making room to grow
Hi! I’m Kajetan “Kaja” Sadowski, a martial artist, writer, and consultant in Vancouver, Canada.
I can teach you how to fight with blades and empty hands, to connect with your body, and to find joy in your strength. I can help you build a training community that brings out the best in you, your peers, and your students.
Join me to discover just how much you can grow when you’ve got the right tools.
One-on-one support for martial arts, self defense, and fitness professionals. Learn the soft skills of community management and get help writing effective policies. Build a new curriculum or revise your current one. Get a second opinion on thorny culture issues or weird problems. I’m here to help!
Bring my skills and knowledge right into your community. You can throw me in the mix at an event, or get an afternoon or weekend workshop tailored to your students. Discover a new martial art, dig into a favourite topic, or build important everyday skills. I can make it all happen in person or online!
Dig deeper into my teaching approach and steal the bits that work for you. My first book, Fear is the Mind Killer: How to Build a Training Culture That Fosters Strength and Resilience, has helped instructors and students around the world re-evaluate how they train. It’s a practical guide to building strong, sustainable, and inclusive training communities. Get it now in paperback, hardcover, or e-book!
Kaja Sadowski is a superlative teacher, researcher and fighter. They have built a world class training school, created hundreds of passionate martial arts students, and work tirelessly to make martial arts a better and more inclusive place. They are kind, compassionate and dedicated to making their students the best they can be. I am proud to call Kaja a colleague and mentor.
After having taken a wide variety of movement classes over the course of my life, I continue to be impressed by Kaja’s ability to guide students through learning physical skills in a way that’s based on what works for their individual bodies and brains.
They make the process of learning to fight from a manual feel comfortable and intuitive for me—as someone who learns primarily through proprioception, this is something I’ve struggled with in the past.
Being part of a class and school culture that centers the needs and comfort of people who are not what one might think of as the typical HEMA student (your neurotypical straight cis white dudes) was a revelation—I realized I had never been part of a martial learning space that was specifically for me before. The amount of mental load created by the social pressures associated with those spaces is hard to quantify, until it’s suddenly not there anymore and I can put that energy toward learning.
