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Shotokan Karate is one of the four major karates styles in the world, so many systems are derived from this style, and thus are contaminated with some very incorrect concepts. Thus, whether you study Shito ryu, Isshin Ryu, Kyokushinkai, or any system that has the Heian forms as a base, you probably are making the errors I am listing in this article. It doesn’t mean your karate stance is bad, it just means if you make a couple of tweaks you can make it better.

A proper karate stance should be a perfect mix between mobility and solidity. Mobiity is when one can launch their body quickly. Solidity is when one can grip the ground with their feet and not be moved.

In the Shotokan kokutsu dachi stance, however, the mix between mobile and solid has been unbalanced. If you study the legs you will see that they are angling more than 90 degrees apart. This means the stance is more solid than mobile.

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Power, in the Martial Arts, especially martial arts like Tae Kwon Do or Gung Fu is often measured by how hard you can hit. Thus, people strike the punching bag and the Makiwara, and they do push ups to strengthen their arms, and…and they are doing it all wrong. You see, there is one critical factor that they don’t understand, and so all their push ups and punches are having less effect than they would wish.

I want to make a point here…and I can only do that by asking you one specific question. Where, during your punch, do your arms bear the most weight? The answer is obvious, they bear it at the end of the punch, when the arm is nearly extended.

So why do you need to work your arm across the whole range of motion? Being strong at the beginning or middle of the push up is not where you need the strength. Concentrating your work out through the whole range of motion of the arm is not putting energy into the impact part of the punch where you need it.

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Tai Chi Chuan is the art that speaks of emptiness. One must move without force to realize the true depth of this ancient art. And, in Tai Chi, you might run out of energy, but you’ll never run out of nothing.

One must understand, of course, that there are stages of emptiness. The beginning student will have one viewpoint concerning this notion, and the advanced master will have another, and there is plenty of room in between. Indeed, one could almost say there are as many viewpoints of this great nothingness as there are students to perceive them.

In the beginning concepts of Tai Chi give much confusion. The beginning student tries to get in his own way, tries to figure out the mechanistic nature of the universe, and works his way through confusion. Eventually, the beginner starts to realize that there is more to this idea of emptiness than he ever had inkling.

One can perceive space inside the body. The apparent concreteness of organ and tissue gives way to perception. Awareness permeates unhindered through the contrivances of the apparently real body.

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There are only three levels when it comes to mankinds evolution. These levels are precis and exact, but are not understandable in todays martial arts. When you Matrix the martial arts, however, even specific arts, like Tae Kwon Do or Jujitsu, then your evolutionary path opens up before you.

The first step is nothing more than learning how to survive in the world. We are born, and our parents educate us and help us, but at some point we all must enter into the survival jungle. Feeding and clothing our bodies, finding out what we really want to do, surviving.

Interestingly, many of our problems have to do with our fellow man. It is not just the struggle for survival of the body, but how to get along with a society which, lets face it, is a little cuckoo. If we survive the jungle, however, if we do not jump off a cliff or hang ourselves, then we become sane, though this is a relative state.

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You can make your system of Chinese Karate into Power Kenpo fairly easily. Of course, you’re going to have to take a stand against the old school boys, but this isn’t always bad. In fact, if you do make your martial art into a Power Kenpo system, you will be following the footsteps of Ed Parker more closely than the old school boys.

The concept of Power in the Fist Law art is something I made up many decades ago. It actually grew from an incident in 1968 in which I asked my instructor to take a look at a kata I had been polishing. My instructor stepped on to the mat and I took a position and started moving.

The form was actually out of a series of books on Japanese Karate, and the name was Heian Five. It is a traditional form, with solid stance and large, significant movements. As such, it seems to stand opposed to the fast whirling arms of Parker art.

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Control the horizontal and the vertical, burn a mystic for Christ, we are about to get out of our bodies. Oooo, floating motes of intelligence, able to waft invisible into bedrooms and bank vaults everywhere! And it is all going to happen through an ordinary martial arts drill, common in systems of Karate and Kung Fu, and especially wudan arts.

If you can lower the volume of the spooky music for a moment, I’ll explain. The out of body experience I am talking about is possible through Horse meditation, what we used to call Kima Chasie. In this article I am going to tell you exactly how to do that exercise, and what is going to happen

Back in the early seventies I was working on my black belt, and I was frustrated with this horse meditation thing. We would stand in the horse stance, one hand in a high block, the other hand in a horizontal, hooked back beak hand. We would concentrate out awareness on our clenched fingertips until our legs shook and sweat burst forth upon our innocent foreheads.

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