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Sundays 1:30-2:45 pm – starting August 27

Saturdays  1:30-2:45 pm – starting September 2

ZenDance awakens the body and mind, based on a beautiful ancient Korean meditation technique. It combines lower abdominal (tanjun) breathing, tai chi, meditation and dance. Specific benefits include:

• Tanjun breathing: transforms ki (life force) up all of the energy centers.
• Movement creation: transforms ki from the tanjun area to the rest of the body by concentrating the mind on the process of creating each movement, becoming a dance meditation.
• Peace of mind: one’s complex illusions and emotions can be transformed into movement creation by the vocal sounding of Yimoko (WhatAmI?) breathing.
• Harmony of yin and yang: one can release emotions of anger and negativity in the process of dance improvisation.
• Calming the mind-body: through mudra (hand poses), walking and sitting meditation.

ZenDance consists of:

1. Gentle spiral movement, stretching while simultaneously making the sound Yimoko, contracting and releasing the tanjun (lower abdominal) area
2. Spinal and pelvic isolation movement
3. Strengthening the sphincter, abdominal, and leg muscles
4. Dance improvisation to release emotions by creating expressive individual movements
5. Mudra (hand gesture) meditation
6. Walking meditation
7. Sitting meditation to encourage the experience of absolute centeredness, balance and harmony.

Anyone who wishes to express their emotions joyfully and freely through movement will benefit from ZenDance.

Starting at minute 2:56 of this video is an interesting discussion of ZenDance by Sun Ock Lee from a performance and meditational standpoint, interspersed with actual performance snippets: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i4kGyqPrMe8

Dr. Sun Ock Lee

Sun Ock Lee is both a practitioner of Zen meditation from Korea and a world-renowned dancer, choreographer, teacher. Her life’s work, ZenDance, is a fusion of both worlds: meditation and movement.

Beyond creating mindful dance art, Sun – or “Sunny” – is dedicated reducing human suffering in the world. Her vocal meditation continually poses the question, “What is the true self?” Every aspect of her meditative movement technique is designed to provide mental, emotional and physical freedom from the stress and anxiety of the complex world we live in.

Traveling the globe, working everywhere from India to New York, from Europe to Singapore and Australia, sharing her dance and insight, Sun has received numerous honors and awards from artistic, scholarly and medical corners.

A huge presence in a tiny body, she is as powerful as she can be ethereal. A review of one of her performances in New York, where she taught and danced for years, included this description: “Time stood still, and every step and gesture seemed to emerge from eternity.” And from another review of her dance, Sun Ock Lee was “poised… between body and spirit.”

Prolific in sharing the wisdom she has garnered over her lifetime, Sun is the author of a number of books on, including Zen Quest: Enlightenment in Dance and ZenDance – Meditation in Movement.  Dr. Lee is the Secretary General of the Asia-Pacific Performing Arts Network (under UNESCO).