Training hall

Sincere speaking is an art — an art that must be practiced with the same perseverance and dedication as the samurai practices his martial art. In addition to the four-day workshop series, we also organize a permanent series that we call the Training Hall or Dojo: a training space in which we gather eight times a year to ensure that we continue to develop the Art of Good Speaking on an ongoing basis.

In this continuing program, we alternate between theory and practice. In the theoretical part, we form a mental understanding of the psychology of truth-speaking. We gradually deepen our knowledge of this step by step. Unlike the foundational workshop series, participants here also regularly contribute on a theoretical level themselves.

In the practical section, we actively practice the art of sincere speaking. We walk a path on which we encounter ourselves — in all our shortcomings, in all the distortions within our relationships to other people; we explore the resistances we meet in our attempts to speak with our own voice while living together with others. Sincere speaking is an act, an act through which a person reveals something of themselves to another; it is an act in which words penetrate the veil of appearances and reveal something normally hidden behind outward appearances. Sincere speaking makes us vulnerable in this world; it reveals us as human beings who do not conform to the norms and ideals imposed upon us by the group and by society.

In the permanent training, we explore the various forms of truth-speaking practiced in ancient culture (techné, wisdom, prophecy, parrhesia). In addition, we intensively practice sincere speaking through the five basic elements of nature distinguished in Shintoism. In sincere speech, the human being becomes the voice of nature — spreading like fire, flowing like water, elusive like the wind, undisturbed like the earth. At the horizon of practicing the art of sincere speaking appears speech arising from emptiness — the emptiness of thought, a form of speaking in which the speaker themselves becomes the listener and listens in wonder to the words emerging from their own mouth.