Ilchi Lee Dahn Hak Yoga

“Youth is the gift of nature, but age is a work or art.” – Stanislaw Lec

Through the continual, lifelong practice and Brain Mastering, you will truly become master of your brain. This means building a lifestyle centered in part on the four previous stages of BEST. You will continue to engage in part on the four previous stages of BEST. You will continue to engage in Brain Sensitizing, Versatilizing, Refreshing, and Integrating. As you do, over time you will continue to create new neural pathways that will help you discover new abilities and new ways of thinking. In short, you will find new solutions to the problems of living.

This new lifestyle can truly lead to a new life! For example, if you were not previously interested in writing, but then in your brain education journey you discover an urge to write your memoirs, you might find yourself in writers’ workshops, meeting other writers, and engaging your creativity to the fullest. Who knows, you could be a published writer for the first time in your seventies. The important thing is that you tried something new.

Brain Mastering, by Ilchi Lee, makes maturity what it should be: a prime time of life when you are free of the constraints of work and children and are free to pursue a rich, rewarding existence. So many older adults miss out on this time because they cling to old grudge of let their minds become frail and halting, but that is a fate to which no one need be consigned. Science is showing us that our minds, emotions, and attitudes affect how long and how well we live as much as, or more than, what we eat of how much we exercise. A positive, hopeful, curious mind is a resource for exploring all the wonders that later life has to offer: Want to travel? Go back to school and get your master’s degree? Start a company? Volunteer? Learn to meditate? Do it. Ilchi Lee tells us, when you are master of your brain, you are master of your life.

You might also inspire others. Not all people who reach maturity will hear of BEST on their own. Some short-sighted people might even consider it New Age mumbo-jumbo. We know the truth: You must grow older, but you don’t have to grow old. You can just grow-in sagacity, purpose, joy, and energy. By pursuing your Brain Mastering lifestyle, you may well motivate others to do the same. You may change one life or a dozen.

“In Full Bloom” by Ilchi Lee and Jessie Jones, PHD

“The most difficult phase of life is not when no one understands you; It is when you don’t understand yourself” - unknown

Part II (Ilchi Lee’s Mediation experience on Moak Mt)

Toward the end of the first week without sleep, I developed a severe headache of a magnitude I had never experienced. The pain in my eye sockets and in my ears was so severe that I culd not see or hear. As time went on, my brain seemed to shrivel and begin to deteriorate. My head seemed always on the verge of exploding. After about two weeks, I knew that I would soon die. I felt a fleeting temptation to sleep, drink, and at something in order to prolong my life a bit. I would have succumbed to temptation had I not survived the ordeal of freezing in the snow covered field.

The pain was so severe, that I knew I was beyond saving at this point. I tried to stand on my head and scream with all my might in order to relieve this pain. Eventually, I gave up. Once again, I decided to fully offer myelf to the heavens above.  With a loud boom,as this thought crossed my mind, I felt the world open up before me. A soothing and refreshing feeling of coor warmth enveloped me. I was beyond my body, free of pain with full clarity.

With an incredible expansion of feeling, I heard a voice cry out from deep within me, “Who am I!” The answer came… “I am Cosmic Energy”. My tongue began moving of its own accord, mouthing the phrase, “My energy is Cosmic Energy, and… “My mind is the Cosmic Mind”. At this moment, with profoundness that I cannot describe, I heard the sound of the universe breathing. It was the sound of my own breathing. The universe and I are not separate, but One! I am the stars, the moon, and the sun! When I see other people, I see myself. Wen i feel others, I am feeling myself. I became conscious that we are all sharing the same cosmic awareness. This was peace in the ultimate sense of the word, realizing that we are one with all existence.

I soon realized that this illumination of “enlightenment”, for lack of a better word, carries a heavy responsibility to share this experience with others. If enlightenment benefits just one individual, what good is that enlightenment? If Truth revealed to one individual ends there, what good is that Truth? If the power of enlightenment does not change the world, it is without value, not even worth theprice of a loaf of bread. I therefore, decided to test the Truth of my enlightenment by attempting to share it with the world. If my enlightenment was real, I could communicate it to others and it would affect them the way it affected me. Thus, I had found a way to express my true purpose for this life…to hel others to experience the spiritual awakening of inner peace. For enlightenment if peace.

“Peaceology” by Ilchi Lee

This excerpt was taken from the book “Peaceology” by Ilchi Lee after he discovered the sensation of “Ki” or “Energy” flowing through his body on the last day of his hundred day meditation training and his experience with 21 day training at Mt Moak (part I):

One morning, in the bitter cold, I sat in the middle of fresh snow, meditating. This was the last day of the hundred consecutive days of training I had promised myself If I did not finish this day, I would not acheive my goal. The previous ninety-nine days would have been for naught. With this in mind, I sat like a stone statue in the middle of the snow-covered field, braving the skin-biting wind. My body shook and my breathing became haggard.

Despite the obvious danger, with my determination to not give up after ninety-nine days, I thought to myselg, “I do not live simple becaue I want to, and I cannot die simply because I want to. Everything is heaven’s will.” My consciousness began to fade as my body began to freeze.  “So this is how I am to die”, I thought to myself. I fully offered myself up to heaven praying, “Becaue I am here by your will, you must do as you wish with my life…”

At this moment I felt my body come alive, furiously spewing out heat, melting the snow around me. Ifelt a powerful stream of Ki energy coursing through my body as it formed a capsule of energy to protect me from the extreme cod. This was not something I could have accomplished alone. This surge of my innermost life energy at the moment of utmost urgency and absolute trust was the ultimate experience in the power of energy, yet it felt empty.

It was empty because I was still unal to anwer the simple question, “Why was I born” Without an answer to this question, I was just a person capable of playing with energy, a mere technician, nothing more. What good was that? What good was it to know that I could survive in freezing temperatures using the power of Ki energy if I lacked the answer I had been looking for all my life?

Bemoaning my own ignorance, I returned to Moak Mountain in Central Korea and vowed not to come out until I had aswers to the questions I was looking for. I decided to test my physical and mental endurance by not sleeping for twenty-one days, with only water for sustenance. I tried everything to stay awake, including sitting at the edge of a sharp cliff, my arms wrapped around the thick branch of a tree, so that the fear of falling would keep me awake. I rolled down a steep mountainside several times due o sitting on the edge of a rock in an effort to keep myself from fallng asleep.

“Peaceology” by Ilchi Lee

All life is in constant motion. Even rocks and mountains are in constant vibration. Every existence is dancing to the rhythm of the Cosmic Order. Life celebrates itself through constat vibration. And through vibration we can enter into the brain stem. You will experience the reality of your life in your brain stem. The following training by Ilchi Lee is a good one to try:

Place your hands, palms up, on your knees. Focus the lightf your awareness only your hands. Hands, hands, and hands. Imagine that heavy rocks are weighing down your hands in place. Silently count to one and raise your hand to your chest, only t let them sink to your knees with a silent two. One, up. Two, down. And repeat. Only through simple, repetitive movements will you allow your neocortex to momentarily stop. Now completely relax your shoulders and feel the heaviness of your hands as they lie on your knees. Feel them getting heavier until they are completely attached to the knees.

You are now in complete relaxation and comfort. In this relaxed state, just concentrate on your breathing only. Feel your neocortex go silent and sense the restlessness of the cerebral limbic system. Your awareness is now at this layer. The cerebral limbic system is gently shaking in the flow of the vibration thatis emitted by the brain stem. You can now feel with an immediacy you have not felt before the myriad emotions that have been locked into the cerebral limbic syste. Let them out now. All the loneliness, hurt, and sorrows. Let them all out right now. Let the tears flow if they will, for through the tears the cerebral limbic system is being cleansed.

Breathe in…and out.

Now your awareness is n the cerebral limbic system. A limbic system. A little more, and you can enter the brain stem. Inside the brain stem you will feel an incredible rush of joy and happiness. Prepare to enter the brain stem. Entrust yourself to the life force that is working through you. Feel the subtle vibration of life that radiates outward from the brain stem. A soft, subtle vibration. Feel it cross your chest intoyour shoulders and arms. Vibration is lif. Feel the vibration travel up and down your spine. Feel its power getting stronger, moving your bodyfrom sde to sid and front to back. Feel it shake you with the power of life itself. Everyone is in constant vibration. It is only that you don’t recognize and acknowledge it. Your heartbeat is a form of vibration. Contraction and relaxation. Expansion and contraction. Let is sing the song of life within you. Inside the vibration is the absolutely joy and peace. Inside the vibration is the True Love of the cosmos. Through vibration you are becoming One with the Creator.

“Healing Society” by Ilchi Lee

“Only one thing is ever guaranteed, that is that you will definitely not achieve the goal if you don’t take the shot.” - Wayne Gretzky

The phrase brain mastery probably makes you think of something slightly different than what is meant by the term. Brain Mastery does not mean being smart or being able to perform mental tricks. Rather, brain mastery is the ability to maintain a proper relationship between your brain and the outside world.

If you are the master of your brain, you have an almost uncanny ability to stay in the moment and to not be swept away by thoughts and emotions. You an control your attitude and keep a positive mind-set, regardless of the situation. And most importantly, a master of the brain never loses hope, no matter how dark the situation gets.

I remember one time when I was a young man there was a bridge under which people threw a lot of garbage. The garbage just piled up week after week. People complained about the garbage, but no one ever did anything to change the situation.

So one day, I decided I would do something about the problem. I began to clear the garbage away, one piece at a time. When all the trash had been hauled away, I buried it in a hole that I had dug in the mountains. I then planted pumpkin seeds in the ground covering the trash. Soon, big beautiful pumpkins were growing there.

This was a huge moment of discovery for me. It came at a moment when I felt truly hopeless about my life. In my early twenties, I had failed the college entrance exams three times. I realized that all I really needed was the opportunity to do something positive for people, and that something positive could even come from a pile of trash.

True brain mastery is the ability to see possibility,even where others see only trash. Those pumpkins grew so well precisely because the garbage had been there before; the trash added nutrient to the soil.

For real brain mastery, you must learn to see your life in th same way, realizing that all the difficult, ugly parts of life can become the compost from which grows your own fulfillmen. The trick is to keep a positive mind so that all the beautiful possibilities of life can be seen.

“Brain Wave Vibration” by Ilchi Lee

“The tragedy of life does not lie in not reaching your goals; The tragedy of life lies in not having goals to reach for. It is not a disgrace not to reach for the stars, but it is a disgrace not to have stars to reach for.”

-unknown

“A man’s mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions.” - Oliver Wendell Holmes

The principles behind Brain Wave Vibration are important, and hopefully you will keep them in mind for continued inspiration and guidance. But they are all of no use unless you put these priciples into deliberate, intentional practice.

The mind-set you keep during this practice is very important. Please approach it with an emphatic sense of intention. Plan on using this tool by which you will transform yourself, not just as a physical fitness routine. Believe fully that a perfected version of you waits just below the surface of your existence, and use this method as a way to shake off all the false layers of misidentification that have been standing in your way.

As you practice, hold in your mind a picture of the person you want to be. Visualize the picture in full color with every minuscule detail in place. At first this image of your perfected self may not be very clear to you. You may be undecided as to who you really want to be. If this is the case, don’t worry. It is natural at the beginning of any journey. You don’t know what the Grand Canyon is like until you go there, right? But you can imagine it, and that imagination is an important part of what will propel you toward it.

This is what Ilchi Lee tries to emphasize, it doesn’t have the be a clear image right away, just focus intently, and soon you will become clearer and clearer to yourself. You can start with a general idea of who you want to be by setting small, attainable goals. As you gain confidence and awareness, your true identity will become increasingly obvious, like an image emerging on a Poloroid photograph.

Most importantly, always remember that this training is for you. You are not doing it to please anyone or to gain anything from someone else. This is a precious moment ih yourself in a world that is always calling you outside yourself. Even five minutes of practice can become eternal if you allow yourself to go deep inside to explore the infinite landscape within you.

This is a beautiful and hopeful time to be alive. We are at a turning point, and your contribution to the world is needed more than ever. All of your struggles, all the struggles of your ancestors, all the struggles of all life have led to this moment right now. You are the culmination of life’s great yearning; you are the hope of the world.

I wish you great joy and peace as you embark on your journey of discovery.

“The significant problems we face cannot be solved at the same level of thinking we were at when we created them” -Albert Einstein

Imagine a bowl of white rice and two hungry men. One man prefers eating the rice by digging in and spooning it to his mouth as quickly as possible, in a very haphazard way. Another man prefers using the spoon to gently scrape layer by layer off from the top until he reaches the bottom of the bowl, in a very meticulous fashion. Whoseis the better way? I guess that depends on your personality. If you have a quick tempe, you might prefer the former. If you are the controlling type, you might prefer the latter. It’s all the same. The rice reaches your mouth the same both ways. Ther is absolutely no difference except in style.

Now imagine that the two men above get into an argument over the differenct merits of their own particular eating habits. The first man thins that it doesn’t matter how you eat the damn rice, since it’s all going to be eaten in a few minutes anyway. The second man stresses the need for a certain decorum even when doing things as commonplace as eating rice. The argument gets heated. The first man accuses the second of being controlling and arrogant while the second man counteraccuses the first of being sloppy and ignorant. The argument turns into a fistfight, and during this fight the bowl of rice drops from the tables and breaks into a thousand pieces, scattering the tiny, white pebbles of rice all over the floor.

Now neither of them can eat, and they remain hungry. Why? Because they both lost sight of what’s really important-the bowl of rice itself. In trying to declare the superiority or their respective positions, they both wind up in inferior positions. In trying to win individually, they have lost collectively.

That is a very simple fable, but one that describes our present society quite accurately. For example, say that the first man represents capitalism and the second socialism. What is the difference between these two great ideologies? Different ways to eat the same bowl of rice. It’s only a matter of difference of opinion for the same thing. Neither one is good or evil. Neither one is correct or wrong. And neither one is what’s more important.

The bowl of rice is.

“Healing Society” - Ilchi Lee

“Twenty years from now you will be more disappointed by the things you didn’t do than by the ones you did”

-Mark Twain

All mind-body practices, including other forms of yoga and meditation, have an effect on the brain. The sense of peace, release of tension, and reduction of stress that these practices offer are due to their effects on the brain. The BEST 5 programs, created by Ilchi Lee, differ only in that they focus on and accentuate these effects. Learning about the brain is also the best way to move your practice out of the training room and into your life. If you only practice yoga as a physical exercise, you are no really tapping into its full potential. Approaching your practice as exercise may help you relax in the moment, but wouldn’t you like to carry peace nto all areas of your life? that is why we study the brain so intensely in the deeper levels of this practice. By learning to become the master of your brain, you become the master of your life.

If you are happy now you are ahead of the game. Most people are stuck looking at four or five problems in their lives. To be happy now it the first enlightenment.

It is great if you are happy. There is no reason not to be happy because life is full of countless blessings, and you should be grateful for the conditions of your life, regardless of where you are in your journey. Ilchi Lee asks have you have truly created the life that you want to live? Or is there a part of you that yearns for more? The goal of these programs is not simple happiness in the emotional sense because this kind of happiness is temporary and often dependent on the conditions of your life. Rather, the BEST 5 programs exist to help you achieve a truly satisfying and fulfilling lifestyle by discovering who you really are inside, which brings lasting confidence and joy.

Develoing a flexible brain, which is the goal of the second step of Brain Education, can help you to avoid this pitfall of aging. Essentially, your brain will establish a greater array of neural connections, and thus you will have more connections available to you as you age. Even if you there is some environmental or genetic factor involved, it stands to reason that a well developed young brain will be better able to handle these sorts of problems as it grows older. The brain is not so different than the body. If you take care of it when you are young, you will have fewer problems when you are old.

Furthermore, BEST helps people develop a more positive outlook on life, which is bound to help your brain as it gets older. Many older practitioner have discovered a new sense of passion and purpose for their lives, which is perhaps the best thing anyone can do for his or her brain.

A human being is a part of the whole called by us universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feeling as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty

~Albert Einstein

A quest to become a person of greater enlightenment asyou make the transition into the mature years of your life. You have plenty of goals: to heal from the traumas of the past, to find peace, to develop a healthier body, and even to discover a new purpose for your life. Brain Mastering, by Ilchi Lee, is discovering the life you want to live and developing a mental discipline that allowsyou to turn your brain into a tool to create that life. Brain Mastering is discovering the life you want to live and developing a mental discipline that allows you to turn your bran into a tool to create that life. It is  continual process of improving your brain to become a better human being.

Essayist Sidney Smith said, “Regret for the things we did can be tempered by time; it is regret for the things we did not do that is inconsolable.” Many of us struggle with regrets for the things we did not do that is inconsolable.” Many of us struggle with regrets about the things we have not done in our lives. These regrets become more acute and painful as we age, like a disease that eats away at the peace and serenity of many older people, turning what should be a time of exploration, vitality, and joy into a shadowy country of unfulfilled promises and resentment.

With Brain Mastery, by Ilchi Lee, you can break free from the unrealized goals of your past. You become a new person with new perspectives and a new ability to harness the creative and reasoning powers of your brain. Free from past fears, prejudices, and preconceptions, you can create a new future ad do after seventy the things that ou wanted to do at thirty-five. Have you read about those men and woman in their seventies and beyond who are climbing the Himalayas, winning literary awards, and starting world-changing charities?

There’s nothing in them that is not in you. You cannot go back and rewrite chapter one, but you can start now and make a fantastic finale.

“In Full Bloom” by Ilchi Lee & Jessie Jones, PHD

Matter Follows Mind:
 
In Eastern thought, there is the saying, “Where the mind goes, energy follows.” In other words, energy travels exactly where your mind wants it to go. Everything we accomplish in this world begins with a conscious thought.

This is not as esoteric or magical as it might seem; it is just the common sense way that things happen. For example, if you admire a tall building in the middle of the city, you can be certain that it all began in the mind of the architect working in tandem with the investors, contractors, and workers who brought it into being. As all these minds came together, energy began to flow toward the fulfillment of the vision. In that way, imagination became reality. Every space mission, every classic piece of art, every saintly act began as a thought in someone’s mind.

You can think of your life as being a little like knitting. When you first begin, there is no shape to it, but you keep knitting with some goal in mind—to make a sweater, a sock, or whatever. Every stitch is like a thought that you add to the overall shape of your life. Eventually, thoughts lead to action and the form will emerge, if you can only keep your intent in mind. A hypothesis put forth by Ilchi Lee is that “If you have no clear vision, however, you will end up with a random pile of knotted yarn”.

Information Management:
 
Information has the greatest effect on the health of your brain. You could almost think of information as food for your brain. Low-quality information is like junk food for the brain, while high-quality information is like highly nutritious, satisfying food. And just like the other functions of the body, brain waves suffer if fed a consistent diet of low-level information.

The situation with many people’s information consumption is not unlike the situation with food consumption. First of all, there is simply too much information being served up. We are constantly bombarded with facts, theories, arguments, advertisements, images, noise—the list goes on. Ilchi Lee theorizes that our brains cannot handle all the extraneous information.

Information used to be held by an elite few, the scholars and rulers of a time gone by. But now there is an excess of information available for everyone. Every piece of information is like a calorie. The brain, which has a natural love for acquiring information, slurps up the information wherever it can be found. Soon the brain is overwhelmed by the vast amount of information entering it. Information in its own right is not bad, no more than food is bad. But too much is too much, especially when the quality is not good.

Like fast food, you can get a lot of information cheap these days. Your mind, like your body, gets heavy and clogged up quickly if you don’t make good choices about what you feed it. Brain Wave Vibration, created by Ilchi Lee, is meant to help you stop processing information, almost like a temporary information fast, so that you can begin to take control of your information consumption.

Brain Wave Vibration by Ilchi Lee