This post comes after the verse, so it's denoument any way I slice it. 

My fragmented psyche craves the order of budo training. I suppose people like me went into nunneries or such, to give space to their constant combination of intellectual/spiritual itch. 

Something about the complex simplicity of Japanese martial arts, gives me a place where my attention is completely full of what I am doing NOW. 

It probably coincides with my vocation of bodywork, where there isn't much room for daydreaming.  

It's not about me, or what I want. 

In fact, it needs an end of that cycle. 

If you truly train, you stop wanting individually.. you have to, it won't work otherwise. 

At some point, it happens that you realize that who you are, what you want and how you like to do things, are just in the way if you want to do this thing. 

Certainly who I am, where I've been, and the debts I incurred along the way in culture & physical injury, are the things I have to build on. 

In training, I am about the training. I am egotistical, I like to make jokes. Fortunately I am good enough at it to make all my teachers at least smile.

Once I have "bowed in" I am about the training. Only on rare occasions in the recent past, have I not been as present as I would like, in work or training. Fun is not excluded, we need to have fun to learn. 

I am mildly curious, when my bodywork teachers get the level of attention from me I give my budo teachers, and seem at least puzzled, or at most overwhelmed.  

If we don't have an ego, we have no reason to learn. 

If we can't get our ego out of the way, we will never learn anything new. 

We must navigate the ego.

I know I am in a good learning place, when who/what/why and my feelings about something are totally subsumed in the training process itself. 

There is no I, only the vacuum I have created, for what I want to know, to be, to do.