Saturday night at the movies.. Enter the Dragon

I just finished watching Enter The Dragon, on this rainy Saturday evening.  It's apparently the 40th anniversary of the release of the film, and I haven't watched it for about 7 years - so, this super-moon evening, I thought the timing was right for another watch.  Still great!  I loved this movie as a boy, and watched it many, many times. 

Whilst watching the movie, I was doing some movement practice and self soft tissue work on my hands and forearms and feet.  Nice hot chocolate and I'm one happy chappy.  Seeing as though I am easily/cheaply amused this way, I think I'll watch another 70's kung fu movie (or two) sometime in the next week.  

Following on from yesterday's physical cultivation topic, I have mentioned some of the transformative/body-mindfulness aspects of my Stretch Therapy/Monkey Gym training (practice), but have not yet mentioned my earlier martial arts training - which was the first profound bodymind change I experienced through hard practice; and still shapes a lot of how I approach movement (and, indeed how I move) and physical cultivation.  I'll go more into this in a later post.. 

One thing that I find interesting, in this era where you find 'yoga' products everywhere (even in the post office(!), I found out the other day), and people are talking about all things mind-body, health, meditation, etc., - martial arts training (in lots of different styles), for me, still offers great bodymind training opportunities.  Obviously, the 'martial' part is often discussed, but for me, these days I am far more interested in the cool things that martial arts training methods can do for to positively change the bodymind. Plus they are fun!

This is not limited to the more 'internal' or 'meditative' martial arts; a 1000 rounds of hard training on Thai pads will change a person, if done properly (10, 000 even more so). Same for increased body-knowledge from wrestling, or stick fighting or whatever.  Actually, for me (not caring about martial application of martial arts so much), looking at the movement patterning and other physical cultivation aspects, martial arts from the whole spectrum (soft --> medium --> hard) are appealing and offer benefits worth pursuing.