Meditation beats dance for harmonizing body and mind
February 24th, 2011 in Medicine & Health / Psychology & Psychiatry
(PhysOrg.com) -- The body is a dancer's instrument, but is it attuned
to the mind? A new study from the University of California, Berkeley,
suggests that professional ballet and modern dancers are not as
emotionally in sync with their bodies as are people who regularly
practice meditation.
UC Berkeley researchers tracked how closely the emotions of seasoned
meditators and professional dancers followed bodily changes such as
breathing and heart rates.
They found that dancers who devote enormous time and effort to
developing awareness of and precise control over their muscles – a
theme coincidentally raised in the new ballet movie “Black Swan” – do
not have a stronger mind-body connection than do most other people.
By contrast, veteran practitioners of Vipassana or mindfulness
meditation – a technique focused on observing breathing, heartbeat,
thoughts and feelings without judgment – showed the closest mind-body
bond, according to the study recently published in the journal Emotion.
“We all talk about our emotions as if they are intimately connected
to our bodies – such as the ‘heartache of sadness’ and ‘bursting a
blood vessel’ in anger,” said Robert Levenson, a UC Berkeley
psychology professor and senior author of the study. “We sought to
precisely measure how close that connection was, and found it was
stronger for meditators.”
The results offer new clues in the mystery of the mind-body
connection. Previous studies have linked the dissociation of mind and
body to various medical and psychiatric diseases.
“Ever have the experience of getting home from work and realizing you
have a blistering headache?” said Jocelyn Sze, a doctoral student in
clinical science at UC Berkeley and the lead author of the study.
“The headache probably built up throughout the day, but you might
have been intentionally ignoring it and convincing yourself that you
felt fine so that you could get through the demands of the day.”
Increasingly, mindfulness meditation is being used to treat physical
and psychological problems, researchers point out. “We believe that
some of these health benefits derive from meditation’s capacity to
increase the association between mind and body in emotion,” Levenson
said.
For the experiment, the researchers recruited volunteers from
meditation and dance centers around the San Francisco Bay Area and
via Craigslist. The study sample consisted of 21 dancers with at
least two years of training in modern dance or ballet and 21 seasoned
meditators with at least two years of Vipassana practice. A third
“control group” was made up of 21 moderately active adults with no
training in dance, meditation, Pilates or professional sports.
Participants, who ranged in age from 18 to 40, were wired with
electrodes to measure their bodily responses while they watched
emotionally charged scenes from movies and used a rating dial to
indicate how they were feeling.
Although all participants reported similar emotional reactions to the
film clips, meditators showed stronger correlations between the
emotions they reported feeling and the speed of their heartbeats.
Surprisingly, the differences between dancers and the control group
were minimal.
Researchers theorize that dancers learn to shift focus between time,
music, space, and muscles and achieve heightened awareness of their
muscle tone, body alignment and posture.
“These are all very helpful for becoming a better dancer, but they do
not tighten the links between mind and body in emotion,” Levenson said.
By contrast, meditators practice attending to “visceral” body
sensations, which makes them more attuned to internal organs such as
the heart. “These types of visceral sensations are a primary focus of
Vipassana meditation, which is typically done sitting still and
paying attention to internal sensations,” Sze said.
More information: The study was published in the December 2010 issue
of Emotion.
Provided by University of California - Berkeley
"Meditation beats dance for harmonizing body and mind." February
24th, 2011. http://www.physorg.com/news/2011-02-meditation-
harmonizing-body-mind.html