Morning Ritual of a Shaolin Monk

Video Transcript

"In order to become a good martial artist, we all have to go through intensive training everyday. Starting as early as four-thirty in the morning. So, let me show you what we do when we get up. So, right after we get up at four-thirty the first thing that we do is meditation. So, we sit cross-legged and start meditating. What this does, is basically to get rid of all the distractions outside from the outer world. So, basically we are at inner peace with ourselves. We calm our mind, our body and our spiritual. And, get it ready for the daily practice. That's the first thing we do is meditation. Afterward, we run. So, every morning we run around the mountain for a half an hour. Running around the mountain. I mean, from the top to the bottom. We're going to crawl down to the temple again. So, crawling is like getting in a push up position. So, you crawl from top to bottom from the mountain all the way down. Probably, for about a half an hour. So, running up on the mountain is basically it trains our dedication. It trains us to overcome our fear. On average, it takes people two hours to walk all the way from the bottom of temple to the top of the cave that we run up every morning. For us, running up there only takes twenty minutes. And, crawling down probably takes about thirty minutes. Running up there, basically builds the strength in our legs and it gives us the endurance. Crawling down there, crawling down from the top of the mountain to the bottom builds up the strength in our whole body. Which gives us a stronger mind, body and spiritual training."