The Cycle of Four is designed to teach and provide tools for karateka to define their identity, discover their purposes, and plan goals and tasks to accomplish meaningful results.
Every year, the dojo presents an important series of four lectures at the January Wednesday night Meditation Class. These have been held for a decade and are among the most popular and powerful Meditation lectures. You can read more about them here.
Of course, these are lectures for adult Karateka. However, beginning in 2025, we've begun integrating these concepts into all of our kid's divisions: Juniors, Youth, Teens, and Mentor.
Last year, we also distributed study and work cards, and we received very positive and encouraging feedback.
This year, we've expanded the cards being distributed, and your kids will be coming home with three sets of cards:
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Identity Card
A single card to help define and state their identity -
Purpose Cards
Several cards to define specific purposes. -
Goal Cards
More cards to define goals and tasks to accomplish the purposes that are chosen.
The cards will be distributed weekly, over the next three weeks, and are synchronized to topics and exercises covered in class.
These concepts are some of the most important in karatedō and we hope that you spend significant time at home discussing them with your kids, following the exercises, and then going back to these concepts over the year (as we will in class).
To support these four concepts, we'll be publishing four guides (Identity, Purpose, Goals, and Goals and Tasks) that are parallel to the exercises we'll be doing in class. The guides will have division-appropriate information and guidelines: what we do with kids in the Juniors division is a lot different from what we do with Teens, for example.
We hope that you will spend time to read these guys, the support materials they include, and do the exercises at home with your young karateka!
