A traditional martial arts dojo is a cultural relic, but one which is very much needed today. As modern people, we can seek satisfaction in ways that were impossible for most people throughout human history. But because of the way our modern life is arranged, we are, at the same time, deprived of many of the good things people long ago took for granted. One is that we have lost the opportunity to share life with a group of people whose experiences, joys and struggles are also ours.

Most of our relationships to others in modern life are with fragments of people, or with representations of people. Life in community with whole people, in the flesh, day in day out, whose lives and feelings matter to us, is something rare to encounter. Yet it is indispensable to a feeling of wholeness and fulfillment. The alternative is alienation, depression, anxiety - all the ills the modern world tries to medicate away. We can cure them through sincere, ongoing dojo practice.

At the gas station, supermarket checkout, at school, on the road, in the store, at the dentist, the government office, the police department, at school, or work, most of the people we deal with remain strangers to us. We know them only as their functions. We do not see them in other aspects of their lives.

Because of this separation, people treat each other badly.  If we live in a big city, commute to work in traffic or hurry along crowded streets, we think of other people as nuisances. That doesn't just hurt the people we are rude to on our busy way. It hurts us, by creating in us a feeling of loneliness and separation.

There are very few communities in the modern world in which people can live lives that are strong, meaningful, complete and shared, from generation to generation. For the people I practiced with, our traditional karate dojo was a good way to recover our humanity from the alienation and agitation built into modern fragmented relationships.