About - LKE Dojo Radically Holistic Muay Thai for Women+

ABOUT US

The Mission

Most Women+ are taught to be small. To be quiet. To take up as little space as possible. To shrink in rooms, apologize for existing, and follow a set of rules they never agreed to.

LKE Dojo is where that ends.

We teach Muay Thai to Women+ — not to win trophies, not to compete, but to come alive. On our mats, Women+ find their voices, their strength, their boldness, and their fire. They stop asking for permission. They burn down everything they were told to be.

And underneath all of it? The warrior who was always there.

We’re not making fighters. We’re making the most dangerous thing in the world — Women+ who are completely, unapologetically free.

That’s the mission. That’s LKE Dojo. Come get some. 🥊

HOW LKE DOJO CAME TO BE

In 2016, Angela walked into a Muay Thai class in Honolulu and saw Aileen for the first time. She was in a marriage she needed to get out of. She thought: please God let this woman change my life.

She didn’t speak to her for a year.

In 2017 she did. And in May of that year, everything changed — for both of them.

At the time, Aileen was one of the most sought-after Muay Thai coaches in Hawaii. She was teaching up to 25 classes a week for $10 an hour. She had built a female training team — women who met a few times a week to train together — and was penalized for it while male training groups did exactly the same thing without a second look. In a teaching certification, she gave a demo and someone in the room said out loud to the head coach: “She’s better than you.” That was the day she became a target.

The raises she was promised never came. The support she was promised never came. When she tried to have an honest conversation about where she stood, she was told she was valued and respected. She was not. Her well-attended classes were taken from her and given to a man who was not only less skilled, but went on to be a danger to the very women he was supposed to be coaching.

When she met Angela, moved in, and became a parent, her total availability to the gym ended. Her mentor — who had relied on her having no life outside of Muay Thai — made that impossible to ignore. What followed was a slow, deliberate unraveling that lasted nearly two years.

That was enough.

She quit the fight world. Left her mentor. Left her classes. And opened Wandering Dojo — private training and small group sessions, built entirely on her own terms. Her mentor, who had trained over 20 world champions and had long seen Aileen as the one to carry on his legacy, tried to recruit them both to run his new gym. Aileen and Angela said no.

Then the pandemic arrived. And Wandering Dojo went quiet.

What followed was a series of offers from well-known names in the martial arts world — coaches and gym owners who wanted Aileen to build their Muay Thai programs, bring in new clientele, and lend her genius to their brands. The offers came with prestige attached. The pay was almost nothing. The work would be hers. The credit would not.

Aileen and Angela said no. Every time.

In January 2022, Aileen and Angela drove an hour to a park, hauled mounds of gear, secured their spot, and started teaching Muay Thai under the name LKE Dojo.

There was rain. There were holes in the grass. There were chickens. There were days when ten people showed up and days when only one did. Nothing about it was glamorous.

Aileen and Angela showed up anyway. For six months.

And then they stopped. The burnout was total. Aileen quietly set Muay Thai down and thought: maybe that chapter is over.

But a calling doesn’t care about your exhaustion.

Life without teaching felt incomplete in a way that couldn’t be explained away — a pervasive undercurrent, something always missing. Not a longing for what was. A pull toward what still needed to happen.

In August 2023 they reached out to a local gym and asked if they could teach a class. The answer was yes. They didn't know if anyone would show up, two students did.

Within weeks they made the decision that would define everything: this would be a Women’s class. Then a Women’s+ class. Because they are queer women who know exactly what it feels like to walk into a martial arts gym and be made to feel like an afterthought. They were done building spaces like that for anyone else.

They added classes. Experimented. Taught series. Ran small groups out of their own home. And somewhere along the way, their philosophy shifted.

They had started with the belief that all Women+ need Muay Thai — that this art could be for everyone. They still believe Women+ need it. But they no longer believe it’s for everyone.

LKE Dojo is for the Women+ who are ready. Ready to stop being small. Ready to burn down everything they were told to be. Ready to find out who’s underneath.

You’ve been waiting long enough.

Coach Aileen

Filipino and 2nd generation American, Aileen grew up in Renton, Washington — raised Catholic, the daughter of immigrants, the only one in her family who would leave. She attended a fancy all-girls private school where the nuns did not particularly like her, spent her childhood wishing she was a boy, and came out to her parents at 25. Via email.

She built a successful career as a sound engineer in Hollywood — nine years, working on productions including Tyler Perry’s, with credits that still appear on television today. It was during those years in LA that she found Muay Thai — training at the Muay Thai Academy of America, the first Muay Thai gym in the United States, under Kru Puk, the Godfather of Muay Thai. One of two women on the fight team, Aileen began her amateur fight career in 2013, competing on fight cards alongside fighters who are now world champions. She trained with UFC and Glory fighters, and represented MTA twice at the Thai festival in Thai Town — the only Muay Thai gym invited.

Muay Thai gave her the self-respect to finally see clearly: she was in the wrong life. When she ate mushrooms, they helped her take the leap. She quit Hollywood.

Aileen moved home to Seattle and kept training — this time at one of the most well-regarded fight gyms in the world, under the Vice President of One Championship, alongside fighters at the highest level of the sport.

When she moved to Hawaiʻi, her Seattle coach sent her to his own mentor — one of the most respected figures in combat sports. Under him she earned the Hawaii State Muay Thai Championship in 2017, competed and won in MMA, trained and cornered both amateur and professional fighters. Her training partners included world champions across boxing, MMA, Muay Thai, and kickboxing.

Then the burnout came. The kind that takes the whole system down. After years of teaching 25 classes a week at a pace the fight world glorifies and nobody warns you about, Aileen burned out her central nervous system completely. The recovery took seven years — and taught her more about the human body than any championship or certification ever could. She quit. The gym, her mentor, the fight world — all of it.

People assume she’s been doing Muay Thai her whole life. They are wrong. She started at 27.
Her style is Muay Femur — characterized by technical mastery, high fight IQ, timing, and versatility. Muay Femur fighters are highly elusive, deploying every weapon seamlessly and adapting in real time with precision and intelligence. Aileen can look at someone train and immediately see twenty things to work on, in order.

She is also obsessed with BLACKPINK, has immense respect for Bruce Lee, and loves the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.

Aileen built LKE Dojo because she spent years in conventional martial arts spaces watching what happens to Women+ — and living it herself. She knows exactly what it costs.

She is done with it.

Coach Angela

Half Chinese, half Korean, Angela was born and raised in Honolulu, Hawaiʻi — the daughter of a Chinese immigrant from Fiji and a third generation Korean mother. She grew up wealthy, then not, and attended Iolani — one of Honolulu’s most prestigious private schools. Iolani had grand plans for her future, but Angela told everyone she was going to be a housewife and mother.

The church was her whole world until college — a conservative, born again Christianity she quietly questioned from the beginning. She spent her early life shaped by institutions that told her who to be. She has spent her adult life burning that down.

She holds a degree in dance from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, studied at the London Contemporary Dance School, and spent a decade professionally choreographing, teaching, and performing. Twenty years of dance — and the injuries that came with it — gave her a deep understanding of how the body moves, what it needs to warm up and recover properly, and how to train sustainably for the long term. It shapes everything about how she coaches.

She was also in a marriage she needed to leave — a toxic relationship that kept her small and hopeless. Then in 2016, still married, she walked into her first Muay Thai class and saw Aileen for the first time. She thought: please God let this woman change my life.

Then didn’t speak to Aileen for a year.

Angela started Muay Thai at 35 as a mother of three who couldn’t see without her glasses. She cried nearly every time she trained, because her worth was so tied to her performance that learning felt impossible. She doesn’t cry anymore. The woman who walks onto those mats now is not the woman who first walked in.

She brings all of it to LKE Dojo — the dance, the embodied understanding of what it means to rebuild a life from the inside out. She is one of the most articulate voices you will encounter on the subject of how Muay Thai creates transformation and changes lives.

She knows the way out. She took it.

Why Women+?

Because conventional martial arts spaces were not built for Women+. They were built for men, by men, around men’s bodies, men’s egos, and men’s rules. Women+ were accommodated — if they were welcomed at all.

Aileen lived this. She was underpaid, undermined, penalized for building community among women, and eventually replaced by a man who was less skilled and actively dangerous to the women in his care. This is not an unusual story. It is the norm.

But LKE Dojo is not Women+ only simply because male-dominated spaces failed Women+. It is Women+ only because Women+ are extraordinary.

Women+ carry wisdom, spirit, power, and strength that the world has spent centuries trying to diminish. When they come together in a space truly built for them, something shifts. They are louder. More willing to fail. More willing to try. More willing to ask. They lift each other. They break themselves and each other free. They exist beyond the parameters society set for them — and in doing so, they change each other.

LKE Dojo exists not just as a refuge from the spaces that failed Women+ — but as a place where they can rise to their fullest potential. Together.

This is not about being against men. It is about being entirely, unapologetically for Women+.

Aggravating the Patriarchy Since... Forever.

"Feel the fear and do it anyway"

- Susan Jeffers