There's something powerfully intimidating about a traditional dojo. It looks like nothing we have in the West. What is intimidating is the emptiness of it all. There’s nothing to distract, nothing to divert one’s attention. The emptiness, severe and silent, can work on the mind. This emptiness is deliberate. Life is full of distractions. Many of them serve to keep us from looking into ourselves, a process that can be uncomfortable. We can distract ourselves with video games,

I’ve run martial arts schools for many years. Like most school owners during the days before Google and Bing, I depended on listings in...