C.S. Sloan's Integral Strength

  How Squats Can Change Your Life! “Happiness is different from pleasure.  Happiness has something to do with struggling, enduring, accomplishing.”   -Dr. George Sheehan I have been reading a lot lately.  Not that I haven’t always read a lot, mind you, so I guess it would be more appropriate to say that I have been reading a lot more lately.  Which you can strike up a little bit to the slightly increased free time I have on my hands.  You see, I have been doing some really hard martial arts training a few days a week, including a session or two of sparring every week, which always takes its toll on you (at my age and with my injuries), and I simply haven’t been able to lift weights as frequently, nor even as intensely, as usual.  Which means (long story short) that I have had more time to read on my hands. As I was perusing one of the local online “marketplaces”, I came across a book with a most interesting title: How Squats Can Change Your Life!   At first, I thought, well, that’s an

Reg Park - seen here in his 50s - built ALL of his muscle by keeping it simple! What follows might be slightly rambling (hey, it’s my blog so I can ramble however much I want).  So… I sat down at my computer this morning to crank out - or at least attempt to crank out - my second installment on “Sets and Reps”, a follow-up to my “Frequency” Fundamentals post from a few months ago, when I said to myself, “ya’ know, CS” (I always talk to myself in my mind in the third person for some damn reason) “I think you jumped the gun a little bit.  Maybe you need to just tell everyone to keep it simple, and stop trying to be so complex, before you get into the varying nuances of sets and reps .” Now, why did I tell myself this?  A couple of reasons. First, it started with a co-worker of mine who wanted to know about “sets and reps” himself.  He has been going to the gym for several months, and, of course, not making the best progress because he has been attempting to “go it alone” instead of liste

     I wrote the original "Path of the Spiritual Martial Artist" over 10 years ago for Taekwondo Times Magazine .  About a year later, it was also one of the first articles I published here at Integral Strength.  But a lot can change in 10 years - at least, on a personal note.  Although my view of Zen, martial arts, and Buddhism has not  changed in the past decade, my maturing  of it has  changed.  After all, one of the foundational views of Buddhism is impermanence, which means that everything - and I do mean everything  - is constantly in flux, and, therefore, constantly changing.  So I thought that it might be a good time to review this original Integral Strength article, and make changes where I see that changes need to be made.  I hope you find it informative, whether or not your love is martial arts, Eastern philosophy and spirituality, or both!      (By the way, I looked everywhere for the Taekwondo Times  this article was originally published in.  I'm sure that i

C.S. sits on his zafu before a training session. 1 - The Journey Begins When I was a teenager, I had one great love: martial arts.  To be more specific, I suppose, would be to write that my great love was traditional Okinawan Karate-Do, which I had trained in since I was 9 years old.     I was a small kid, tiny you might even say, compared to the size of my fellow 4th-grade classmates.  For whatever reason - and perhaps schools still do this, much to the embarrassment of small boys - my 4th grade teacher would often line up the entire class against the wall of the classroom, boys and girls alike, from shortest to tallest.  I was always the shortest.  Add in the fact that, in addition to my smallness, I was something of an introvert, often bullied, and so my parents thought that martial arts might be a good way to build my self-esteem, not to mention keep me from getting pummeled on the elementary school playgrounds.     Now, if you’re a 9-year-old boy in

     T o practice Zen or the Martial Arts, you must live intensely, wholeheartedly, without reserve - as if you might die in the next instant.       -Zen Master Taisen Deshimaru Korean Zen Martial Artist      This is the first in what will be a series of entries on “Zen combat”, as well as a basic explanation of what the term actually means here at Integral Strength.     The term comes from a book of the same name by the historian Jay Gluck, first published in 1963.  For early Karate-ka in North America, the book was exceptional reading, and it still remains so until this day.  For some reason, it hasn’t always remained in print, despite the fact that - unlike the entirely useless and pretty much awful book “Zen in the Martial Arts” by Joe Hyams, which has, for some odd reason, remained a seminal favorite - Gluck actually knew something about Zen and the martial arts.  Not to fault Hyams entirely, I suppose, since almost all martial artists I’ve come into contact with