What I teach
Every student arrives already knowing how to fight. Children know how to kick, punch, argue and negotiate a bedtime. Adults have simply had longer to make it look like something else. It isn't something a martial arts school gives anyone, it's what they walk in with. What I teach is how to recognise that appetite and decide what to do with it, instead of being run by it.
We begin by fighting others for ourselves. Refinement is learning to fight ourselves for others, and it takes a lifetime.
Umeboshi
Umeboshi is a seminar I have run since 2014, now on request. It teaches martial arts through brush and ink.
An umeboshi is a pickled plum, and the dumpling it fills is the reason for the name. The outside is rice flour, water and salt, available anywhere and quick to make. The filling comes from one place and needs time to pickle. Martial arts is the outside.
Participants start by painting circles, which is both preparation and practice. From there the sessions work through giving a shape life on the page; organising shapes to carry balance, symmetry, torque and leverage; the flow of energy through a few frames of kata and taolu; force extended through an instrument, using bow, sword, stick and knife; and the geometric patterns that recur across schools of energy, warfare and healing. The final session returns to the floor.
The point is to see what a class hides. A stance held for an hour teaches less than the same stance drawn, because the paper holds still while the body does not.
It has run as a weekend retreat and as a single evening. Martial artists come and so do people who have never trained, and the ones I did not expect are those curious about martial arts who would rather approach it through the drawing than through the floor. For them the paper is the way in. No artistic experience needed.
A shorter version ran for children between 2018 and 2020. The brush work was the same and so was the reason for it: a child who cannot yet hold a stance for a minute can hold the drawing of one for as long as they like. What they are looking at stops moving, and that is when they start to see it.
Umeboshi Art Seminars throughout the years since 2014
Umeboshi Children’s Art Workshops
Self-defence and community workshops
Women's self-defence with Sakeenah Canada in July 2025 and again in July 2026, now running annually. Sakeenah runs shelters and support services for Muslim women and children leaving domestic violence and homelessness; the workshop is an open event to bring attention to their work rather than a service to the women in their care.
The same seminar has run with Unison Health and Community Services in Toronto, in September and October 2025, with the next scheduled for August 2026. A seniors' tai chi workshop ran with Studio 89 in Mississauga in March 2026.
Schools and community
The school programs run under my martial arts school, Dapo Martial Arts, and are taught by our instructors. Between 2014 and 2020 we ran weekly programs in at least six schools, and COVID ended most of them. The karate program at Humbervale Montessori School has run since 2012 and is still running. At Woodlands Secondary School we ran annual self-defence workshops for students from 2022 to 2024. At Olive Grove School a children's martial arts program ran from 2014 to 2020 and restarted this year, twice a week. From 2017 to 2020 we ran a program at Peel Youth Village for young people at risk.
Enquiries
If you run a school, a community centre, or a program and want to talk about this work, write to me at me@basselsj.com.