Teaching

The teaching and the work are one enquiry, which is why this page sits on an artist's website. The work claims fighting is an appetite everyone is born with rather than an aberration. A class is where that claim gets tested, weekly, and if it were wrong, twenty years of training halls full of children and adults would have shown it by now. What happens in those training halls is what the work is made from, and it is the difference between making work about a problem and handling it.

We begin by fighting others for ourselves. Refinement is learning to fight ourselves for others, and it takes a lifetime.

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.

With children, a lot of the teaching runs through stories and poems I wrote for it rather than through explanation. Every program I run uses them, and the karate program at Humbervale Montessori School has done so since 2012.

The school

I built Dapo Martial Arts in St Catharines in 2003 and moved it to Mississauga in 2005. I have run it since, and the instructors teaching there now are ones I trained and certified. For years we carried families who could not afford the fees, case by case.

Everything below runs on it. The seminars, the school programs and the community workshops are taught by people the school trained.

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.

Where the cost lands

Fighting always costs somebody, and usually not the person who chose it. The work outside the dojo goes where that lands.

Some of the young people who train at the dojo are in the middle of a crisis: at home, with the police, or about who they are. I am not equipped to treat any of that and do not pretend to be. What the dojo offers is a room that stays open and people who keep expecting them back, which for some of them has been the thing that held. That has been true since the beginning and it is still true.

From 2017 to 2020 we ran a program at Peel Youth Village for young people at risk.

We ran women's self-defence sessions 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.

Schools and community

The school programs run under my martial arts school, Dapo Martial Arts, and are taught by our instructors. They are our own programs under our own contracts, not curriculum an institution picked up from somewhere else. I have been teaching in schools around Mississauga since the dojo moved there in 2005. The contracted programs began in 2012.

The karate program at Humbervale Montessori School has run since 2012 and is still running. At Olive Grove School a children's martial arts program ran from 2014 to 2020, and restarted this year at twice a week. Two French-language public elementary schools followed, taught in French: École élémentaire Horizon Jeunesse from 2015 to 2020, and École élémentaire Le Flambeau from 2017 to 2020. At École St-Jean-Baptiste the program ran from 2016 to 2019, through their after-school program, the Centre Éducatif Éveil aux Savoirs. In the private schools, Clanmore Montessori School and Meadow Green Christian Academy both ran from 2017 to 2020, Maingate Islamic Academy in 2018, and Safa and Marwa from 2019 to 2020.

Seven of those ended in 2020 and one in 2019. That was COVID. At Woodlands Secondary School we ran annual self-defence workshops from 2022 to 2024, and a seniors' tai chi workshop ran with Studio 89 in Mississauga in March 2026.

Enquiries

For institutional enquiries, including grants, exhibitions and partnerships, write to me at me@basselsj.com. Schools and community centres looking to book a program should contact Dapo Martial Arts at cmacdapo.com.