The Dojo's Five Disciplines

A body's home is a place held apart — and holding it takes five practices, none of which requires a building.

The first thing the canon says is the thing that removes the barrier: a dojo need not be a dedicated building. It is the cleared space where a body gathers — someone's home, a community room, a rented studio, an outdoor place that has been set apart. It may become a dedicated building as the body matures; in the meantime any consecrated space works. What makes it a dojo is not the lease. It is that the space is set apart and held between gatherings as well as during them, so that it accumulates the practice over years rather than being re-made each time (Sacred spaces, Threshold, Home).

Entry and exit protocols. The threshold is crossed deliberately. Ordinary life is set down at the door; the person is fully present inside while inside, and fully present outside on leaving. This is the smallest and most portable of the five and the one that does most of the work (Threshold, Ritual, Check In).

Care of the space. Cleanliness, order, repair — the body's care of its place mirroring its care of itself. Who sweeps is not a trivial question (Stewardship, Commons-Tending).

The shrine. A focal point holding the room's orientation — whatever form is honest for this body. A room with nothing at its centre is oriented by whatever was last loudest in it (Temple, Reverence).

Visitor protocols. What happens when someone who is not of the body enters — how they are received, and what keeps the room itself intact through the visit (Welcoming The Stranger, Guard the Membrane, Chatham House).

Relationship to neighbouring fields. The place sits in a land, a street, a community; its relationship to them is part of what is tended, not an externality (Bioregion, The Locality, Kinship).

Any body with a regular meeting place can hold all five from its first gathering, at no cost. That is what makes this an instrument rather than a description of an institution: the discipline is available long before the building is.

Also called: the dojo disciplines · holding the room Stands on: Sacred spaces · Circle · Threshold · Stewardship Opens onto: The Roving Ark Temple Dojo · The Hub's Seven Spaces · Temple · Welcoming The Stranger · Guard the Membrane · Ritual · Human-Scaling · The Circle's Shared Field, And How Circles Form In play: the Home — from the first gathering onward Sources: LIØNSBERG Wiki Books/The Sacred Warrior Guidebook/Sacred Warrior — II.2 The Warrior Circle, §The Dojo (unmarked) · The Roving Ark Temple Dojo (Card, draft — the mobile form, for seasons when a settled place is not tenable) · lionsberg.wiki: The Sacred Warrior Guidebook Open: The canon's Sacred spaces row is ore — a list of named rooms with no cards written — and names the dojo among them; these five disciplines are the only written practice for any of the family. · Nothing states what a body does when its space is shared with others who have not agreed to any of this.