Meditation, Martial Arts, and Dance

A two-post day, because this is an interesting article about martial art as an expression of religion in Shaolin. There is one video of kung fu together with ballet.

There's no distinction, Polly said, between sitting meditation and what can happen while doing kung fu -- a meditation through dynamic movement, like yoga.

"If you're practicing Shaolin kung fu properly, it is a form of meditation," he said. "It's just fast and hard meditation, instead of slow or sitting. And that's why many of those moves seem so strange -- because they're actually moves that were developed for meditation purposes as well as self-defense and not purely self-defense purposes."

This reminds me of Zen and the Art of Waltzing. When I went looking for that article, I found this other article about dancing making you smarter. An interesting detail I saw was that "when brain cells die and synapses weaken with aging, our nouns go first, like names of people...." Interesting, kind of like the symptom of "difficulty word-finding" with Lyme disease or chronic fatigue syndrome.

The discussion about parallel-processing and exercising your brain connections also reminds me of this post, For Your Brain, over at Whistle Dance.

So this means that I'm going to continue doing the Tai Chi silk-reeling exercises that I learned, and go back to tai chi class and dancing as soon as is possible...