Kent Bond 28 by Kent Bond

“My Zen teaching has deepened to encourage people to really plunge into the world, into life. I want them to enter life, to embody their practice, tend it with their hearts. To attend to life, to this body, is to love it and bless it. Particularly we need to find a way to bless our wounds and the darkness we
find ourselves in. It takes patience to bless our wounded-ness,
because we haven’t been taught a respect for it. But if you
do bless your body, you notice that you find what is right for
you. You have the kind of pains that are right for you, as well
as the kind of joys that are yours, the experiences that you
have honestly earned.

When we listen to our bodies, our bodily wisdom grows. We
can feel the body’s urge to move and honor its cycles of rest,
we can meditate and dance, we can respect its need for solitude, we can allow its lively senses, and we can know its pleasures and limitations. Instead of fearing our body, its losses and strange vulnerability, we honor it. When the mandala of awakening includes rather than excludes the body, our gifts can flower and our heart remains free.

Rabbi Nachman of Bratzlav tried to get his disciples to understand that:
“If you never want to see the face of hell, when you come
home from work every night, dance with your kitchen
towel, and if you’re worried about waking up your family,
take off your shoes.”
—-
Hakuin Zenji wrote in his ancient Song of Zazen,
“All beings by nature are Buddha, as ice by nature is water. How sad that
people ignore the near and search for truth afar like someone in
the midst of water crying out for thirst. . . . Truly, is anything miss-
ing now? Nirvana is right here, before our eyes; this very place is
the pure Lotus Land; this very body, the Buddha.”

Excerpts from After the Ecstasy the Laundry by Jack Kornfield

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Untitled by Kent Bond

The mirror reveals
A very unique notebook

A cherished volume
That I have chosen
to journal in
Today

Skin is the delicate parchment
Organs, bone, joint and sinew
The bindings and spine

Each cell,
Chapters.

War and Peace are but cliff notes
In comparison

Bible, Koran, Kaballah
Only echo its holiness

I need not think to

Turn the page

For the entry is already
Transcribing, recording
Jotting down every nuance

Never forgetting to
Scrawl in the margins a highlight,
An insight

And no editing is ever required
It is all there
All in perfect syntax and meter

It knows no time
To sit and scribble a few notes
For it opens and records

Through
Past, Present and future
As fluidly

As the ink

In my veins

Impossible to

Forget this book,
or leave it on my night stand
Where I think I do my best work

In those meditative states before sleep
And full awakening
Although it is there too.

I look in the mirror

As pages turn
A scar,
A tear
A wrinkle
Embeds itself on the well worn
Cover

A soft patina
A glow
That lets one know

This volume is well loved

Ancestry
Experience
Premonition
Relationships

All dancing across the pages

The bard sits in silence
A little jealous that
His eloquence
Was never able to quite capture
This in words

Sneak a peak
Read the last chapter
To see how it
All ends

What is
Found?

Just

Beginnings

—Paul Reynolds

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Limber by Linaji

Yoga reading Koloa 05/25/09

To become conscious of ourselves as a body is to become conscious of mankind as one.
Love is not something to be attained; it is the reality in which we exist. What is necessary is conversion, realization, enlightenment. I can operate from the viewpoint that I am me, you are you, the earth is the earth, and that’s the way it is. I can conceive of myself as the lonely warrior traveling across a hostile land, meeting now and then for a brief moment a fellow traveler.

When the body is out of harmony with the field of the earth, when the parts of the body are out of harmony with each other, and when one body is physiologically walled-off from other bodies, such a viewpoint makes a lot of sense. But the dissolving of the walls reveals another possibility.

Love is not a feeling, an emotion, or an affection. It is the attitude and behavior of a person living by another viewpoint. The viewpoint is the realization that the reference of the words “I,” “you,” and “the earth” are elements within a single unified system of energy. The path into the body is a path into that realization. The more one follows the realization, the more one finds the whole universe.

Protean Body : A Rolfer’s View of Human Flexibility

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