By: Yelin Gemma Lee
“Keep going! Your spirit is in here!” Sasha’s encouraging, booming voice cuts through the music in a room full of students dripping with sweat, warming up for his kickboxing class. He is right there with them, circling the room to check in on his students and correct their form.
Nearing two years since opening Modern Warrior: Academy of Self-Defense, SFU alumnus Sasha Tadayoni is taking the mixed martial arts community by storm. With his uplifting and groundbreaking movement, Tadayoni works to help individuals overcome personal obstacles and move towards personal empowerment and growth.
What is Modern Warrior?
“Our mission is empowerment of our students: helping them achieve peace of mind and preparing them for whatever they might face out there in the real world.” said Sasha Tadayoni in an interview with The Peak. “We are not a fighting school, we are a school that focuses on real-time events, real scenarios, and the rule of law when it comes to self-defense.”
The Modern Warrior dojo is unique in that it prides itself in combining aspects of self-defense and traditional martial arts to create a balanced and effective weekly regimen.
“Sasha always stresses that it’s not about being better than anyone, or beating someone to a pulp. It’s about feeling — as a whole — equipped to defend yourself from very real threats and dire situations that could happen, or have happened to you,” said Cruz Velasquez, an SFU student who is also a Modern Warrior wrestling instructor.
“Honestly, I never could have predicted that I would be teaching self-defense because I never really saw how valuable my wrestling skills could be when applied outside of the wrestling field of competition.”
Modern Warrior’s self-defense training classes are based mostly on jiu-jitsu, kickboxing, silat, and wrestling. Modern Warrior is giving people of all ages and walks of life the opportunity to study a multitude of self-defense and martial-art forms, which fosters a space of intense discipline and personal growth.
“The whole mantra of modern warrior is train the mind, prepare the body. We want to encourage and empower others to always be a student, to always be learning,” said Velasquez. “Yeah, I’m an 11-year wrestling veteran but I find that Modern Warrior is teaching me new things all the time, in all aspects, whether it be teaching methods or different aspects of self-defense.”
Tadayoni is notorious amongst his instructors and students for making sure each individual gets the most out of his classes. One of these students is Nafisha Hussain, who also studies criminology at SFU.
“[Modern Warrior] has allowed me to both physically, mentally and emotionally expand my limits [as well as] achieve things that I had previously thought I wasn’t capable of,” said Hussain. “It’s an empowering and positive environment that encourages growth — as a whole.”
Tadayoni encourages the students to let their emotions flow, whether they be timidness, frustration, anger, or even fear and anxiety over the common mental obstacle of “flipping the switch” (turning on the intent to land an effective strike or to hurt somebody). For Tadayoni, there is no better place or time to express your emotions towards personal barriers and weaknesses than during class. He emphasises that the dojo is a safe place for all students to do this.
Once the instructor has a sense of a particular student’s personal obstacles, they can help students train them to overcome it, empowering the student and equipping them to face the things that make them feel vulnerable.
“No matter what past issue or current issue our students bring to our dojo, we are there to talk them through it, give them the encouragement they need, and generally be a great support and advocate for each student’s personal goals whether it include overcoming something major or not,” Sasha explains. “Patience is the greatest virtue that we can give to our students.”
How did it all begin?
Approximately three and a half years ago, Tadayoni experienced an injury that left the left side of his body paralyzed. Tadayoni found himself unable to walk and struggling with depression. While working through his personal difficulties, he watched local news explode with the upsetting reality of sexual assaults happening on local university campuses. He soon gained a momentous drive to do something about it, and from this was born a life dedicated to training himself and others.
“Not being able to walk [or] apply the things I have learned throughout my life to protect myself was not only disheartening, but foremost it was scary— it made me think ‘Oh my god, if something were to happen to me right now, how would I defend myself?’” Tadayoni recounted. “It was a very eye-opening moment in my life as it made me reflect on the fact that at least I have some self-defense training to help me. I could imagine that people with no previous training could be feeling even more vulnerable.”
“Seeing the sexual assault cases on the news every single day almost jolted me out of the depression I was experiencing from my injury,” Tadayoni said. “If I was not able to be active again, nor go into competitive fighting again, I could share my knowledge of self-defense and use it to equip other people.”
When Tadayoni is not teaching, he himself is training and working hard to pursue his personal dream to be a professional boxer in nationals. After years of healing and training for his first local fight since his injury, he fought in the BFL (Battlefield Fight League) kickboxing headlining fight on September 22, 2018, at Hard Rock Casino and won, broken nose and all. A group of his students and fellow instructors came out to see him fight and celebrate his huge personal accomplishment.
“I’ve been training [in] martial arts — specifically kyokushin karate — since I was six years old. I competed in the local, national and international level, eventually getting into the Canadian team,” says Tadayoni on his martial arts experience. “At 21 years old, I started practicing kickboxing and jiu-jitsu, trying to make myself as well-rounded of a martial artist as possible.”
What’s next for Modern Warrior?
All of the instructors at Modern Warrior bring their own teaching style, history, craftsmanship and passion to the dojo, and play a part in making it as lively as it is. Most if not all of these instructors compete and win fights in their off-time and tirelessly train so that they can continuously challenge their students.
“My primary goal as an instructor is to get my students to feel confident in what they already know. What I want my students to take away from my class is not the theory or the specific moves, but to learn how to react upon your primary instincts when you have to fight— what we call ‘flipping the switch,’” Velasquez said. “We also want to make sure that as instructors of self-defense, we are not only there to train you but to also be there for you as a huge part of Modern Warrior is the mental training and it can come with tough barriers. Barriers that we, even as instructors, have struggled through.”
Instructors and students alike express their passion for MW by returning every day or every week to train. Some students fight in local karate or kickboxing competitions, and some are just enjoying the killer workout both mentally and physically.
“From my experience, Modern Warrior wasn’t something I expected, but it was a place I needed. That still rings true after 8 months,” said Hussain. “The classes they offer are so different, things I never anticipated I would ever be giving a try and now I’m enrolled in classes for things like wrestling and karate. In a way, modern warrior has opened many doors for me.”
Tadayoni’s passion for teaching self-defense has only grown since he opened the business. With his team of five instructors, he is working on expanding Modern Warrior as a movement through a semester-based curriculum. This is similar in framework to Tadayoni’s educational career at SFU, where he graduated with a BA in International Studies. Tadayoni is hoping to form a curriculum that can be passed down to future instructors at different dojos across Vancouver, Canada, and maybe even across the world in Japan.
“As instructors, we are nothing special nor superhuman”, says Tadayoni, “at the end of the day we all strive to be lifelong students: consistently eager to learn and grow.”
And what about Tadayoni’s advice for actual students at SFU, who may be going through their own hardships?
“Stop treating yourself as if you are so small,” Tadayoni said. “You can do a lot more than you think, and you are always stronger than you know.”
