C.S. Sloan's Integral Strength

  Living in the Now? On Zen, Mindfulness, Budo, and the Depths of TRUE Practice      Zen has become part of our lexicon in the modern English language.  I don’t believe this is a “good” thing.  If you ask the average American about Zen, they’re not going to be knowledgeable on the subject.  They tend to equate Zen with calm or “being peaceful” or something such as that.  Zen is often used the most as an adjective or an adverb.  “Sensei is the most Zen dude,” a young martial practitioner may say of his teacher.  Or a surfer might say that his “ride was very Zen.”      That is not Zen.      If someone is a little more knowledgeable on the subject of Zen, they may equate it with mindfulness or “living in the present moment?”  But is that correct?  And for the martial artist, or the Zen practitioner reading this, should that even be the goal?      What do people mean, anyway, when they talk of “living in the now” or even “ being now”?  In many ways, it is the intention that matters.  Do

Achieve Fantastic Results in Martial Arts by Utilizing the Maxims of the Founder of Matsubayashi-Ryu Karate Do: A “Modern” Application Shoshin Nagamine seated in Zazen (Zen Meditation). One of the earliest books that I bought as a young karate-ka was Shoshin Nagamine’s “The Essence of Okinawan Karate-Do.”  For those of you that don’t know—or only “know” because of the title of this essay—Shoshin Nagamine was the founder of an “offshoot” of Shorin-Ryu karate that he called Matsubayashi-Ryu .  But most modern martial artists probably know him—if they even know him at all—from the aforementioned book.  As I said, I bought this book when I was probably 11 or 12 years old (which means in the early to mid 1980s) at a store called “Bookland”—that’s right, kids, once-upon-a-time there were these things called “malls” that actually had relatively small bookstores inside of them.  (The other one in our local mall was called “Walden Books.”)  By the way, I at the time had never heard of—nor had

 Essays and Thoughts on The Dokkodo Part Fifteen Do Not Hold Onto Possessions You No Longer Need By this point in our commentary on The Dokkodo , you know the drill.  There is always something more  to Musashi's work than at first glance.  Even for native readers in Japan, Musashi can seem paradoxical, quizzical in something akin to how a Zen koan might take a period of time to wrap one's thoughts around the nature of what is being read.  But this is even more so for those of us reading an imprecise English translation.  Once you couple this with the fact that Musashi seems so ancient  to our time and day, hopefully you begin to see how one can't just dismiss Musashi as being outdated, or how you must not be so quick to translate Musashi into a meaning that you  want his words to have.  That might make it more comfortable for us, but it's not going to bring about the changes that Musashi prescribes for us as modern martial artists. Let's look at a couple of differen