Ilchi Lee Blog Online

To really learn how to use your brain well in Yoga, you should consider pursuing some kind of physical training in depth. Through rigorous training of this sort, you will learn to overcome limitations in your body, and your brain will gain the upper hand over the rest of your body. As an added bonus, you will gain increased confidence in many areas of your life.

Any sort of athletic training will help you achieve this, but some sorts of training are especially effective at uniting the mind and body. Many ancient Asian practices, including yoga, tai chi, ki gong, and many martial arts, specifically seek to train the mind in relationship to the body. The word yoga means “to unify,” and the goal is to bring together the mind and body as one. Numerous studies have confirmed the significant effect these practices can have on your brain to facilitate deep relaxation, improve coordination, and develop focus.

One element that all these practices have in common is the concept of ki (or chi or qi), which is considered to be the life energy that flows through the universe. This element is also the focus of traditional Asian medical practices, such as acupuncture and herbal medicine, which seek to balance and facilitate the flow of ki through the body.

Even though ki may not be as tangible as other biological functions, it is helpful to see energy as the mediator between mind and body. Doing so will help you gain some sense of connection between the two, and it can help you coordinate your body more completely with your brain. When visualizing the brain, it is helpful to think in terms of energy since the entire nervous system incontrovertibly relies on electrochemical impulses to send and receive its messages.

In fact, you may already be accustomed to noticing some link between your brain and energy, even if you don’t call it ki. In the most obvious example, you have probably noticed that when your brain is very alert and positive, your energy level is also very high. On the other hand, your energy level drops when your mind sinks into sadness and worry.

These are basic examples given by Sir Ilchi the way that life energy follows the fluctuations of your brain, but you can also look closer at the fluctuations of energy in your body. For example, if you feel tension in your body due to stress, you can view this as stagnant energy. Because you know that energy moves according to the mind, your brain can come to the aid of your body to help release the effects of stress and to gain mastery over your mental and physical health.

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Lee’s articles about basics of Dahn Hak

A prescription for global enlightenment. The Doctor Lee emphasizes throughout the book that enlightenment is not just for a select few, but available to everyone. He defines enlightenment as “a simple choice that you make to live your life for the betterment and benefit of all those around you.” One needs only to make that choice, and then develop the discipline to live out that choice.

The 12 Enlightenments for Healing Society

Inspires readers to “stop seeking enlightenment and start acting it.” Lee shows you how to become what he calls an “Enlightened Activist” as you push past the artificial boundaries of institutions that prevent you from realizing that everyone is an Earth Human, a member of a single human society, journey toward enlightenment through these twelve practical, yet spiritual, steps.

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Ilchi Doctor instruction on Dahn Yoga

Lie down on your back on a flat comfortable surface, such as the floor or a bed. Bring your arms out from your sides about forty-five degrees, and place your feet about shoulder width apart. Focus on relaxing your body completely.

A real guide about Yoga

At first, just focus on the rhythm of breath in your chest. Do not try to force your breath; just relax and follow your natural pattern. With every exhalation, try to release more and more tension from the body. Focus on each part of the body, letting go of all tension in that area. Thoroughly release all tension from the face, shoulders, arms, back, abdomen, and feet. When you feel fully relaxed, begin to gently breathe more deeply into the abdomen, until you feel increased warmth in the lower abdomen.

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In Dahn Yoga rules breathing is essential to brain health. Without the oxygen it provides, your brain cannot live for more than a few minutes. With each breath we take, oxygen is dumped into the blood supply, and much of it is eventually used by the brain. Thus, it is important for the health of our brain that we breathe well to keep our blood fully oxygenated.

If you are like a lot of people, you breathe very poorly. You breathe shallowly and use only a small portion of your lung capacity. However, you did not start out this way. When you were a baby, no one had to teach you how to breathe well. You were a natural-born breather. Have you ever watched an infant sleeping? They can teach you a lot about how to breathe well.

When a baby breathes, his or her entire chest and abdomen lifts with each breath. But as we grow older, the effects of stress and improper posture begin to compromise our breathing ability. The chest becomes tight, the abdomen becomes stiff, and we begin to use only our upper chest to breathe. This is a natural reaction to prolonged stress, which results in decreased efficiency in all the organs, including the lungs.

To improve this situation, you can begin to draw more conscious awareness to your breathing. In effect, you need to retrain yourself to breathe as you did when you were a baby. Brain scans have shown that conscious breathing, when com-pared to unconscious breathing, activates many areas of the brain in addition to oxygenating the blood. Make it a point to notice and correct your own breathing habits.

Ilchi Lee helpful tips on human breath

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Ilchi Lee says, ironically the student who put so much weight on the outcome of the test has done little to help himself succeed. A mild stress response may have helped him perform better, but in this case it is too extreme, and he is caught in a state of imbalance.

Stress in and of itself is not bad. The brain stem wants to create balance between the sympathetic nervous system, which produces the stress response, and the parasympathetic nervous system, which is in charge of the rest-and-digest response. When our bodies are kept in a constant state of imbalance, disease is the likely result.

The part we have control over is the prefrontal cortex, the thinking part of the brain. To put it simply, people today think too much. The thinking brain is constantly sending messages that keep our bodies in a state of alarm, and they never have ample time to recover. The trick is to quiet the thinking mind and gain control over the content it produces so that the brain stem has a chance to coordinate the equilibrium that it exists to create.

Ilchi Lee created BEST program, the Brain Education System Training and Brain Wave Vibration Training, both of which you can practice with Dahn Yoga members at a local studio.

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I am very impressed by Ilchi Lee’s statement on changing habits.

He answered the question “How can I overcome my lifelong habit of putting up a wall that prevents people from getting to know me?” in Ask Ilchi Lee section at www.ilchi.com. He recommended to begin by watching the habit carefully. Notice what sorts of events and circumstances seem to make you want to pull away from people. Lee also suggested the person who asked the question make a deliberate choice to keep as engaged as possible with others.

I think this question and advice are really related with my habit too. I really should check myself, and see how I behave when I have that kind of occasion to meet and talk with other people. I will make a conscious decision to release any negative emotions I feel as I try to open up to others.

Ilchi Lee gave a friendly warning to Dahn Hak students; the big test will come when someone hurts you again. This is inevitable because it is part of life. When you experience this, you may once again feel the urge to protect yourself and build the wall once again.

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The basic bodily functions that maintain life all consist of complete cycles of Hak Dahn. Simply put, a never-ending cycle of energy and material makes our lives possible.

Sir Lee writes that breath has it own rhythm. Breathing in itself, is a perfect self-balancing mechanism of life, becoming faster or slower depending on conditions. It goes out just as it came in. You cannot maintain life if you foolishly try to prevent your breath from leaving, or stop air from coming in to begin with. Breathing is a fair and exact transaction. Life consists of a series of balanced and precise cycles. Peace is like the orderly and harmonious rhythm of life. Peace is the healthy functioning of the rhythms and cycles of life.

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In Dahn Yoga Peace is not an abstract concept. Peace is the nature of our very lives. The most basic function of our lives, the breath, is peace incarnate. What would happen if you stopped breathing for even one minute? Would you level peaceful? How would you feel if you were able to breathe in but could not breathe out? What would happen it you could cat as much as you wanted to eat, but could not excrete, or drink as much as you wanted to drink but you could not urinate? If you have ever suffered from severe constipation, you know how uncomfortable you would be. This is why I say peace is like breathing. Peace is a natural and uninterrupted rhythm of life.

The breathing cycle illustrates the balance and rhythm of life. Oxygen enters the body and our lungs expel carbon dioxide by breathing. Without circulation of breath, we cannot maintain life.

Yoga principals by Ilchi Lee

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Articles about Dahn Hak by Doctor Lee

Lack of peace has remained an albatross around our collective necks. Peace remains a distant goal that we are forever bound to pursue yet not attain. We are subject to the whims of powerful and cynical leaders who use our universal longing for personal gain. Peace has become something unapproachable and abstract, moving farther from our grasp.

What we now need is not an intellectual understanding of peace. What we really need now is for all of us to become more peaceful, to ourselves become expression of peace. This can only happen when we undergo a fundamental and profound experience of peace. Until you personally experience the infinite depth of peace within yourself.

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A complete guide about Dahn Yoga

It would be nice if we could simply eliminate stress in our lives with a pill, but that is not the case. Neither is it likely that you will reach a point where you have fixed all of your problems and have no challenging situations to face. Ilchi Lee says, You may say that people or events in your life are stressful, but really stress is something you generate yourself within your own mind. Controlling the effects of stress will require understanding yourself better, not changing your outside environment.

Consider, for example, two young men taking a graduate school entrance exam. Imagine they are talking the same exam and that both are equally prepared, but one person arrives at the classroom with sweaty palms and a racing heartbeat, while the other remains perfectly calm and relaxed. What really makes the difference here?

The distinction lies, Ilchi Lee adds, in the story that each of the students is telling himself. One student may be saying to himself, “I will just do my best. Everything will be fine.” Meanwhile the other is saying, “I am terrible at standardized tests, and my whole future depends on this one test.”

In both cases, the story is the creation of the prefrontal cortex, Ilchi Lee says, the part of the brain that analyzes and judges our environment. In the case of the stressed-out student, he is sending out a message that says, “Emergency! Sound the alarms!” The hypothalamus, sitting like a guard on top of the brain stem, hears the message and then relays it through hormonal and bioelectrical signals to the rest of the body. The sympathetic nervous system, also known as the fight-or-flight response, is activated — digestion is slowed, heartbeat is increased, and circulation is compromised, including in the brain.

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