Are you a student of Ninpo or budo taijutsu? Are you trying to learn ninjutsu, the art of the ancient Japanese ninja?
If so, you should be aware of certain things that may be influencing your ability to master this powerful martial and life mastery system.
The focus of this article is on something that can go unnoticed and yet be very influential in your taijutsu training, without you even knowing it!
To illustrate the point, let me tell you a story about something that happened here at the academy and what I observed during the course of the event. The situation itself and the person involved didn’t really have anything to do with training, but they had a lot to do with your ability to train correctly and progress toward mastery.
Confused? do not be
This is what happened.
I walked into the dojo the other day, ready to do some work on the website and send some emails to my long distance students and the internet was down.
I couldn’t figure it out and finally checked the phone line that the DSL runs on and it was dead. I had service on the other line and the bill was paid so… time to call service. Long story short, they’re looking for a guy to check the lines.
Well, during your time here, I was in my office and I heard a loud rattle coming up to my office door. When I looked up, sure enough, it was the Verizon guy, walking around like an old-fashioned cowboy, with a ton of tools hanging from his belt.
The first thing I noticed was this HUGE swagger, the twisting of his hips, as he walked around with all this gear hanging from his body. The second thing I noticed, the deepest thing, didn’t happen then, but about 20 minutes later, when he came back to tell me that they found the problem and would fix it in no time.
Except, this time, he didn’t have his utility belt hanging from him.
Any idea what I noticed?
What I noticed was that when he moved, he had EXACTLY THE SAME gait as he would with the utility belt on!
When I first saw him with what was easily an extra 30 pounds hanging from his waist, I chalked it up to his trying to move effectively with all of it. But now, I saw that he had actually allowed, probably unknowingly, this very damaging and unnatural type of movement to creep in, and it BECAME the default method of walking and moving his body: unnatural rotation of the hip joints, twisting column and all that. !
What about you?
What could he have allowed to “infiltrate” his own body movement from his job, or even an old wound that has supposedly healed? What has become part of the way you “naturally” walk that is contradictory to the way a human body is naturally “designed” and “built” to walk?
I use the word “natural” very loosely. Because students and teachers who say they are trying to learn ninjutsu use this word quite a bit. But what most people mean when they discuss how their own body moves is not “natural” but “usual.”
And “usual” movement is NOT the same as “natural movement of the body”, as taught in Ninpo-Taijutsu lessons! And yet I see students, from white belts to higher level black belts, moving their bodies in this way and trying to dismiss it as “natural” to them.
If you’re confused about this simple lesson, what else could you be missing that’s keeping you from taking your skills to the next level?
More specifically, the question I have to ask you is…