Overview

Polished Steel recounts entertaining and amusing tales and lessons that have been learned by a range of students from different backgrounds, each of whom discovered some humility from their experience, but learned important life lessons at the same time.Martial arts teaches more than just defense, it teaches humility, respect, and strength. This book is a collection of stories from the dojo featuring various students as they learn lifelong lessons.Written with style and humour, Polished Steel will have you laughing and smiling while nodding in agreement throughout. Delve inside, learn something new and leave your ego with your shoes, at the door...Join Mary, Edmund, Simon, and other students in the dojo as they learn important life lessons from their Sensei. There are no shortcuts in life and training with Sensei provides the tools to traverse it. This collection of stories beautifully illustrates these teachings through simple but effective lessons that you can use in your own life.The stories in this book, with an accompanying haiku, cover many of the principles of several martial arts, as well as body, mind, spirit and life-lessons. In fact, it is likely that there will be something for everyone to learn inside.

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9780473393984

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Reviews

A wonderfully refreshing read, which should be on the bookshelf ofany/every serious student of traditional Budo. Patrick McCarthy, Hanshi; Each story in this collection is like a Japanese Haiku poem ... brief, perfectly balanced and delivering a moment of insight at the end. As we read the stories we get to know some of the students in this dojo, but most of all we get to meet the extraordinary figure of 'Sensei', who repeatedly confronts his students with unexpected training challenges and a poker-faced wit, aimed (like a true Zen master) at confounding them into realization. An entertaining and enlightening read that will appeal to martial arts enthusiasts as well as those who have never set foot in a dojo. Russel Brownlee

Author Information

Shaz Davis is an award-winning writer and holds a black belt or more in a traditional samurai sword art and t'ai chi ch'uan. With almost two decades of training and 15 years' experience teaching t'ai chi Shaz has combined her love of words and training to produce a book of short stories on lessons in the dojo, complimented with her favourite form of poetry, haiku - due to be released on 20 August 2017. She can be found writing and teaching t'ai chi in the picturesque township of Oxford, at the foothills that mark the end of the Canterbury plains on New Zealand's South Island. Shaz has also written several t'ai chi e-books that teach the detailed moves of the traditional Yang long form. Although magazine writing and production have been a core focus of Shaz's twenty-something-year career as a writer, including teaching magazine writing for various writing colleges, she shifted her focus on online work in 2007 and won awards for her online writing in 2008 and 2009. After completing an undergrad course on short story writing at the University of Canterbury a couple of years ago, she is enjoying exploring this creative outlet. When not writing or training, Shaz and her partner Bob (Sensei in Polished Steel) can be found undergoing intensive fetch and throw training under the keen eye of their active border collie, Shanti.

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