Oct 25 2008
Your Refreshed Brain
Dahn Yoga’s founder Prof Ilchi Lee is famous as brain educator. The subject of this chapter is Brain Refreshing, the process of releasing negative emotional residue and letting go of past traumas. The goals: a more positive state of mind and greater, more productive control over your thought patterns.
Negative thought patterns are a major source of stress, and stress is the most common mental problem of our time. Hundreds of thousands of years ago, our hominid ancestors developed stress response systems that were designed to flood their bodies with powerful hormones in the face of a threat—an attacking bear or a dangerous deer hunt on the plains, for example. Those chemicals produced a wave of very useful physical and mental changes: more blood flowed to the heart and brain, the pulse raced, the skin temperature dropped, muscles tapped reserves of sugar energy, the brain sharpened and quickened. These responses were very important if you were a hunter-gatherer looking to outrace a wounded bison or fend off a hungry wolf. In this setting, the fight-or-flight response was very healthy.
However, attacking animals are rare in our modern world, and hunts on the plains are even rarer. Our mighty brains and our knack for technology have enabled us to become a race that uses its mind, not its muscle. We are farmers of information and hunters of data now. Rather than tracking prey in woodlands, we sit at desks in cubicles. Yet in terms of evolutionary time, we’re just a few ticks of the clock from those seven days, so our physical nature has not changed much. Back then, when the danger was over, our stress response was too. Our bodies relaxed to conserve energy. But today, under the pressures of work and traffic and debt and politics and war, our stress response is on overload. Many of us are “stressed out.” Chronic, long-term stresses are our problem, and that fight-or-flight response does more harm than good. Those potent hormones are being dumped into our bodies constantly, which is not what nature intended.
As a result, our immune systems suffer. Our blood pressure spikes. We develop migraines, anxiety, and depression. In the short term, the stress response helps us. But chronic stress, hours every day, causes deterioration of both the body and the mind. And yet how easy it is to cleanse ourselves of such damaging effects! In chapter one you learned how to release tension from your body, but it is all for naught if you do not also learn how to release emotional tension from your mind. It is really a matter of choosing positive emotions to replace the negative, which is essentially what Brain Refreshing is all about.
One quick way to do this is to follow the old adage, “Laughter is the best medicine.” Research shows that laughter reduces levels of at least four of the common stress hormones. A short, intense walk (it doesn’t even have to be one mile long) can clear stress hormones from your bloodstream. And the simple act of taking a breath—something we do thousands of times each day without thought—can sweep away stress, relaxing the body and allowing it to rest and heal. But in today’s world, even the simple act of proper breathing becomes difficult, as our bodies become full of stress-related tension. What’s needed is deliberate attention to our breathing, emotions, and actions. Living consciously to shape one’s emotions and attitudes is the next step in BEST.