Enter the ninja

By Dustin Shipman
THE JOPLIN GLOBE (JOPLIN, Mo.)

JOPLIN, Mo. March 31, 2008 09:00 am

— As his student slices through the air, downward toward Christopher Sampson’s head with a training sword, Sampson reacts and moves without seeing the wooden blade.
He is able to avoid the attack using what he describes as a sort of “extra sense” that his ninja training has taught him, feeling the movement before the blow and always being aware of his surroundings.
This is only one technique Sampson has been learning in studying the martial arts of Ninjutsu, which he has been studying for several years. Now Sampson teaches others the ways of the Ninja, as well as his own spiritual philosophies at his home in Joplin.
“Since I was really young I have been interested in Ninjutsu,” Sampson said, adding that his own training and now teachings have not limited themselves to a strictly Ninjutsu technique but other philosophies and ideas influence his classes as well. “I have taken Ninjutsu and added the imagery of the Medieval knight to create this which I call the Shinobi Knights.”
Spirituality is an important concept in Sampson’s teaching, which combines his own Christian values with the Eastern disciplines of Ninjutsu. According to Sampson there are several lessons through his teachings that intersect with his values such as never striking the first punch and learning to help, not to hurt, each other.
“When I was about 6 my dad used to throw throwing stars in my grandmother's drive way and then in the 1980s there was sort of a ninja boom,” Sampson said. “There wasn’t a school around here so I just had to read and learn from pictures, then when I got older I found a long distance way of studying, and I have been in touch with instructors from Illinois and St. Louis, it has been a life long learning thing, but I have really studied it for seven years.”
Sampson said his form of marital arts differs from other forms in several ways but there are also a lot of things which are rooted in all forms which he teaches.
“We are different in a lot of ways, like we are not about rank, it’s not about getting to the next belt. It is about the whole learning experience itself,” Sampson said. “We originate everything that we do from spirituality. There is a native spirituality in Buddhism ... we train our sprit and it shines through our body.”
Sampson said movement is a key in learning Ninjutsu and that often the way that we learn to move and to react to something on instinct is not always the best way to handle a situation. Through his training, he said, Ninjutsu can teach students a better way top react.
“The first step is to unlearn how we have learned to move all our lives in order to learn to move correctly,” Sampson said. “We learn how to roll and how to fall to the ground. Once we learn that, we learn how to just move naturally while standing.”
Paul Phillips, Joplin, has been training with Sampson more than a year. Curiosity was what brought him to the class.
“There is much more to this than just fighting," he said he found. "There is a spiritual connection that I have made and I really think that it has helped my spiritual growth as well as my mental growth and helped me to be more aware of what’s going on around me.”

Dustin Shipman writes for The Joplin (Mo.) Globe.

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