Phelan's Quest

Last Sunday, I spent a long afternoon at Farr Community Hall, a small village leisure centre in the hills outside Inverness, in the company of four ninjas. Or, as they preferred to put it, "students of the Bujinkan". Even our instructor Jock Brochas, who has been training in the art for over 25 years, and teaching for more than a decade, refers to himself as "still learning". I had met Brochas for the first time in a Starbucks cafe at a retail park the night before, where he attempted to explain to me his philosophical approach to ninjutsu, which is based strongly on perception and intuition – particularly so in his case, as he also works as a practicing psychic medium. He gestured to the large round coffee table we were sitting at and said that the physical side of ninjutsu – technique – might be seen as a small circle of ash at the centre. The following morning, he arranged an all-day seminar mostly for my benefit, and showed me what he was talking about. Like many in the West, my lifelong fascination with "ninjas" is rooted in popular culture, and screen representations which have nothing to do with either history or reality. What little I know about the actual practice of ninjutsu I have read in books by Stephen K Hayes, Simon Yeo and Soke Hatsumi himself. As instructive as those books may be, they can't provide much more than theory, and are hardly a substitute for training. And it is becoming increasingly obvious that if I want to write my own book – an outsiders' perspective on ninjutsu – I will have to make my way inside the art as best I can. Jock Brochas quoted Hatsumi several times: "Shut up and train."

So we did. For six or seven hours straight, the members of the Shinshin Ichijo Dojo demonstrated the basics – beginning with the Ichimonji stance and defenses – and illustrated that the range of variations on each strike, lock and throw are almost infinite. I did my best to process this information physically, and made what I felt was pretty slow progress. My problem, which I am told is common to newcomers, is that I cannot yet strike a balance between over-thinking each move – to the point where I would stop half-way through a technique to ask myself if I was getting it "right" – and over-acting in terms of tension and aggression. Brochas and his students were extremely patient in explaining that I needed to think less and do less, that every action in the Bujinkan proceeds from nature, and allows the practitioner to move less like a boxer or a wrestler and more like wind or water.

This is what struck me most about what I saw and learned last Sunday: the sheer fluency of intention and movement. My fascination with this kept me going all day, and affected me in a way that I'm not quite able to articulate yet. I have been practicing ichimonji in my sleep since then, and having only just started training at this early stage of my research, I don't think I could stop if I wanted to. Brochas has told me that he knew I would feel this way. Perhaps because he's psychic. But more likely because he simply knows that feeling himself.