By Glenda Kwek
You close your eyes and inhale deeply, with your back straight and legs folded. In the still room, the silence is punctuated by a low voice, encouraging you to clear your mind and concentrate on the present. As your chest rises and falls, you feel a growing calmness spreading through your body. A few minutes pass, and you open your eyes, ready.
This mediation exercise could have come from yoga or pilates. But it is from an Eastern art that popular culture has associated with pizza-eating turtles with a rat as their master!
It's ninjitsu — the secret art of the ninja. Ninjitsu is a Japanese martial art that's believed to have evolved a millennium ago from farmers and peasants rebelling against the Samurai warrior class.
Unlike its Hollywood image of flying metal stars, wall-climbing and smoke bombs, the real art of ninjitsu is more subtle, with an emphasis on mental and spiritual enlightenment. Body mass and physical strength are not necessary attributes for students, making it more accessible to women than some other martial arts, practitioners say.
"The art of the ninja is being elusive, not being there," says Anthony Bray-Heta, a ninjitsu teacher in Sydney's North Shore. "It's a simple art that builds confidence because you don't need body strength to win.
"It's about nerve endings, nerve strikes, and breaking balance by movement."
Bray-Heta has been practising ninjitsu for 12 years, and has trained in Great Britain, New Zealand and Australia. He moved his school to Brookvale six months ago from Avalon in NSW's Northern Beaches, and his Maai-Hyoshi dojos are attended by both men and women. He says while popular culture often portrays martial arts as having practitioners that are physically focused, the art of ninjitsu is easy to do and "good for those who don't have the body mass".
"As a teacher, I get the biggest students to come up against me. The grandmaster of ninjitsu is a very small man who's 78 years old. It's all about evasion and movement."
Lara Ross is one of Bray-Heta students, and has been practising ninjitsu for four years. As a woman, she finds ninjitsu perfect as a self-defence skill for women.
"What I found with Ninjitsu was that it teaches you the principles. There's no actual right way of doing things — the purpose is to survive," she says.
"It's yucky; it's something that people don't want to face. None of us want to wake up and think we might get attacked today. [But] it's about being prepared for the unexpected, because you never know what will happen. At least you have some idea of what to do.
"For women, facing up against men, we have to be a lot smarter to get out of our situation. You want to look at the situation objectively. When you are been attacked, they (the attackers) are using your fear against you. When you are learning ninjitsu, it's about being empowered and not letting them use your fear."
Ninjitsu's emphasis on survival techniques means it's not practised as a sport, unlike some other martial arts like taekwondo or karate, where there are sparring competitions in controlled settings. There is also another difference — spiritual survival is given just as much attention as physical survival, from the day a new student steps into the class, Bray-Heta says.
"The whole thing about ninjitsu is harmonising your environment with the world," he says. Participants learn physical moves, mental completeness and encouraged to grow spiritually through the use of sensory skills, Ki training, meditation and spiritual "pressure'' training. Students are taught "mushin'', which means "no mind'', to learn how to still their thoughts.
Ross likens the practice to yoga, an ancient Indian art. Yoga's popularity has grown among women over the past few years with its much-touted exercise benefits. But lesser known is its roots in serving as a path towards spiritual enlightenment.
"Ninjitsu is like doing yoga, because you are uniting your mind with your body," she says. "You understand the full meaning of why you use a technique, and you can use the same principles in business, university, work or at home.''
