Shinobi Martial Arts in Plaistow NH | Learn Ninjutsu Self Defense | 603-382-9456

On Sunday of last weekend I got to attend a Ninpo Bikken Seminar (ninja sword) with Ken Savage, my friend, senior and owner of TWMAC. As always when training with Ken his knowledge, research and presentation make for a great day of training. Listening to Ken always helps me put the things I have learned over the years into an understandable order. It was a great day of training but not just for this reason.

There were over thirty people there this weekend representing four different schools and three different ninjutsu organizations. Obviously there were people from TWMAC a Bujinkan Dojo under Ken Savage, there were people from our dojo, SMAC, a Stephen Hayes To-Shin Do school and Bujinkan school, people from BMAC our teacher, Mark Davis’s school and people from our friend Leon Drucker’s school, a Myo Fu An Dojo under Muramatsu San.

What’s so important about this? Everything! Recent events in the Bujinkan have shown that things are changing, people, friends and instructors are not always going to be with us. It is time for the ninjutsu community to grow up and stop the political bickering.

This weekend seminar and New England Warrior Camp, which Ken runs every year, are examples of the way it should be. All politics and bullshit are dropped at the entrance and we train in ninjutsu. All are welcome as long as you are there for training. I challenge the ninjutsu to community to follow Ken’s lead. We’re running out of time people. Stop arguing and get together and train.

Thanks to Ken for hosting and presenting these events and thanks to Mark Davis, our teacher, who continues to help us move along this path and made us understand it’s all about the training.

We’re less than a month away from the Mark Davis Koshijutsu seminar in NH. Mark asked me to come down to Boston to go over some of the material for the seminar to be prepared. I went but we’re covering Koshijutsu, the kihon happo and san shin no kata, I’ve seen these all before should be fine…

Luckily I never think like that with my teacher. Last night I was introduced to a level of the “basics” that honestly blew me away (actually physically too ask the people there who saw me flying). Watching videos on the internet and traveling around to seminars I have seen so many people saying this is the way it is but from my perspective after almost 25 years in this art I’m not impressed very often. The reason is I get to go to Boston every Friday and train with Mark Davis so it takes a lot to impress me.

Then Mark goes and does what he did last night, show me that even though I train with him every week there is always more to learn even with the material I’ve been working on since 1988. So if you are involved in the martial arts in any way, or want to be, don’t miss this seminar.

Dennis

To sign up for the seminar CLICK HERE, you’ll regret it if you don’t.

Last week I had you read Jon Merz’s article about not mistaking being nice for being week. In it Jon says: Some of the most dangerous people I know are also the nicest. They always treat people with kindness. Their Facebook profile pictures are smiling and convey happiness and security with who they are as people. And it takes a lot to rile them up. They are forgiving and tolerant of people with less character, honor, and intelligence.

This week I want to talk about one of those nice people who others make mistakes about, Mark Davis. Mark is my teacher and my friend. Mark is a nice person but having been one of his training attackers for over two decades I can safely say you don’t ever want to make the mistake and believe that Mark is weak in body, mind or spirit.

Mark’s is so humble his Facebook picture is a tree. Although to anyone who has met him that’s kind of funny because Mark is almost that big. I’m just over six foot one and hopefully just a little over two hundred and fifty pounds (damn holidays) but standing next to Mark I’m small. If you have met Mark though you know he somehow pulls in his size so not to intimidate you.

I’ve watched Mark walk through a crowd at seminars completely unnoticed both physically and for his talent. Yet both are enormous. When we go to Ninja Festival and his teacher Mr. Hayes is presenting, Mark quietly disappears into the crowd and trains making sure the spotlight stays where it should.

His understanding of not only our art but of martial arts is amazing. So much so that there are about fifteen of us that have been training with him for twenty years or more. We tried to count how many have been training for a decade or more and it came out around forty people but then we’ll say we forgot this person or that person so we don’t really know. This gives rise to the question “Why do so many people keep training with him for so long?”

The answer to that is simple, every time we go to class he has more for each of us to learn. Read that sentence again and understand that I’m not talking about a collection of information he hands out in small bits. Mark teaches each of us individually according to what we need to work on to understand out art better. That is a unique talent.

Recently he has done a number of seminars for us to take us all to the next level. The Jutaijutsu seminar at the beginning of the month opened up a whole new level of understanding for me personally I didn’t even know existed. Talking to Mark later he showed me some of his notes he had prepared for the seminar. Like always the three days of information he presented and blew all our minds with was only a small portion of what he had prepared to teach.

This post may seem like I’m trying to get brownie points. It is not, in fact when Mark sees it I’ll probably get a friendly beating for it. This is a thank you to a very nice person you don’t want to make the mistake of underestimating. Thanks Mark for everything.

The next seminar Mark is planning is Koshijutsu in New Hampshire in February (Seminar Information Here). I’ve seen a small part of what he is going to show, if you are at all interested in martial arts you don’t want to miss it.

I started to write a post this week about confusing passion for weakness. It came from some comments an immature person I know made about our training. As I started to write I saw a comment on FB from my friend, author and ninja Jon Merz about a post he had written covering the same subject. After reading Jon’s I decided to defer to the expert writer and let you read it also.

So please click HERE to read Jon’s post. It eloquently puts words to my thoughts. Thanks Jon.

I was fortunate to be able to do some whale watching this summer. While doing so it struck me that the mindset involved is very similar to that of meditation and the martial arts.

If you have ever looked for anything on the open sea you know how difficult it is The ocean is alive and in constant movement with waves cresting and chopping continuously. Add to that clouds, sun, wind and a lack of perspective due to the shear enormity of the ocean and spotting something becomes difficult to say the least.

People kept yelling “There’s one there” and everyone would run to that spot. It would turn out to be only a wave but this continued over and over again in the beginning. To me it was like a beginner in the martial arts trying to force things to happen.

Watching this go on I tried to react the other way. I just looked out to the sea with no focus and let the waves go by like thoughts when meditation. I did not try to find the whales, I just observed the sea.

Then they were there. The tell tale spray of water and air as the whale surfaced. I calmly pointed and said there.

As the day went on I and an older gentleman, who I later found out was in the navy, spotted almost all the whales as they surfaced. It was interesting to see people’s confusion as to why the two of us kept finding them.

Again our training goes way beyond physical self-defense. Ninjutsu really is a way of being.

From a very young age we are all programmed by society to want to be right and avoid being wrong. We don’t like being wrong it doesn’t feel good to most of us. The problem is you don’t learn anything if yo don’t make mistakes. Mistakes are like fertilizer for the brain.

I make mistakes all the time. I love them.

Every mistake I make requires me to evaluate the results I got, look at what got me there and come up with alternative to solve the problem. In other words to LEARN.

That’s why I love teaching so much. Every mistake my students make I get to be part of the process of evaluation, discovering and learning. I have learned much more from my students then they have from me. Each mistake they make is a gift.

So let go of your ego, delete the programming of the past and embrace your mistakes. They will take you far if you let them.

One of the occupational hazards of teaching ninjutsu is that you get into the habit of observing people. Not just visually but everything in different situations.

Recently I was listening to a number of people talking about politics. One person in particular kept making statements that I know came from a political pundit on a TV show that I had seen. As I listened I started to think about our words and thoughts and questioned…Who’s are they?

With television, the Internet, political spin doctors, religious zealots, scientific proponents, teachers, friends, parents, peers, spouses and all the other influences out there acting on us, are any of us thinking our own thoughts?

As an exercise I began to track my own thoughts. I picked a subject at random then tried to write down three ideas I had about that subject. So far not too difficult.

The next part though was enlightening. I tried to remember where I got my ideas for this subject. What was the evolution of these thoughts? What did I read, see or hear that lead me to these thoughts?

Then even harder to do, I evaluated my research for these thoughts. Did I actually check any of the facts or did I just pass the information along like idle gossip? What experience did I have that could verify any of these thoughts?

As a continued meditation I began to question and take apart what I thought I knew about this subject. Could there be a different perspective? Could I be wrong?

The answer is of course, yes I could. Without examining our thoughts and their origins we give power over to others that could intentionally or unintentionally control us. So again I challenge you to ask, “Whose thoughts are you thinking?”

One of the ways our students evaluate a situation is with something we call Win, Lose, or Draw. Once a technique or fight begins in each moment you have to learn to evaluate the situation even while you are in the situation.

To me this is an exercise in perspective between the Taizokai (personal perspective) and Kogokai (big picture perspective) mandalas. The student needs to be focused on what they are doing and yet at the same time be aware of what is going on around them.

Let’s look at an example. Say your training partner throws a punch at your head and you step off line, bring up your hands to guard yourself and defend. At this point you have to decide did I win, lose or draw.

A win would be defined in this case as you are offline of the attack, covered, caused the attacker to miss you and taken away their balance. With this outcome you have the opportunity to move in and counter attack and complete your technique.

The other side, lose, with this example would be you are barely offline. You just got out of the way of the punch but you’re off balance and they are aligned with your center and ready to launch their next strike. Here you need to disengage completely and regroup. Basically “Run Away!”

The third possible outcome is a draw. In this example you got offline of the first attack but were unable to disrupt the attackers balance and you don’t have a clear path to the attacker. Here you wait, let them come again and restart the process.

Taijutsu is all about cause and effect. This is one way to evaluate your results and learn to see cause and effect.

I was quoted in one of our student’s blog posts as saying there is no such thing as a knife fight, that there is only a fight. I wanted to explain this statement because I had a number of students asking if I meant you didn’t have to worry about the knife. Let me see, how can I put this…NO!

My comment was made in response to the idea of different types of fighting for different situations. Knife fighting versus grappling on the ground versus kicking distance fighting. To me these are all dangerous ways of thinking when you are fighting for self protection and not sport.

You can’t have a different set of responses for each situation, it won’t work. Eventually you will guess wrong and you will lose, which means something much different in self protection situation then in a competition. Your system has to be ready for anything at any moment.

If you’re grappling you should know where your attacker’s hands are and if they have a weapon or not. In our art we assume they always have a weapon because that is how our art came to be. There were always weapons.

This is why I have a problem with many of the grappling ideas that are in fashion today when it comes to self protection. Guns, knifes and multiple attackers throw a big wrench into a lot of what is being taught as modern jujutsu.

Try putting a knife into one or both opponents hands and see the change it creates in their technique. Most are reduced to move faster, use more muscle and bigger stronger wins. The difference with our art is that weapons don’t change anything for us because to us there is just a fight and anything can happen.

I heard some martial arts students speaking about an instructor at a recent event in our area. The comments ranged from how amazing he was to how dangerous he was as a fighter. But as I watched them work out it was obvious they were having difficulty with the material being taught.

I watched as their teacher demonstrated over and over for them to no avail. He was a strong athletic person and his students were trying to do exactly what he was doing but they were not all strong and athletic. Some of them could simply not physically do what their teacher could.

Martial arts instruction for self protection has to adapt to the student. It has to meet their needs and capabilities. I’m not talking about lowering standards, I’m talking about presenting and adapting principles to meet the understanding of each student. It has to work for them.

The ability to adapt martial arts concepts to individual needs is rare. Most instructors just follow a set of memorized techniques and teach their students to do the same. If you look at it from a business point of view you can understand that it is much easier to force everyone to do the same thing then to provide customized teaching to each and every student.

My teacher Mark Davis helps us to take apart the art and understand why it works. He does this with each of us in a way that makes sense to us. Each of us is very different.

Mr. Hayes did this with an entire art when he created To-Shin Do to help make ninjutsu principles more understandable for our society. Dr. Hatsumi did too when he added the concept of nagare or flow to our system to deal with the larger foreigners training in the art.

All great teachers adapt their presentations for the student so that it works for them. The art only lives on if it can be passed down so the next generation understands.