Living in the Age of Stress
Jul 21st 2008Phil LawstoneAbout Ilchi Lee
Quotations from Ilchi Lee’s new book Brain Wave Vibration
You have probably heard many awful stories about the health conditions of the past - stories of plague, faminine, and poverty. We look back on these times with a sense of relief that these hardships are a thing of the past for most people, at least those living in the developed contries of the world.
Yet, even while we have escaped many of these horrors, we seem to have invented our own kind of epidemic, and it is brought about entirely through our own choices. Ilchi Lee says in his new book Brain Wave Vibration, that it is the scourge called stress.
Stress has been linked to almost every illness of modern society. The list of associated diseases is staggering: heart disease, cancer, high blood pressure, asthma, lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, fibromyalgia… the list goes on and on. And on top of that, there are a host of negative habits associated with the stress response - activities people do to find artificial relief, habits that throw the body into further imbalance, including overeating, smoking, and excessive consumption of alcohol.
Why, if we have been able to conquer polio, smallpox, and other deadly contagion, have we not been able to conquer this thing called stress? The answer lies in how we relate to the world from the inside out, not in how the outside world relates to us. When a doctor controls a bacterial infection with an antibiotic, he or she is attacking an invader that came from outside the body. But in the case of stress, Ilchi Lee founder of Dahn Yoga says, the effects are largely self-inflicted.
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