without purpose.
Istiklal Caddesi remained alive.
Cafés.
Restaurants.
Music.
Conversations.
The smell of Kebab Döner.
The movement of people.
The lights.
An old Byzantine chapel standing under a new building.
Sometimes I would stop and simply watch.
That may be one of the greatest pleasures of travel:
to have nowhere you need to be.
You become a witness.
And gradually the city begins revealing itself.
Not through monuments.
Through familiar details.
A waiter carrying coffee.
An old man sitting quietly.
A young couple walking together.
A musician playing somewhere in the distance.
A stranger smiling.
A mosque appearing between buildings.
The call to prayer moving through the evening air.
And somewhere, perhaps, an oud.
The city became less like a museum and more like a living organism.

Day Thirty — Leaving Istanbul

After a month, I realized that I had not succeeded in “understanding” Istanbul.
The”Istan Blues” in me couldn’t grasp it.
Perhaps nobody can.
A city with thousands of years of human memory cannot be completely understood in a month.
But perhaps understanding was never the real purpose.
Perhaps the purpose was to listen.
I came to Istanbul expecting to discover its history.
Instead, I discovered something about myself.
I discovered how deeply music can cross civilizations.
I discovered that architecture can become philosophy.
I discovered that religious differences need not prevent an inner conversation.
I discovered that the body can understand something before the intellect has found the words.
And I discovered once again that walking can be a form of meditation.
Athens had allowed me to walk into the philosophical mind of the ancient world.
Istanbul allowed me to walk into the layered memory of civilizations.
Perhaps that is why Hagia Sophia remains so powerful in my memory.
Standing beneath that enormous dome, I felt that the building was not asking me to choose between its histories.
It was simply showing me that they had all happened.
They had all left their traces.
And those traces had become one building.
One city.
One human story.

The Empty Hand

As I left Istanbul, I thought about something familiar from my own martial-arts journey: Karate Do,The Way of The Empty Hand.
We train for years to acquire knowledge, technique, strength and discipline.
And then, paradoxically, we are asked to let go.
To empty the hand.
To empty the mind.
Perhaps cities teach the same lesson.
We travel believing that we are collecting places.
But eventually we understand that the greatest journeys are not about collecting.
They are about receiving.
I arrived in Istanbul carrying my own history.
My ChristianityMy martial arts. My music.
My memories. My questions.
My ideas about East and West.
And Istanbul placed all of these things into a much larger landscape.
It did not erase them.
It rearranged them.
Like an oud improvising around an old melody.
Like jazz.
Like the blues.
Like Tai Chi.
Like life itself.

The Mind of Istanbul

Perhaps Istanbul is difficult to define precisely because it has never been only one thing.
Greek.
Roman.
Byzantine.
Christian.
Turkic.
Ottoman.
Islamic.
European.
Asian.
Ancient.
Modern.
And yet none of these words alone is sufficient.
Istanbul exists in the space between them.
Between continents.
Between religions.
Between empires.
Between histories.
Between East and West.
Between memory and present experience.
And perhaps this is why I felt so strangely at home while walking through it.
For I, too, have spent much of my life walking between seemingly contrasting worlds:
hard and soft,
Empty hand and armed hand (Kobudo)
Karate and Tai Chi,
Yang and Yin,
discipline and freedom,
body and mind,
science and spirituality,
Christianity and the wisdom of the East,
the warrior and the seeker.
Maybe this is why Istanbul spoke to me.
I was not merely observing its contradictions.
I was recognizing something of my own journey within them.
And so, when I remember Istanbul now, I do not see only the Blue Mosque, Hagia Sophia, Taksim Square, Istiklal Caddesi, the Bosphorus or the mosques on the other shore.
I hear something.
An oud.
A distant call to prayer.
The murmur of a crowded café.
The footsteps of countless generations on ancient stones.
And underneath all of it—
the old, familiar rhythm of the blues.
A rhythm that seems to say:
We come from different shores,
but we are carried by the same river.
That, perhaps, was Istanbul’s deepest lesson to me.
I went there to walk through a city.
I came away feeling that I had walked—
inside the mind of a civilization.
And somewhere along the way,
I also walked a little deeper
inside my own.
Indeed,  travel is also a beautiful inward journey….

Inside The Mind Of Athens

jun asuncion

For a month now I have been living in Athens.

At first, I thought I had come to Greece as a visitor—to see its ancient monuments, walk through its streets, visit its museums, sit in its cafés, listen to its music, and perhaps touch, however briefly, the enormous historical presence of this country.

But something unexpected happened.

The longer I remained here, the less I felt that I was merely looking at Greece.

I began to feel that I was somehow inside it.

Inside its landscape.
Inside its mythology.
Inside its questions.
Inside its memory.

And gradually another thought came to me:

Perhaps I am not simply walking through Athens. Perhaps, in some strange way, I am walking through the mind of Athens.

Before philosophy, there was the landscape

Every civilization begins somewhere before it begins to speak about itself.

Before there was philosophy, there was nature.

-And There Was The Sea-

There were mountains rising abruptly from the earth. There was the sea surrounding the islands. There were olive trees, dry hillsides, limestone, sunlight, wind, storms, drought and the relentless Mediterranean summer. There were fertile valleys beside barren mountains, caves, springs, forests and coastlines opening toward distant horizons.

The Greek world was never simply a piece of land. It was a landscape broken into thousands of relationships between mountain and valley, island and mainland, village and sea.

The environment presented human beings with a fundamental condition:

You must learn to live between forces.

Perhaps this is one of the deepest keys to understanding the Greek imagination.

Human beings were never alone in the world. They existed between earth and sky, mortal and divine, order and chaos, reason and passion, fate and freedom, beauty and destruction.

Long before philosophers formulated these oppositions intellectually, human beings had already experienced them bodily.

And this is where I find an unexpected connection with martial arts.

A martial artist also begins not with philosophy, but with the body.

Before I understand balance intellectually, I must experience it through my feet.

Before I understand harmony, I must feel it in movement.

Before I understand tension and relaxation, I must encounter them in my muscles and breathing.

Before I understand the relationship between opposing forces, I must experience pushing and yielding, advancing and retreating, contraction and expansion.

The body knows things before the intellect gives them names.

    -From Myth To Meaning-

Perhaps the ancient Greeks knew something similar.

Long before Socrates stood in Athens asking uncomfortable questions, the Greek world had already been telling stories.

The myths were not merely primitive explanations of nature. They were imaginative maps of existence.

Zeus, Athena, Apollo, Dionysus, Aphrodite, Ares, Hermes, Artemis, Demeter, Persephone and the countless figures of Greek mythology were ways of giving form to forces within nature and within the human psyche.

The gods behaved like gods—but they also behaved remarkably like human beings.

They desired.

They competed.

They loved.

They became jealous.

They fought.

They deceived.

They suffered.

They sought power.

They made mistakes.

The mythology therefore became a vast mirror in which the Greeks could contemplate themselves.

And perhaps this is why Greek mythology continues to speak to us.

The gods are not simply out there.

They are also within us.

Athena can become the archetype of intelligence and strategic wisdom. Ares can represent the raw impulse toward aggression. Apollo can embody order, proportion and clarity. Dionysus can represent ecstasy, dissolution and the liberation of instinct.

The ancient Greeks were, in a sense, already exploring the architecture of the human psyche through myth.

And when I look at this through my own martial-arts experience, I recognize something familiar.

Every martial artist eventually discovers that the real opponent is not necessarily the person standing in front of him.

It is also fear.

Anger.

Ego.

Impatience.

Vanity.

Insecurity.

The desire to dominate.

The inability to yield.

The inability to remain calm.

The ancient heroic journey and the martial-arts journey therefore meet at an unexpected place:

the battlefield is ultimately within the self.

-Homer: Humanity Before Philosophy-

Then came Homer—or rather, the Homeric tradition—and with it the great heroic imagination of the Iliad and the Odyssey.

Here we encounter human beings who are neither saints nor philosophers.

They are warriors.

They desire glory, yet they suffer.

They possess courage, yet they experience fear.

They love their families, yet they kill.

They seek honor, yet they are driven by pride.

Achilles is magnificent precisely because he is contradictory.

And perhaps this is another reason why the Greek tradition feels so familiar to me as a martial artist.

The martial arts are also filled with paradox.

The practitioner learns to become strong without becoming brutal.

To develop power without becoming intoxicated by power.

To acquire the ability to fight while cultivating the desire not to fight unnecessarily.

To become capable of violence while learning restraint.

The highest form of martial skill is therefore not aggression.

It is controlled potential.

The sword that remains in its sheath because the warrior possesses the discipline not to draw it is, in a deeper sense, more powerful than the sword constantly being swung.

This reminds me of one of the deepest principles I have encountered through decades of Karate, Tai Chi, Qi Gong and Kobudo:

strength without wisdom is dangerous; wisdom without embodied strength can remain merely theoretical.

The two must meet.

-The Greek Discovery Of The Examined Life-

And then, eventually, something extraordinary happened.

The stories began to turn into questions.

The gods were no longer enough.

The Greeks began asking:

What is reality?

What is justice?

What is virtue?

What is beauty?

What is knowledge?

What is the good life?

What is the nature of the soul?

What is the relationship between appearance and reality?

What does it mean to be human?

And then we encounter Socrates.

Socrates did not simply give answers.

He questioned.

He walked through Athens speaking with people, challenging assumptions, exposing contradictions and turning ordinary conversation into philosophical investigation.

His great revolution was perhaps this:

human beings must examine themselves.

The famous injunction associated with Socratic philosophy—know yourself—could almost be placed above the entrance of a Martial-Arts Dojo.

Because what is martial-arts training ultimately asking?

Who are you when you are afraid?

Who are you when you are tired?

Who are you when you lose?

Who are you when, as a Sensei, your students humiliate you?

Who are you when you possess power over another person?

Who are you when nobody is watching?

These are philosophical questions disguised as physical training.

– Plato: The World Behind Appearances-

With Plato, the Greek inquiry moved still deeper.

The visible world became a doorway toward another question:

Is what we see all that there is?

Plato’s world of Forms proposed that behind the changing appearances of things there are deeper realities toward which our imperfect perceptions point.

Whether one accepts Plato’s metaphysics literally or not, the question remains profound.

The martial artist encounters a similar distinction.

A technique can be copied externally.

Two people can perform the same movement.

Their bodies may appear to be doing the same thing.

But something invisible may be completely different.

One person performs the movement mechanically.

Another embodies it.

One has memorized the form.

Another understands the principle.

One moves the body.

Another moves from the center.

This distinction between appearance and essence is one of the great themes of both philosophy and martial arts.

The form is visible.

The principle is invisible.

-Aristotle And The Wisdom Of Practice –

Then there is Aristotle, whose thinking feels particularly close to the martial artist because Aristotle was deeply interested in how human beings actually develop excellence.

Virtue is not simply something one knows.

It is something one practices.

We become courageous through courageous action.

We become disciplined through disciplined action.

We develop good judgment through repeatedly exercising judgment.

In other words:

character is trained.

This is profoundly compatible with martial-arts philosophy.

A black belt is not simply somebody who has learned a collection of techniques.

The belt is supposed to represent years of repetition, correction, failure, perseverance and transformation.

The body becomes a kind of archive.

It remembers what the conscious mind has forgotten.

Thousands of repetitions gradually transform an intellectual instruction into embodied knowledge.

This is why the dojo can become a philosophical laboratory.

One does not merely think about patience.

One practices it.

One does not merely discuss balance.

One loses balance and learns to recover it.

One does not merely talk about humility.

One gets corrected by a teacher.

One does not merely speak about overcoming fear.

One steps forward despite it.

Philosophy becomes flesh.

Indeed, excellence is not an act but a habit.

-Pythagoras And The Hidden Music Of Existence –

And then there is Pythagoras.

The Pythagorean vision fascinates me because it sees mathematical proportion and harmony as something fundamental to reality.

Here another bridge appears—this time through music!

As a guitarist who loves blues and jazz and every style in between, I have experienced how something apparently spontaneous can nevertheless contain an invisible architecture.

A great improviser does not simply produce random notes.

He listens.

He responds.

He anticipates.

He leaves space.

He resolves tension.

He creates tension.

He returns to rhythm.

He departs from rhythm.

He discovers freedom within structure.

Tai Chi feels similar.

The movement appears effortless, but beneath that apparent simplicity exists an intricate relationship between weight, gravity, breathing, timing, relaxation, intention and structural alignment.

Perhaps this is one reason the ancient Greek idea of kosmos is so evocative.

The cosmos is not merely everything that exists.

It carries the suggestion of order, arrangement and harmony.

The martial artist, the musician and the philosopher therefore meet again:

all three are learning how to discover order within movement.

-The Body As A Temple Of Consciousness-

Walking around Athens, one cannot escape the Greek fascination with the human form.

The sculptures do not merely depict bodies.

They celebrate proportion, movement, posture and potential.

The human being becomes a measure through which the world can be contemplated.

This is especially meaningful to me because my own path has always been fundamentally embodied.

Karate taught me structure and discipline.

Kobudo taught me relationship with an external instrument and the responsibility that accompanies power.

Tai Chi taught me continuity, softness, balance and the possibility that yielding can itself contain strength.

Qi Gong taught me to pay attention to breath, internal sensation and the subtle relationship between body and mind.

These traditions came from another civilization, another geography and another historical experience.

And yet, standing here in Greece, I sometimes feel that they are having a conversation with the ancient Greek world.

Not because Greek and Chinese philosophies are identical—they are certainly not—but because both civilizations understood something that modern life often forgets:

wisdom is not only an idea in the head. It must somehow become a way of inhabiting the body and the world.

– The Warrior And The Philosopher-

Perhaps the deepest connection between Greece and my own path is found in the relationship between the warrior and the philosopher.

Modern people often separate them.

The warrior represents action.

The philosopher represents thought.

But ancient Greece did not always make such a simple division.

The ideal human being was expected to cultivate body, character and intellect.

The gymnasium was not merely a place for physical exercise. It belonged to a larger culture of education and formation.

The Greek concept of paideia involved the cultivation of the whole human being.

And this speaks directly to my understanding of martial arts.

The true martial artist is not merely training to defeat an opponent.

He is training to become a particular kind of human being.

More centered.

More observant.

More disciplined.

More courageous.

More compassionate.

More capable of responding rather than merely reacting.

This is why I have always felt that martial arts, when properly understood, are forms of education.

The body becomes the first teacher.

Experience becomes the second.

The instructor becomes the guide.

And life itself becomes the ultimate dojo.

    -Athens As A Living Mandala-

There is another experience I have had during this month.

Athens sometimes feels to me like a gigantic mandala of human consciousness.

At its center stands the Acropolis.

Around it, layers upon layers of civilization have accumulated.

Mycenaean memory.

Archaic Greece.

Classical Athens.

Hellenistic civilization.

Roman rule.

Byzantium.

Orthodox Christianity.

Ottoman history.

The modern Greek state.

And today’s enormous, noisy, contradictory metropolis.

Nothing has completely disappeared.

The ancient and the modern coexist.

A fragment of marble may sit beside a modern apartment building.

An ancient column may rise behind traffic.

A Byzantine church may stand only a short distance from a classical temple.

A philosopher’s question may still be alive beneath the noise of contemporary life.

Athens therefore teaches something that martial arts also teach:

the present is never without a past.

Every movement contains previous movements.

Every posture is the result of countless adjustments.

Every mature practitioner carries his earlier mistakes inside his present skill.

Civilizations are similar.

They do not simply replace one another.

They accumulate.

They transform.

They reinterpret.

They remember.

-The Greek Gift Was Not Perfection-

Yet perhaps we should not romanticize Greece.

The ancient Greek world was filled with slavery, warfare, inequality, political conflict, misogyny and cruelty.

The civilization that produced democracy did not extend democratic equality to everyone.

The civilization that celebrated beauty also knew violence.

The civilization that produced philosophy was capable of war.

And perhaps this makes the Greek legacy even more valuable.

It was not created by perfect people.

It was created by human beings struggling with contradiction.

And this is precisely what makes the Greek inheritance alive.

Greece does not tell us:

“Here is the perfect human being.”

It asks:

“What kind of human being might you become?”

That is a much more powerful question.

-The Greek Lesson And The Martial Way-

After decades of martial-arts practice, I have come to believe that the deepest martial art is not about winning against an opponent.

It is about integration.

The shadow and the self.

The hard and the soft.

The masculine and the feminine.

The active and the receptive.

The conscious and the unconscious.

Strength and gentleness.

Discipline and spontaneity.

Form and freedom.

Silence and expression.

This is why the Greek experience has touched me so deeply.

Here, too, I encounter a civilization constantly negotiating opposites.

Apollo and Dionysus.

Reason and myth.

Athens and Sparta.

Tragedy and comedy.

War and peace.

Body and soul.

Individual and polis.

Human limitation and the aspiration toward excellence.

Perhaps wisdom does not consist in choosing one side.

Perhaps wisdom lies in learning how the opposites can enter into relationship.

That is also the essence of Yin and Yang.

Not the destruction of opposites, but their dynamic interdependence.

And so my encounter with Greece has become, unexpectedly, another stage of my own martial journey.

I did not come to Greece only to study the past

I came here as a traveler.

But somewhere along the way, I became a student.

Not a student sitting in a classroom.

A student walking.

Looking.

Listening.

Breathing.

Touching ancient stones.

Watching the light change over the Acropolis.

Hearing Greek voices and music in the streets.

Walking past statues of gods whose names I learned decades ago.

Sitting in cafés beneath buildings that contain layers of history.

And suddenly realizing that history is not really dead.

It lives inside the questions we continue to ask.

Perhaps this is what it means to enter the mind of a civilization.

Not to memorize its dates.

Not simply to admire its monuments.

But to begin asking some of the questions that its people once asked.

What is beauty?

What is truth?

What is courage?

What is justice?

What is the good life?

What is the relationship between fate and freedom?

What does it mean to know oneself?

And perhaps, finally:

What does it mean to become fully human?

– Returning To The Beginning-

I began with the landscape.

And perhaps I should end there.

Because after all the temples, philosophers, myths, wars, poems and theories, the mountains are still here.

The sea is still here.

The olive trees are still here.

The sunlight still falls upon the stones.

The wind still moves through the same Mediterranean landscape that countless generations once looked upon.

Nature remains.

Human beings come and go.

Civilizations rise and fall.

Ideas are born, flourish and disappear.

But something continues.

Perhaps this is the deepest lesson of all.

– The Greeks Did Not Create Their Civilization Out Of Nothing.-

They listened to the world.

They looked at nature.

They experienced beauty and terror.

They confronted death.

They struggled with one another.

They imagined gods.

They invented stories.

They questioned those stories.

They turned toward reason.

They cultivated the body.

They composed music.

They built temples.

They created drama.

They argued in the marketplace.

They trained athletes.

They fought wars.

They contemplated the stars.

And slowly, through generations of human experience, they created one of the great conversations in human history.

I feel privileged, after so many years of walking my own path through martial arts, philosophy, music and life, to have been able to step into that conversation.

For a month, Athens has not simply been a place I visited.

It has become something more intimate.

A mirror.

A teacher.

A landscape of memory.

A philosophical dojo.

And perhaps that is why I feel such a strange familiarity here.

Because the journey of Athens and the journey of the martial artist ultimately ask the same question:

How can a human being transform experience into wisdom?

The Greeks answered through myth, philosophy, art, mathematics, architecture, politics and poetry.

The martial artist answers through discipline, movement, breath, repetition, silence and awareness.

But beneath these different languages there may be one common human aspiration:

to bring the scattered parts of existence into harmony—and, in doing so, to discover who we really are.

                    ——–::——-

   My Two Old Friends

         

In the quiet dawn, I walk the path of old,
Two friends beside me, their wisdom untold.
Tai Chi, the river, so gentle, so kind,
Karate, the mountain, with focus and mind.

Years have woven, their threads in my soul,
A tapestry of strength, a story whole.
In youth, I sought, the power within,
Now over sixty, I see where I’ve been.

Tai Chi flows softly, like whispers in the breeze,
Unveiling the secrets, with effortless ease.
Karate strikes fiercely, with passion and might,
Still, winning without fighting, that’s the noble path.

In the balance of both, I found my own way,
In the silence of dawn, Kamaytao joined my day.
My body, my temple, stands light yet strong,
My mind, a flowing river, where inner waves belong.

Through decades of practice, through sweat and through pains,
These two steadfast friends have quieted my breathing.
My life energy vibrant, my heart light as air,
A testament to training, to passion and to self- care.

Though the way is long, with distractions not far from home,
I stayed true to my path, in this digital life.
For Tai Chi, the flowing, and Karate, the firm,
Have anchored my Kamaytao being, through each twist and turn.

Now as I stand, in the twilight’s soft gleam,
I thank my two friends, for this beautiful dream.
The soft and the hard, the yin and the yang,
In harmony together, Kamaytao’s sweet song sang.

With youthful energy, in this seasoned frame,
I honor my journey, I cherish the same.
For Tai Chi and Karate, two old friends indeed,
Have nurtured my spirit, fulfilled every need.

Warrior’s Blues

(words and music: jun asuncion)

I
I’ve been through the fire and the rain,
Lost some friends, gained some pain.
But I’m stll standing, I’m still here,
This loneliness is nothing to fear.

II
I’ve been through the ups and downs,
Lost my parents’ other children along the way.
But I’ll walk this lonely path with my head held high
For I carry my father’s name, my solid pride.

Chorus:

If it be my fate that I stand alone one day,
I’ll embrace with grace this destiny.
I’ll face this truth and no one else I’ll blame,
The warrior in me keeps me stronger ever more.

III
Here today, gone tomorrow, they say.
The truth that all must face at the end of day.
But I find solace in the memories of my parents so dear,
For, be it in deeds or in thoughts, never had I betrayed them, that’s clear.

IV
My destiny is here to stay, so let it be,
In this moment I live, so I flow with it.
Sorrows and pain they journey with me,
They will be my best friends by the break of day.

(repeat chorus)

OKINAWAN TRADITIONAL KARATE AND KOBUDO GRANDMASTERS

by jun a.

Over the past six years – and after over thirty years of Karate practice and teaching in Switzerland- I’ve been regularly visiting and training in Okinawa with my Shorin Ryu Seibukan Karate teacher Grandmaster Zenpo Shimabukuro, son of the late Grandmaster Zenryo Shimabukuro, who himself was a direct student of Chotoku Kyan sensei. Chotoku Kyan was a student of Sokon Matsumura, founder of Shorin Ryu karate style, – and many other masters of his time.

The lineage of the Okinawan Shorin Ryu Seibukan Karate is clear and is easily found when one tries to research more about it.

A side note: Karate is Karate, but if you mean or teach and practise Traditional Karate, then you need to have behind and in front of you the family of grandmasters- both past and present that support you, and a Karate Philosophy  that rejects the Japanese approach to it-  which is  sport and competition. The Okinawans are not Japanese, historically speaking.
As Chotoku Kyan sensei had demonstrated, one is free to have several karate teachers of your choice as long as you inform your other senseis. This is possible in Okinawa because the attitude of togetherness is their cultural trait. In this sense, Okinawans help one another and Karate is not viewed as a competition but just as a vehicle for everybody to train their body and spirit.
So, it’s only in Okinawa where you don’t feel this jealousy and competition among the great masters. You often see them working together in seminars and enjoying together a drink of the Okinawan Awamori thereafter. They laugh and dance together and talk about ordinary topics. About Karate, they don’t emphasize the differences in styles and technic, and they don’t compare and judge as to which one is better, but rather respect one another. They don’t even talk about Dan Rankings, etc. What matters to them are your efforts, sincerity and respect to people and tradition. Okinawans of today still hold on to the belief that their land is a “Land Of Propriety”. And this is true also among the masters of Karate, an art refined in Okinawa.

Jun Sensei with Grandmaster Zenpo Shimabukuro. Okinawa, Japan 2018

I am fortunate to have been accepted as a student by Grandmaster Zenpo Shimabukuro (photo above) for it opened to me the way to the authentic Okinawan Karate and also the way to other masters of other schools of Karate and Kobudo, like Goju Ryu, Uechi Ryu, and other Shorin Ryu styles. So I train also with Master Kinjo Shihode of Uechi Ryu Karate, Master Minoru Higa of Shorin Ryu Kyudukan, Master Kyuna Choco of Shorin Ryu Karate  and Master Seiki Takushi of Goju Ryu Karate – and Bojutsu. Not in the photo gallery is Master Morio Higaona of Goju Ryu Karate. Their names, accomplishments and lineage are simply legendary. So, you  really don’t go back home empty handed- or, empty-minded, for that matter- each time you meet and train with them. You gain tremendous knowledge and skills, and lose much of your big ego. This is Okinawan Karate.