Zen Body-Being: An Enlightened Approach to Physical Skill, Grace, and Power Book

I wanted to love this book. I really did. However, reading it made me appreciate the simple statements of masters like Musashi Miyamoto. Statements like: "Consider this carefully."

Ralston gives no doubt as to his own mastery, but his mind is, like so many of ours, prone to redundant and excessive explanation as though trying to give you every detail of some form of enlightenment and its merits over another form, which goes like so...

Perhaps it's not so much his mind as his intended audience. Westerners tend to think like this and it doesn't work for subjects like martial arts, awareness, and meditation. It just doesn't.

The principles in this book are indeed valuable and worthwhile as objects of study and refinement, but they don't need a couple hundred pages to explain them. Those couple hundred pages of exposition don't actually help you understand them any more than singing a 12 hour opera about fish teaches you how to swim.

Allow me to sum it up:
1. Feel the ground. Knowing which way is up helps.
2. Feel your body. Know which way is supposed to go up.
3. The more ways you move, the more you can feel both the ground and your body.

Think about it.

Zen Body-Being gets three stars. As someone with training and experience in this sort of thing, I didn't really get much out of it. However, it's not really written for those with training. It's written for those who have no idea what they're doing with their bodies at any given moment. For those people, perhaps the repetitive calls to attention and self-awareness will benefit them in some way.

For those who want to delve into it, understand that it can't really be read cover-to-cover like one would a novel. It contains exercises and drills that you must practice frequently if you're to get any benefit out of the book. None were new to me, but they may be to you.