D. M. Kenyon

D. M. Kenyon is an attorney and the president of The Healing Arts Center, a holistic wellness and massage therapy school in St. Louis, Missouri. He has been a practicing Vajrayana Buddhist in the Kagyu tradition for twenty-three years. For over a decade, he was a martial arts instructor in the art of Aikido. He has some monastic training and was one of the founders of the St. Louis Buddhist Council, a multi-ethnic consortium of Buddhist temples and congregations from across the St. Louis region.

As the father of a son and three daughters, Kenyon became concerned about the absence of training opportunities, especially for girls, that could help young people evolve into physically powerful and wise adults. Deeply concerned about the socialization and objectification of girls, Kenyon has spent the last twenty years developing "wisdom transfer" systems based on ancient knowledge that are accessible to Westerners. Noting that traditional systems of wisdom transfer have all but disappeared in the West in recent decades and that girls are still being culturally socialized to walk behind boys, Kenyon often wonders out loud about what the world would look like if his daughters were trained the same way he had been trained. This gave rise to his book The Lotus Blossom.

His latest project, Common Sanctum, is a web based community that provides learning resources for Western students in a Westernized format thereby avoiding some of the the cultural translation problems that can sometimes obscure learning in tradition wisdom education. The ancient teaching of the Buddha and those who have developed the Buddhist path over the centuries is presented in the context of psychology, science and consciousness training that is easy for Westerners to comprehend.

Kenyon has had the good fortune to train with some extraordinary masters including His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama, the His Eminence the 17th Karmapa, Lama Lodu Rinpoche, Steven Seagal, Haruo Matsuoka, Seiseki Abe, Kung Fu Master, Yin Cai and others. As a life long student of ontology, Kenyon has been indoctrinated into a variety of ancient training systems that have brought both wisdom and joy into his life. Troubled by the dumbing-down of consciousness in the age of social medial and the effect that uncultivated streams of consciousness (he calls them "rivers of mind vomit") are having on people of all ages, Kenyon has set about the task of writing about and teaching the art of inner cultivation. The Lotus Blossom is an example of his message. It is a guide for his children and others pointing to a time-honored path in the hopes that all who might hear him might consider the benefits of stepping out of the mainstream and seeking true wisdom and skill.