Who doesn’t want to be a mysterious, Sphinx-like ninja parkouring around the city at night? Like Batman, but with more antique gears and more virility!
“Ninjutsu” is one of the most ancient and traditional sets of covert physical and psychological methods, especially schemed for spies and mercenaries in Feudal Japan. This particular martial art technique involves escapism, infiltration, and manipulation of psychology.
Modern life comes with modern problems. For instance, writing essays could be a huge problem if you’re a student. Of course, if you’re a family person maintaining a healthy work-life balance with self-improvement is becoming tougher day by day. Speaking of modern issues – losing control of your actions and emotions comes on top, doesn’t it? Emotional instabilities, aka our inner demons, most often and almost in all cases – get in our way of achieving something we want. And this battle between your emotions vs. determinations inside your mind gets so much to handle that it leaves you wondering who controls who?
Ninjutsu had been outlawed centuries ago, along with the old problems. But the power of ninja techniques is timeless; you just gotta modernize some details to fit your needs. So, believe it. Even in this 21st century, you can be a tough-shielded ninja with extraordinary possession over your body and mind.
Buckle up; we will take a round of steps to become an emotionally intelligent super ninja in no time!
Step-1: Believe in your inner strength
Yes…that word…believe!
Ninjutsu is not just a fun skit you show off to people. It’s a lifestyle that you embrace and cohere. A small study published in the Journal of Neurophysiology states that:
Your muscles have very little to do with determining your strength. It’s your mind, more specifically, your nervous system that solemnly controls the muscle performance.
So now you know where your inner strength comes from, the fuel of your ninja spirit. It’s time for you to find rejuvenation in solace and amplify your inner strength.
Step-2: Have a spiritual connection between your body and mind
To cultivate your inner ninja spirit, create a reciprocal relationship between your body and mind.
Yoga meditation regularly helps you keep the mind sharp, boost self-awareness, introspection, strengthen the immune system and enhance cognitive skills. On top of that, yoga meditation directly helps you to focus on increasing the elasticity of your muscles and allows an extraordinary level of flexibility, balance, endurance, and mobility.
Many scientific studies and experiments have found different connections between your resolution and the physical world. The power of self-possession can rigorously shape and map your real-life existence. And, this self-mastery is achieved when you de-clutter and suspend all the conventional thinking and enter into the meditative state of self-consciousness through yoga and meditation.
Step-3: Make a long-term commitment to your appetite
Believe it or not, most of us have emotional hunger that leads us the way right from bed to the fridge. And it almost always comes as a sudden and emergency craving! In other words, you depend solemnly on new curbs for a quick emotional recovery and back to being functional again. This craving is alarmingly dangerous, as your emotional appetite has no limit. You may devour and devour up until you feel any better…and the damage is done and dusted a long time ago.
On a totally another side of the pole: as a ubiquitous trait of a shinobi, you have to be lean and agile. And to generate the necessary energy for any quick missions or adventure, and to the emotional stability throughout the way, adhering a strict and well-balanced diet, along with hardcore physical activities is a must!
Since adaptability is the key to Ninjutsu and also to emotional intelligence, now is the time for you to keep an eye on your waistline and change your diet requirement accordingly. For better mobility, speedier recovery times and higher endurance- proper nutrition balance will help you to improve your body chemistry.
Limiting the consumption of carbs and switching to raw and steamed food could be a great start!
Step-4: Train yourself to become an agile fighting machine
Fighting machine. Well, not quite literally. In real life, this fight is against your own physical and emotional shortcomings. And if you want to perform all the stunning athletic feats expected of a ninja, it’s about time you put your game controllers into the locker and start leveling up your agility and aerobic fitness. Enrolling in martial arts training for the ultimate lean-lithe physique should the start, for the stabilizers, tendons and improved blood flow. If it’s all a bit overwhelming for you as a newbie, don’t hold your breath. Start with the basics like mastering leg scales, double arm lever etc.
You may not be aware of it, but mastering your body is directly associated with overpowering your inherent weakness, cognitive impairment and boosting your emotional intelligence more than ever. During the physical activity, our brains release hormones called “growth factors“, which is directly linked to improved brain health. These hormones substantially benefit the region of our brains, “hippocampus“, crucial for learning and memory. The loss of neurons caused by stress, anxiety and depression that shrink the hippocampus is also recovered by the growth factors hormones, through the physical training.
This is what happens when you remove the hippocampus:
Keeping the scientific jargon aside, the bottom line is that martial arts or Ninjutsu training is not for the mastery of your body but also mastery of your cognition in combination.
Fortified aerobic skills and a great emotionally intelligent ninja in the making!
Step-5: Become an escape artist
Before you start being over-hyped about tailoring a black “shinobi shozoku” (stereotypical black ninja suit), allow me to burst your bubble. Real life is no Hollywood movies, and you’re not a stealthy fantasy warrior either.
In real life, your main purpose here is to get things done without being noticed.
It’s not some sorcery but, hands down, a brilliant tactic to pursue on your journey to becoming a ninja despite having a unique physique that stands out. One of the primary disciplines of Ninjutsu is “inconspicuousness” and learning to disassociate the identity from public knowledge.
In real life, the practice of blending into the crowd or the “disappearing act” has a much deeper psychological connotation. When you try to blend in with the crowd, you nurture cultural affinity by embracing the variety of cultural languages. You learn to become more adaptable and more forbearing.
When you continuously perform active surveillance to avoid detection, you sharpen your mindfulness at the same time. You keenly observe your surrounding on the move and cultivate your quick deductive reasoning. These are some of the vital parts of emotional intelligence.
Final words
The art of being a ninja is beyond physical tactics, but more to crawling into the human psyche in extraordinary circumstances. So the connection between being a ninja and cultivating emotional intelligence are pretty much complementary to one another.