Mt. View Aiki Arts

The Frontier Okuden Insights #1 : Everyone says "practice makes perfect." The man with 70 years of martial arts experience calls this a lie that keeps you mediocre.

After training under masters across New York for two decades, building a school in India, and teaching hundreds of students, Sastri Sensei breaks it down cold: "I don't consider anybody a master. We can only go so far—maybe I know a little more than somebody else and somebody else knows more than me."
The delusion of "mastery" is what stops your growth. You think you've arrived, you stop researching. You believe you're good enough, you stop experimenting. Every martial artist who calls themselves a "master" has already peaked.

Here's what the 70-year practitioners actually do: They practice one thing obsessively. Not the flashy throws. Not the pain compliance locks. The thing they learned on Day One that everyone overlooks: taisabaki—body positioning.

"The only thing I practice is taisabaki. I don't know anything other than taisabaki," his senior student admits. After 30+ years of training, thousands of techniques in the arsenal, this is what gets practiced daily.

Why? Because if your positioning is wrong, no technique saves you. If your positioning is right, techniques become obvious. Most martial artists collect techniques like trading cards. Real fighters collect positions—spatial advantages that make the opponent's next ten moves irrelevant.

The billiards analogy destroys the myth: You don't just sink one ball. You position the cue ball for the next shot, and the next, and the next. That's taisabaki. When you move correctly, you're not executing one technique—you're positioned for infinite responses depending on what the opponent tries next.

Here's what this looks like tomorrow morning:
→ Stop memorizing combinations. Start practicing getting to advantageous positions from any attack. Spend 80% of training time on movement patterns, 20% on technique ex*****on.
→ When drilling with partners, don't ask "Did I execute the technique correctly?" Ask "Was I in the right position to have multiple options if this didn't work?"
→ The failure point is treating movement as the setup for techniques. Movement is the technique. Positioning is the fight. Everything else is cleanup.

The book documents how Sastri Sensei could scramble his footwork during demonstrations in India—legs doing one thing, hands doing something completely different—and it still worked. Why? Because position trumps sequence. Get to the right spot relative to incoming force, and your body finds the technique automatically.

You've spent years collecting moves. The 70-year practitioner spent years perfecting where to stand. That's the gap between competent and unconsciously effective.

The Frontier Okuden lays out the entire taisabaki system—eight fundamental directions that contain infinite combinations, the billiards-table spatial strategy that makes you untouchable, and why every technique you've learned is secondary to where you position your body. Page 15-22 alone rewires how you see combat.

The threshold is in front of you.
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Musings in the Mountains: Long Drives are Deep Education

He thanked me.

Somewhere between talking about the book and talking about throwing knives, Sastri Sensei thanked me, and I did not quite know where to place that. The arithmetic has never worked in his favor. There is no ledger in which he is the one who owes. If gratitude is a current, it has only ever flowed one way, from me to him.

There are conversations that only happen in cars. The road unspooling ahead, the world softening past the windows, and something in you stops performing and starts speaking. Sensei and I had those drives. Before class, after class, on weekends in Phoenix, through the slow geography of two lives in dialogue.

We talked about martial arts the way some people talk about God, with that same mix of certainty and mystery. What it was. What it could become. Where it had been corrupted. Where it still held its truth. We did not always agree. Agreement was never the point. The point was the conversation itself, the continuous act of thinking together at speed.

Those drives are not archived anywhere. They live only in how I teach, in the silences I am able to hold, in the things I refuse to explain away with technique.

He visited the dojo. He always came. And he never interfered. Think about what that takes: for a teacher to watch a student teach and simply let it be. No corrections from the back of the room. No quiet suggestions afterward. No pull toward his own way of doing things. He watched, and when class ended, he was still just Sensei, present and unobtrusive.

Most teachers carry a territorial instinct. What they built is theirs. He seemed to understand something else: that the transmission was complete the moment it left his hands. What grew from it was no longer his to shape. My independence, teaching on my own terms, was not something I built alone. It was something he protected, by example and by never asking me to be more practical.

There were the weekly calls, since the nineties. Before connection became effortless. We called each other deliberately, and we kept the thread intact. Over time the roles blurred. Teacher, student, witness, friend. We moved from technique to philosophy, from philosophy to life, to health, to family, to the small absurdities of the week: knife throwing, pizza recipes, online certifications, the body’s refusal to cooperate as it once did.

It would be smaller to say he “made” me come to America, as if it were a simple decision. But there is a reason the book is happening, a reason the dojo exists where it does, a reason the art has traveled this far in this particular form. That reason has a name and a face and a way of looking at a young, arrogant kid that makes him feel he is capable of more than he currently is. Some teachers give knowledge. A few give direction, a tilt in how you see the world. He did the latter. The rest was just showing up.

So when I told him I would send him the first copy of the book, it felt less like a gesture and more like alignment. The work exists because he once chose to teach a handful of us in quiet rooms at odd hours. Of course the first copy should travel back along that original line and land in his hands.

I told him, too, how many of his students stand inside these pages. How the book is not just my voice, but a kind of chorus. Ramesh Jodige Sensei. Peter Donaldson Sensei in South Dakota. Fernando Hernandez Sensei in Mexico. Allan and the other students from the California dojo. Their lives, their dojos, their questions, all of it threaded into the fabric of this book. Not a monument to a single man, but a map of many lives touched by what began in that small room.

Our conversation, as always, wandered. From the book to pizza, from knife throwing to developing sensitivity, from online lessons to what they can never transmit. You can correct alignment over a screen. You cannot transmit the hum in the room when everyone breathes together. You can demonstrate a drill. You cannot quite convey the way a partner’s intent changes the air before any contact is made.

Stories from old parties surfaced, the gatherings where technique dissolved into laughter and yet the art was still present. Someone catching a glass before it fell. Someone reading a mood before it turned. The same principles, just wearing different clothes.

In other words, nothing essential has changed. As in the dojo, so in life. Martial arts traverse every aspect of living, tracing faint but unbroken lines between how you enter a stance and how you enter a difficult conversation, between how you receive a punch and how you receive bad news. One moment we are talking about angle and timing; the next we are talking about aging and the stubbornness of the body. The bridge between those topics is invisible but unmistakable.

So when he thanks me, for the book, for keeping him in the story, I want to tell him the current does not flow that way. But I do not argue. The gratitude of a student who knows what they were given is not something to debate. It is something to hold, and, if possible, to pass on.

The book is one way. The students are another. The daughters in the dojo, moving through the world with something ancient in their bodies and something fiercely their own in how they carry it, are rivers the original spring fed.

He may thank me. I will let him. And then I return to what I know: that somewhere near the beginning of every good thing in this life, if I trace it far enough back, there is a drive through a dark road and a voice beside me asking the right questions.

The long drives are not over. They have just changed form.