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Brain Education, Holistic Fitness Classes
By moo | May 27, 2008
Throughout most of my adult years, I have found life a struggle. Mixed in with the times when I felt healthy, happy, successful and peaceful have been too many times, subtle or dramatic, when I experienced crisis situations (setbacks in my academic and later business careers, disappointments in personal relationships), excessive dysfunctional emotions and thinking (fears, hurts, guilt and sadness), and stress-related physical problems (nervous stomach, stiff neck, loss of balance and face rashes).
Too often, my mind and emotions did not work well. So, I did what many in my generation did: I entered psychotherapy, a few different times in my life. Talking about and feeling my problems, and thinking of solutions, as well as listening to the therapist’s suggestions, always helped to some extent. When my situation seemed okay again as I saw enough progress in my life, I stopped seeing the therapist. It was painful emotionally to go through this process, so I did not relish going further and deeper.
Basically I had concluded that I could adjust my behavior by getting smarter, but that I was who I was, my personality was set, and I had to make the best of my mental/emotional make up. So I settled for dealing with the symptoms (my mind’s thoughts and attached emotions) and not daring to address the causes (back then not knowing how my brain worked and that it held the keys, along with my body and mind, to making me into a truly healthy, happy and peaceful human being).
Then, after a month of physical deterioration and mental distress three and a half years ago, I found that I could educate my brain to heal my body through a system of exercises, improve my mind by getting outside of stressful situations, and feel inner peace by accessing my spiritual dimension.
My efforts to work on myself through Ilchi Lee brain education – holistic fitness classes, various body-brain workshops, and private energy healing sessions – and the growth I have achieved across the board – health, wellbeing and soul – have made me realize that I have been going through the five steps of a program – l called the Brain Education System Training, or BEST 5, given its five steps.
Step 1, Brain sensitizing
I learned about my brain and worked consciously with its potential. I was able to strengthen and energize my body, clarify and calm my emotions, and activate and elevate my spirit and soul. My life was transformed.
I hadn’t realized how tight and weak my body was, and how anxious and stressed my brain was. Moreover, I felt that decades of bad habits had generated excessive mental stress and physical tension, which now were endangering my health and clearly shortening my life as well.
I become truly aware of my body for the first time, from its muscles to its organs. I started to feel alive and full of energy, less tense, more flexible, and stronger. From being unable to do any push-ups, one day I found myself doing seventy without strain. A large part of this progress was realizing how much my mind determined my physical actions, and how I could control both of them more consciously. Experiencing greater brain-body communication helped me gain motivation and discipline, and now I could guarantee that I always awoke on the right side of the bed, eager to face the day.
As a result of my training practice, things started to shift in my body. I realized that I was becoming more aware of my brain and the power I was accumulating in my brain-body system. A yogic approach to the energy that connected body and brain to each other was based on stretching, strengthening, breathing, deep relaxation, and energy accumulation. At last, I was sensitive to the state of my body and brain, their interconnection, and how to improve them systematically. I had found my center.
Step 2, Brain versatilizing
I took courses in how the body-brain-mind system works from an energetic viewpoint (with a 10,000-year health tradition in Asia), how to get in touch with and open my heart to feel whether a thought or emotion is coming from my ego or soul, and how to use martial arts for self healing and empowerment through greater body and brain discipline. The net effect has been for my body and brain to have an amazingly expanded repertoire of movements and states. I have developed the competence and confidence to recognize and then go beyond my old habits and automatic responses. This ability to overcome many of what I used to call my inherent limitations is in essence my brain having become more versatile. I can feel and do things that I only used to dream of.
Step 3, Brain refreshing
Why do so many of my negative feelings about the world and myself persist over the decades? It is something to do with the wiring in my body and brain; it is as much physical/chemical/electrical as it is mental/emotional. Wouldn’t it be valuable to have a delete function for my negative thoughts/emotions, just like a computer does? I have come fairly close to developing such a delete function – not of the old memories themselves, but of their intensity and hold on my thinking and behavior. I have identified the negative thoughts that used to rule me and learned ways to lessen and even eliminate their emotional control of me. When my old fears come up, I can hear them for what they are and talk them back into the darkness. One part of the process is physical and emotional releasing, while another part is the mustering of spiritual energy to see the big picture and interconnectedness of my life and the world inside of me and around me. I now possess sufficient energy, philosophy and methodology to catch myself when a negative thought wants to run my actions, and thus switch to a more positive source of guidance. My brain operating system has been renewed in profound and permanent ways. I am no longer a slave of my past and a victim of my present.
Step 4, Brain integrating
Then I realized that my brain education was shifting to building up the positive sources for me to live my life like I really want to. I can choose who I want to be and do what is most meaningful to me. I have discovered the capacity to improve my brain through deep self-reflection and the insertion of positive ways of thinking, feeling and behaving. Through energizing exercises, affirmations, visualization, meditation, and insight and inspiration, I can integrate new, positive and powerful components into my brain-body system. I have come to revise my self-concept, and thus elevate my self-esteem, to be fundamentally loving, joyful, peaceful, creative, powerful and wise. And I look and feel young and handsome too.
Step 5, Brain mastering
We cannot live all the time in courses and workshops. As useful as they have been to me, each day, even each minute, I am the creator of my life. This feeling of mastership of my life is supported by many principles and practices that I have learned in the past few years. My challenge is not to forget what I have learned, and through mindful action reinforce and strengthen the best of what I have installed in my brain and body. It helps to have a big vision of the purpose of my life. This vision for me has taken the shape of working to heal humanity and make peace the norm in the world – by become a more competent and passionate communicator and leader. I am a person with a mission and my life has never felt more full, meaningful and promising. And the best is yet to come, as I work on it each day.
Dahn yoga Ilchi LeeTopics: Dahn Class, Dahn yoga, Ilchi Lee |