Cool water energy and hot fire energy flow within our bodies simultaneously. When the body is in balance, the cool water energy travels upward toward the head while the hot fire energy flows down to the lower abdomen, where it is stored. The underlying principle behind this natural flow of energy is called Su-seung-hwa-gang (Water Up, Fire Down),

We can readily observe examples of Su-seung-hwa-gang in the natural world. Think about the cycle of water on earth. When the fire energy of the sun shines down on the earth, the v.ater energy of rivers, lakes, and oceans rises to form clouds.

Consider how plants obtain the ‘ energy They receive fire energy from the sun shining down on their leaves. while drawing the water energy up through their roots from moisture in the ground. With this cycle of energy, plants and trees grow and bear fruit, inter. When the ground is too frozen for plants to draw up water, ideas to the ground and no fruit is produced. Life itself goes into dormancy natural cycle of energy is once again possible.

Su-seung-hwa-gang is the core principle for human health by Ilchi Lee.

These lines are copied from Prof Ilchi Lee book. This is about life priorities, he says that I challenge you to keep asking these questions, until you no longer receive literal or conceptual answers. If we approach these questions with deep effort and sincerity, they can penetrate straight through the masks of job, personality, and ethnicity. Gender, or any other ego reference. Eventually we awaken to the realization that these two questions are one and the same, and the answer to one solves the other. That answer goes beyond words, and it is likely to reorder your life priorities on the grandest of scales.

WHEN YOU REFLECT ON YOUR LIFE, you may feel unhappy. A life crisis may precipitate even more acute questioning. We may feel overwhelmed to the point of emptiness. Please embrace the discontent and emptiness. Do not avoid these feelings by seeking distractions, for they may be the beginning of your awakening. What are the principles that can sustain our awakening? How can we understand the world, after we have decided to listen to the soul’s voice and follow its call?

Life as a physical body is suffering. There are times, of course, when life is beautiful and even uplifting. However, when we examine life in its whole picture, it is filled with unwanted happenings and hardships.

The fact that we were born to live in this world out of an external force and not our own choosing is in itself suffering. We live trapped inside time, space, and the limitations of our physical bodies, embracing the loneliness of the soul.

“Happiness is a state of mind.” “Choose to be happy.” “Create your own happiness.” Why do we need so many self-motivational maxims? After spending your whole day in the never-ending pursuit of happiness, have you ever gone to bed wishing that tomorrow would not come again, overwhelmed by the heaviness of life?

During my childhood, most houses had a set of acupuncture needles as a first aid kit of sorts. When I had severe indigestion, my grandfather would take a needle and prick the very tip of my thumb, letting a drop of blood flow. This stimulation and release of a single drop of blood would open the blockages in my meridian channels. He would then rub my back with his warm hands. Then to my amazement, the food that had been stuck somewhere between my mouth and my stomach would gently settle down, making me feel much better.the tip of the nose straight up to the top of the head. The Baek-hwe is located where the three lines intersect on top of the head.

It is truly regrettable that acupuncture techniques used in Asia over a long history as daily remedies have now become distant to the general public. Since in many regions the law limits practicing acupuncture even among family members, I will introduce the techniques of acupressure as an alternative.

Acupressure and acupuncture are basically alike. Both of them use the same points. While acupuncturists apply needles, practitioners of acupressure use the fingers or pointy instruments to press key points on the surface of the skin that stimulate the body’s self-healing abilities.

In the United States acupressure is primarily used to relieve pain, reduce stress, and improve overall well-being. In Asia, the technique is used more like first aid: individuals typically practice it on themselves or on family members to treat everyday ailments such as colds, headaches, sore muscles, and hangovers. While many people prefer to go to a trained therapist to get acupressure treatments, the techniques, once learned, can be self-administered or administered by a family member.

Foremost among the advantages of acupressure is that it is safe to perform on yourself and others—even if you have never done it before—so long as you follow the instructions and pay attention to the warnings. You need only your hands to practice acupressure therapy anytime, anywhere.

Tension tends to concentrate around acupressure points. When a muscle is chronically tense or in spasm, the muscle fibers contract due to the secretion of lactic acid caused by fatigue, trauma, stress, chemical imbalances, or poor circulation. Read more

See some extracts from Prof Ilchi Lee’s collection.

Hu-gye (Back Ravine, 813): When you make a loose fist, the point is located at the end of the crease, the highest point and the junction of the red and white skin.

Yong-chun (Gushing Spring, KIi): Divide the main body of the foot into 3 equal parts. Yong-chun is one third the distance from the top of the toes, at the center of the sole.

FACIAL PUFFINESS

Yin-reung-chun (Yin Mound Spring, SP9): Below the inner knee and the depression along the shin bone (tibia). Those who often wake up with a puffy face can practice moxibus-tion or acupressure on this point to make the puff mess disappear. This point is contraindicated for pregnant women.

WRIST, ARM, OR SHOULDER PAIN

Yang-ji (Yan§ Pool, TH-4): Raise your hand upward to rind the crease on your wrist. The point is located at the depression formed in the middle of the crease.

Truth is truth, not the explanations of truth. Truth is a living, moving process. Truth is constantly undulating and vibrating. You can become one with the truth, but you cannot explain or even consciously recognize it. In order to recognize the truth, you have to separate yourself from it, and to explain the truth, you have to separate yourself from the recognition. This is an exercise of impossible prerequisites. This is why a wordsmithed truth is nothing but a shadow of the barest silhouette of the truth. If Buddha had yawned instead of holding up a flower, would that gesture have been any less representative of the truth?

It is sometimes possible to represent the truth with words, write by Ilchi Lee. However, in that case, it is not the words themselves but the power of the vibration of the words as spoken by the speaker and the surrounding atmosphere that work together to make the speech into an experience, an entertainment event featuring the truth that allows you a tiny glimpse into the truth. But there is a world of difference in being at the “event” and reading about it in a newspaper article later on. Even if you had been there and felt the power of the event, you will be disappointed by the sterile words if you read the transcript of the same speech later on.

If you try to approach the truth only through words, this is akin to reading the transcript of the talk. Such is the limitation of language. Although it will do for our everyday lives, it is too small a vessel to hold the water of the truth and too rough a mesh to catch the flow of the truth.

Although language has these inherent limitations, it has no problem when dealing with things in everyday life, such as drawing up contracts or writing a user’s manual for machinery. It will continue to be sufficient for such uses in the foreseeable future. We only come up against the limitations of language when we seek to express something that is beyond the realm of skills and or technology.

More Ilchi Lee instruct, have you ever felt frustrated because you could not put into words that deepest something within your heart? Say you had an insight of the truth, and you wanted to share that precious gift with as many people as possible. How would you explain this truth of complete and perfect life, of self-sustaining and eternal life? Because it is so difficult, some, like the Buddha, expressed it with silence, a flower, and a smile. But once that’s done, people start to analyze and interpret the gestures and expressions; the smile means something, while the flower symbolizes something else, and so on.

These interpretations become recorded in a book and that book eventually becomes the sacred text of the tradition. Once it attains the level of a sacred text, the interpreted words gain and exercise an authority that controls and limits the behavior of people. People start to memorize, chant, and imitate the words of the sacred book. When the superficial gestures become ritualized and popularized, they get transformed into a religion, the essence of the insight long forgotten. Religions are products of interpretations that are, by definition, flawed.

Our physical bodies contain several internal networks. Two are well known: the circulatory and nervous systems. The circulatory system carries nutrition and oxygen, while the nervous system carries information. Prof Ilchi Lee suggested that circulatory is a kind of plumbing system while the nervous system is like a telephone network. However, just because two bodies of water are connected by a pipe doesn’t mean water will flow between them. For the water to start flowing, some type of a push, a motivating force, is needed. In the same manner, just because your telephone is connected through a switchboard to other telephones does not mean that you can talk with your neighbors without some type of power. The power that forces blood through the veins and arteries and information along the neural pathways is called Ki. The flow of Ki is the most basic flow of anything in the body.

But Ki also surrounds the body. To differentiate it from the physical and the spiritual body, we will call the cloud of Ki energy around the human body the energy body. Without the medium of energy, information cannot be realized in material form, just as you cannot access the information in a disk just by inserting it into a disk drive. You need an energy flow that delivers the information to the hardware to be expressed in whatever forms you want; only when electric current is passed through the disk will the information embedded be read and converted into an accessible form. Likewise, Ki is the medium by which information is carried and the net with which to gather it.

The routes through which Ki travels within and around our bodies are called the meridians. This is the third network, besides the circulatory and the nervous. However, meridians are not a set of physically constrained pathways to which the movement of energy is confined, but are specifically defined roads along the body through which the main flux of the energy travels.

This article is collected by Prof Ilchi Lee from his book. In this he said as human beings strengthened their claim to the top spot, our relationship to Earth became ever more fragile and anxiety-ridden. In an ever-increasing attempt to secure our living conditions, we utilized non-sustainable and non-justifiable (except for greed) methods of mining the environment, methods which have led to scarcity and barrenness. As a result, we have come to this point at which we not only threaten Earth but also our own survival. If we don’t overcome the challenge of survival facing us, we will have existed only for about 50,000 years as a recognizable species, which, compared to the estimated five billion years of Earth’s life span, is not even as long as the blink of an eye.

Although natural evolution is a field still marked by unanswered and unanswerable questions, two questions are generally thought to be foremost in the field: What caused the quick demise of the dinosaurs, and what caused the meteoric rise of Homo sapiens as the dominant presence on Earth?

Although scientists have found fossilized bones of our presumed ancestors dating back some three million years, it is still subject to debate whether we descended from these ancestors. We have yet to find the missing link. All we know for sure is that Homo sapiens, after maintaining a quiet presence for most of the three million years, began a rapid upwards climb about 50,000 years ago, showing amazing intellectual and creative progress with the beginning of the Neolithic Age 15,000 years ago. It was almost as if human beings made a great leap forward—no, a gigantic leap forward—in terms of intellectual abilities.

Why did the dinosaurs suddenly disappear and human beings emerge, among all the species, as masters of an intellect that has since advanced enough to now threaten the entire Earth? Although scientific inquiry will take some time to complete, if it ever is completed, I have done some creative thinking of my own and drafted a plausible scenario to answer these questions. Bear with me as we embark on a fun journey of “what-if”.

Let us assume that Earth is about five billion years old and the first ancestors to modern-day Homo sapient emerged from the primordial swamp (so to speak) about three million years ago. Even extending the average human life span to a generous 100 years old, three million years is a long time. No wonder we think that Earth is ours, since we have been here so long. However, compared to the five-billion-year history of Earth, our three million is not so impressive, especially considering that it was only 50,000 years ago or so that we started using tools and exhibiting possibilities for becoming the dominant species on Earth that we are now.

Or are we now? There are two facts cited when humans are claimed to be the dominant species. One, we monopolize the highest percentage of Earth’s natural resources. Two, we are the most threatening species, capable of annihilating other species and destroying the Earth. Therefore, humans are the dominant species on Earth in much the same way as the biggest bully on the block gets that way due to his size. We might argue that humans are different or special because of our intellectual pursuits and cultural achievements, but truthfully, do you think that Earth would be less beautiful or harmonious without Mozart’s symphonies or Shakespeare’s sonnets?

If we were to recognize the right of first claim to the land, then Earth would belong to the ants and cockroaches before it did to us. Since they lived here longer than we have, instead of spraying insecticides whenever we spot them, we should be paying them rent. Dinosaurs, which disappeared abruptly from the face of the Earth about sixty-five million years ago, were the dominant species on Earth for 150 million years. Compared to their reign, the human reign hasn’t even started yet. Read more Ilchi Lee articles.

According to Dahn Yoga rules repeat the motion, except this time, with your arms raised, palms up, tilt your whole body to the right side as far as it can go without losing your balance. Feel your whole left side being stretched.

Lower your hands and return to the upright position as you breathe out.

Up Repeat the motion, now moving to the left. Feel your whole right side being stretched.

Lower your hands and return to the upright position as you breathe out.

Breathe in as you bend forward at your waist and try to touch the ground with your palms. Be careful not to bend your knees. Try to touch your knees with your forehead, or come as close as you can.

Return to your starting position as you breathe out. Repeat the whole cycle four times.

Ilchi Lee books about breath respiration.