Body-Mind-Spirit Integration
Posted on June 13, 2011
There are many paths to Body-Mind-Spirit integration. Which path are you on? You might be a person who finds yourself most fully unified when meditating in a quiet room. Or you might be an athlete who gets “in the zone” in a spirited competition. Or you might find your Oneness while cooking and eating a fine meal. There are many paths. It doesn’t matter which on you are on. It only matters that you are aware you are on a path, and even that doesn’t matter, but that’s another story! The open secret is that we are all already fully integrated–it’s the degree to which we are aware that is the marker of our progress on the path.
There is a great Chinese novel called Monkey, by Wu Cheng-en, translated by Arthur Waley, and based on a children’s folktale. In Monkey, the Chinese monk Tripitaka travels to India with his guardians Monkey, Pigsy and Sandy, in search of the sacred Buddhist scriptures. After many picaresque adventures, they finally arrive in India and meet the Buddha, who gives them some holy scrolls written in Sanskrit. Jealous Indian monks substitute blank pages for the scriptures. On the way back, the travelers discover that they have been tricked. They return to the Buddha to ask for some real scriptures. The Buddha says: “It is such blank scrolls as these that are the true scriptures, but since they have come all the way from China, please give them some with writing on them.”
It you want to respond to this entry, you could write about a time when you felt that you were fully present in the world–your mind, body, and spirit all in sync.