My Story - More Than Movement

My journey through martial arts, rehabilitation, awareness, war, and starting again — and what more than 25 years of working with movement and people taught me about the connection between body, mind, and everyday life.

9/5/202615 min read

My journey through martial arts, rehabilitation, awareness, war, starting again — and what more than 25 years of working with movement and people have taught me about the connection between body, mind, and everyday life.

For most of my life, movement has been one of the ways I understand people. Only later did I realize that it had also become a way of understanding myself.

I didn't see it that way when I was younger.

Back then, movement was about sport, discipline, technique, and mastery. I played soccer and spent years studying martial arts, including karate, aikido, and tai chi.

Around the age of 20, I opened my own martial arts school in Ukraine and began teaching.

At that point, I thought I had a fairly clear idea of where this path would take me.

Then, when I was 23, I went to Japan.

A lesson I needed years to understand

I travelled to Japan because I wanted to continue developing as a martial artist.

By then I already had a black belt, my own school, and experience teaching others. I wanted better technique. I wanted to learn from people who had spent their lives in martial arts. And, like many young practitioners, I wanted to reach another level.

One of the masters I had the opportunity to learn from was already in his 80s.

After working with me, he gave me some advice that never really left me.

I don't remember his exact words, and I don't want to pretend that I do. What stayed with me was the meaning.

Today, I understand it something like this:

Don't just perform movement. Feel it. Let movement and feeling become experience, and let that experience change the way you think and live. Learn to be present in your own life.

At 23, I thought I understood what he meant.

In reality, I didn't.

I had trained for years. I had a black belt. I had my own school. I was already teaching other people. So, naturally, I thought I understood movement.

But I was still looking at it mainly as something we do.

He was pointing toward something else: movement as something we experience.

It took me many years to understand the difference.

I started asking different questions

When I returned to teaching, I gradually began looking at my students differently.

Technique still mattered, of course. But I became more curious about what was happening to the person while the technique was being performed.

Where was their attention?

What was happening to their breathing?

Could they coordinate their arms and legs while maintaining balance?

What changed if I added rotation, a memory task, a change of direction, or another cognitive challenge?

And could we train the brain and body to work together, rather than thinking only in terms of muscles, repetitions, and technique?

I began experimenting in my own school.

I took movements from different disciplines, adapted them, and combined them with balance, coordination, breathing, attention, memory, and cognitive tasks.

The more I worked this way, the more one idea became clear to me:

The exercise itself is only part of the practice. How we perform it — and what we combine it with — can be just as important.

I sometimes think of it like cooking.

You can have excellent ingredients, but that doesn't automatically make a good meal. The result depends on how the ingredients are combined, in what order, in what proportions, and for what purpose.

Movement began to make sense to me in a similar way.

Over time, I became less interested in how many repetitions someone could complete or how long a workout lasted.

I became much more interested in quality.

Can you actually feel what you are doing?

Can you notice unnecessary tension?

Can you coordinate your breathing and your attention with the movement?

Can you keep your brain involved, instead of allowing every movement to become automatic?

There is absolutely a place for hard work, effort, strength, repetition, and intensity.

But more movement is not always better movement.

A few minutes of focused, well-structured practice can sometimes be more useful than a much longer session done with very little attention.

For me, the goal is not always to do more.

It is to get more from what we do.

Understanding the body was only part of the answer

I continued my professional education and earned a Master's degree in the field of physical rehabilitation and sport.

Studying kinesiology, physiology, physical rehabilitation, and related subjects gave me a much stronger professional foundation for questions I had already been exploring through teaching and observation.

But the more I learned about the body, the more interested I became in the brain.

In everyday life, our physical and cognitive abilities almost never operate separately.

Take something as simple as walking down the street.

Your brain is managing posture, balance, direction, speed, and the environment around you. At the same time, you may be having a conversation, thinking about work, remembering where you need to go, making decisions, or responding to something unexpected.

That made me ask a very simple question:

Why do we so often train the brain and body separately when everyday life requires them to work together?

That question stayed with me and gradually became an important part of how I worked.

India added another part of the picture

My interest in meditation and awareness eventually took me to India many times.

There I explored meditation, breathing, attention, and awareness more deeply.

And I started paying closer attention to something I had not thought about enough before: not only what a person was doing, but the state in which they were doing it.

Are you actually present while you move?

Do you notice your breathing?

Can you feel when unnecessary tension begins to appear?

Are you experiencing the movement, or simply copying what you see?

What happens to your mental and emotional state during the practice?

Gradually, things that had once seemed like separate areas of my life began to connect.

Martial arts. Physical rehabilitation. Kinesiology. Coordination. Cognitive training. Breathing. Meditation. Awareness.

I no longer saw movement simply as physical activity.

It was becoming a practical way of working with the relationship between the brain, the body, attention, and our internal state.

People became my greatest teachers

Over more than 25 years of teaching and practical work, I have worked with people of very different ages and abilities — young children, adults, older adults, athletes, and people who simply wanted to move and feel better in everyday life.

Those people have taught me at least as much as courses and textbooks have.

Children were especially interesting to observe.

When movement involved coordination, attention, memory, balance, and problem-solving instead of simple repetition, I could often see how quickly they adapted.

But something happened later that meant even more to me.

Some of the children and young people I had taught eventually grew up.

Years later, some of them came back.

This time, they brought their own children.

For a teacher, there are few greater signs of trust.

At different times, I even had the opportunity to work with three generations of the same family.

That taught me something I still think about today:

Movement has a different meaning at every stage of life.

For a child, it can be part of discovering and developing new abilities.

For an adult, it can help maintain physical capacity, energy, awareness, and a connection with the body.

And as we grow older, movement can take on another kind of importance — helping us preserve mobility, confidence, independence, and our ability to continue participating in everyday life.

I still remember one older woman I worked with.

She had a noticeable tremor in her hands, and writing had become difficult.

For several months, we worked with coordination, attention, movement control, and brain-body interaction.

One day, she was able to write her name clearly.

Just her name.

It sounds like a small thing, but it wasn't small to her.

I still remember how happy she was.

And I remember what that moment meant to me as a teacher.

I don't consider one experience like this to be medical proof, and movement cannot solve every problem.

But it reminded me of something fundamental:

We don't train movement just to become better at exercises. We develop abilities that help us participate more fully in our own lives.

I have seen the same principle in a simpler way with balance.

When an older person begins to feel more stable and more confident, the effect is not limited to the exercise itself.

Walking can start to feel different.

Instead of constantly thinking about limitations or worrying about losing balance, that person may begin to enjoy moving again.

Those changes have always mattered to me.

Then practice became personal

Years later, the war in Ukraine changed everything.

For a long time, I had been teaching people how movement, breathing, attention, and awareness could affect the way we feel and respond.

Then suddenly these were no longer just ideas I was teaching.

I needed them myself.

There were periods when normal life simply stopped existing.

We lived with constant uncertainty and pressure. There was no real sense of safety or comfort, and sometimes even basic things, including food, were difficult to access.

Extreme stress shows you things about the nervous system that are difficult to understand from a textbook alone.

I saw how differently people responded to pressure.

Sometimes there was panic.

Sometimes a person's thinking seemed to freeze, and even simple decisions became difficult.

I experienced that pressure myself.

And there was something else that changed the meaning of it for me:

I was responsible not only for myself, but for my family.

My decisions affected the people closest to me.

I couldn't stop fear or stress from appearing. But I could try not to let fear make every decision for me.

That was when years of practice became very practical.

Breathe.

Observe.

Stay present.

Separate what is actually happening from what fear says might happen.

Assess the situation.

Make a decision.

Take the next step.

Then the next one.

I learned that staying calm does not mean that you are not afraid.

It doesn't mean that stress disappears.

Sometimes calm simply means creating enough space inside yourself to see a little more clearly and make the next decision.

And when other people depend on you, that becomes especially important.

No movement practice, breathing exercise, or meditation can change the reality of war.

But those practices helped me work with my own state inside that reality.

They helped me remain present enough to support my family, adapt, assess situations, and keep making decisions while circumstances were constantly changing.

Before that, I had understood many of these principles through education, teaching, practice, and observation.

During the war, I began to understand them through necessity.

That changed the way I would later teach them.

Starting again

Eventually, my family and I came to Canada.

It wasn't simply a move from one country to another.

We were leaving behind a life that had taken years to build — familiar places, work, relationships, professional connections, and the basic feeling of knowing where you belong.

In Canada, there was no established life waiting for us.

No professional network.

No financial foundation to fall back on.

No familiar community.

And I barely spoke English.

I knew only a few phrases and often needed an online translator even for simple conversations.

After more than 25 years of building a professional life, I suddenly found myself starting again.

And once again, I wasn't making decisions only for myself. I had my family beside me, and rebuilding our lives meant carrying that responsibility while trying to find some stability in a completely new environment.

I know this part of my story is not unique.

Many immigrants understand what it means to arrive in a new country carrying years — sometimes decades — of education, skills, work, memories, and experience, while almost nobody around you knows any of that yet.

You have to build trust again.

For most of my adult life, I had been a teacher.

Canada made me a student again.

I had to learn a new language, understand a new culture and a different professional environment, and somehow communicate what I knew when I didn't always have the words to explain it.

It was difficult financially, professionally, and emotionally.

But Canada also gave me something I will always remember.

People gave me a chance.

They listened even when my English wasn't good.

They waited while I searched for words.

They came to my classes, asked questions, introduced me to other people, and helped open doors into new communities.

Sometimes they simply showed kindness at a time when kindness meant much more to me than they probably realized.

Those small things did not feel small then.

In practical terms, I arrived with very little.

But I wasn't empty-handed.

I carried more than 25 years of experience. I carried what I had learned from the many people I had worked with. I carried my education, the words of my teacher in Japan, and the experiences I had taken from India.

And I carried practices that had just helped me through one of the most difficult periods of my own life.

I needed a chance to share them again.

Movement became my language again

About three months after arriving in Canada, I had the opportunity to lead my first workshop at the Calgary JCC.

I remember standing in front of that group very clearly.

For years, teaching had been completely natural to me.

Now I knew exactly what I wanted to share, but I didn't always have the English words to explain it.

So I went back to the language I knew best.

Movement.

I demonstrated.

People followed.

We moved, breathed, and worked with attention and coordination.

And they understood.

More importantly, they could experience the practice for themselves.

That workshop meant much more to me than simply teaching another class.

For the first time since leaving Ukraine, I began to feel that perhaps I could build something meaningful here again.

One opportunity led to another.

I continued teaching at the Calgary JCC, and that relationship continues today. Later, I also began working with people through other Calgary organizations and community settings, including the MNP Community & Sport Centre.

There were workshops, regular classes, individual sessions, online practices, and classes in Calgary parks.

People came back.

They told me what they were noticing.

They asked questions.

And, just as before, their experiences influenced the way my work continued to develop.

One of the most meaningful parts of rebuilding my life in Canada has been the people I have met along the way.

I continue to meet kind, generous people who support what I am doing in many different ways. Some help organize activities. Some participate in projects or come regularly to classes. Some share ideas, introduce me to other people, or help me connect with new communities.

And sometimes the support is much simpler than that: someone simply believes that the work has value.

What means the most to me is seeing that this support doesn't stop with me.

Someone helps make a workshop possible. Someone brings a friend to a class. Someone shares an experience or gives their time. And because of that, another person gets an opportunity to move with more confidence, feel more connected, or discover something useful for their everyday life.

I have watched these small circles of support begin to grow around the work.

And that has given me another reason to keep going.

There are still moments when rebuilding something from the beginning feels difficult or uncertain. But then I see people returning, supporting one another, joining new ideas, and becoming part of what is developing.

It reminds me that very little of value is built by one person alone.

What began as my attempt to start again has gradually become something shaped by many people.

Their trust gives me encouragement, but it also gives me a sense of responsibility — to keep learning, to keep improving what I do, and to make sure the work continues to be useful to the people who give their time and trust to it.

I also chose to make some practices free or available by donation.

After experiencing what it means to rebuild life from the beginning, accessibility meant something different to me.

I also began meeting many people who would never describe themselves as “fitness people.”

Some were dealing with stiffness or stress. Some had lost confidence in movement. Others were simply noticing changes that came with age, work, responsibility, or life experience.

Some were comfortable standing and moving.

Others needed to begin more gently, sometimes even from a chair.

That confirmed something I had learned many years before:

Meaningful movement does not have to begin with intensity. It has to begin with the person.

Different country. Different language. Different backgrounds.

But the human needs were often very familiar.

People wanted to move more easily.

They wanted to trust their bodies more.

They wanted to maintain balance and coordination, keep their minds active, have more energy, manage stress, and feel more connected to themselves.

A professional reset

Starting again in Canada also gave me something I wasn't expecting: the opportunity to look at my own work almost from the outside.

For years, different parts of my approach had lived inside my martial arts teaching, fitness work, rehabilitation knowledge, neuro-motor exercises, meditation, breathing, and awareness practices.

Starting over forced me to ask a useful question:

If I were building this from the beginning today, what would I keep?

What actually matters?

What is useful in real life?

What can be simplified?

And how can more than 25 years of experience be organized in a way that another person can actually use?

I wasn't interested in inventing more exercises.

There are already thousands of exercises.

I was much more interested in understanding how to use them well.

I also didn't want to create another system that asked people to choose between different kinds of movement.

Walking, strength training, yoga, swimming, tai chi, martial arts, fitness, and many other practices can all have a meaningful place in someone's life.

My interest was somewhere else:

How can we bring more attention, coordination, awareness, cognitive engagement, and purpose into the way we move?

Movement.

Balance.

Coordination.

Cognitive challenge.

Breathing.

Attention.

Awareness.

Not as separate pieces, but as parts of the same experience.

The term NeuroFitness came close to describing the direction my work had gradually taken — using movement in a way that engages the brain, nervous system, and body together.

I didn't create NeuroFitness as a concept.

What developed over the years was my own approach to it, shaped by martial arts, physical rehabilitation, movement science, meditation, teaching, personal experience, and many years of practical work with people.

Today, I continue organizing and developing those principles through what I call the Sage Sinto Method.

The roots of this work existed long before Canada.

But Canada gave me a chance to look at those roots again, reconsider what I had learned, simplify some things, and allow something new to grow from them.

So Canada did not simply become another place where I teach.

It became part of the story of my work.

And the people I have met here became part of that story as well.

For their trust, patience, kindness, and the opportunities they gave me when I was starting again, I remain deeply grateful.

More than movement

My understanding of the brain-body connection has also become broader over the years.

For me, it is no longer only about balance, coordination, mobility, or cognitive performance.

It starts with something much simpler:

noticing ourselves.

Can I notice when my shoulders begin to tighten?

Can I feel when my breathing changes?

Can I recognize when stress starts changing the way I think?

Can I notice an emotional reaction before it completely takes over my response?

The more aware we are of what is happening inside us, the more possibility we may have to respond instead of simply reacting.

That matters far beyond exercise.

It matters in a difficult conversation.

At home.

At work.

When we are under pressure.

When someone disagrees with us.

When somebody needs us to listen rather than immediately react.

Our internal state rarely affects only us.

It influences how we speak, how we listen, how we make decisions, and how we treat the people around us.

I understood this very clearly during some of the most difficult periods of my own life.

When other people depend on you, the ability to recognize and work with your own state becomes more than a personal matter.

This is one of the reasons the relationship between brain and body matters so much to me.

The body often tells us something before we have words for it.

Breathing changes.

Muscles tighten.

Posture shifts.

Movement changes.

We sense that something inside us is different.

Learning to notice these signals doesn't solve every problem.

But it can give us something valuable:

a little more awareness and a little more choice.

And perhaps this is one of the places where movement begins to affect more than physical ability. It begins to touch the quality of our lives and the way we relate both to ourselves and to other people.

What I want to pass on

Today, I don't judge a successful practice by how exhausted someone feels afterward.

And I don't think the number of exercises alone tells us very much about the value of a session.

There is a place for intensity.

There is a place for strength, repetition, effort, and physical challenge.

But there is also enormous value in learning to move with attention.

To feel.

To breathe.

To notice.

To challenge the brain and the body at the same time.

And to understand a little better what changes inside us while we move.

Sometimes doing less, but doing it with greater quality and awareness, can teach us more than doing a lot on autopilot.

The goal is not always to do more. It is to get more from what we do.

After all these years, this is what I most want to pass forward.

Not simply a collection of exercises.

I want to share a way of working with movement that helps people understand their bodies better, keep their minds engaged, maintain their abilities, and become more aware of their own state.

I have already seen this kind of knowledge travel across generations.

Children I once taught later returned as adults with children of their own.

At times, I had three generations of one family practicing with me.

There is something deeply meaningful to me in that.

What we learn rarely ends with us.

The way we care for ourselves, respond to stress, use our bodies, and move through life is also something the people around us can see and learn from.

Perhaps that is one reason this work has become so important to me.

Not to create perfect movement.

And certainly not to create perfect people.

But to help people remain active participants in their own lives — physically, mentally, and emotionally.

To have enough mobility and energy for the things that matter to them.

Enough awareness to recognize their own state.

Enough presence to experience the people and moments around them.

And enough connection with themselves to keep learning and growing throughout life.

More than 25 years later

Sometimes I think about the 23-year-old version of myself who travelled to Japan looking for a higher level of martial arts mastery.

I heard my teacher's advice then.

But I think it took more than 25 years — teaching, education, India, many students, war, responsibility for my family, loss, starting again, and building a new life in Canada — before I began to understand what he was really pointing toward.

When I was younger, I thought mastery was mostly about what we could make the body do.

Today, I see it differently.

Movement can train the body.

It can challenge the brain.

It can develop coordination, balance, strength, and physical ability.

But when we learn to move with attention — when we feel, notice, breathe, and remain present — movement can also teach us something about ourselves.

More than 25 years later, I am still learning.

I am still observing.

I am still refining the way I teach.

And I am still discovering how much movement can teach us when we stop treating it only as something to perform.

This is the direction I continue to explore through my work and through the Sage Sinto Method.

Not simply doing more, but experiencing more of what we do.