making room to grow
Today, I made the announcement to my students and colleagues that I will be taking an indefinite hiatus from teaching weekly group classes, effective immediately. This is one of the most difficult decisions I've ever made. I know it's the only reasonable choice right now, and that I've put it off for far too long. … Continue reading On Burnout
You might have noticed that the kajaswords website got a big facelift lately. I've been working hard all month to make this space as pretty, functional, and easy-to-navigate as possible in preparation for some exciting announcements in the coming months. Part of that process has involved cleaning up the blog specifically, which I'll admit I've … Continue reading Broken Links
The trick to creating freedom to experiment, learn from error, and develop self-reliance, is a structure that actively supports those behaviors. I talk a lot about how you can't teach students to be independent thinkers and active problem-solvers if your class structure is built around obedience and rigid adherence to pre-set patterns. You also can't … Continue reading No Such Thing as Unstructured Space
I originally wrote this piece as two separate Facebook posts, published a few days apart. The first was a very personal vent about some of what I've been dealing with over the past few months, and the second a concrete call to action for folks in my martial arts community. I'm sharing both here in … Continue reading Disposable Women and Martial Arts: An Essay in Two Parts
I was reading this interview with Samin Nosrat, the host of a wonderful cooking show called Salt Fat Acid Heat, when I felt a switch flip in the back of my head. The "click" was almost audible. It was a shift in how I viewed myself in relationship to food and to cooking, and had … Continue reading The Things We Believe About Ourselves