What You Get When 700 "Power Brains" Gather

I attended the 3rd International Brain HSP Olympiad and Brain Education Conference at the Fallsview Best 5 Resort, Ellenville, NY, Augstu 10-12, both to do my job of supporting media relations and to benefit from the information, inspiration and community bonding of the events. I hosted and briefed several public relations and media people -- all new to the topic of Brain Education, and thus dealing with a mixture of skepticism and excitement. But when the job part was over, I could be one of the participants, the bulk of the 700 people gathering from five countries. We could celebrate the infinite potential of the brain and verify how Brain Education can transform schools, health-care, business and even produce world peace by working to improve the capability of the source of our creativity and reality, the brain.

As I met people, many I had known from other conferences and workshops on health/healing and personal growth, I could feel the shared joy of coming together to be part of the exploration of a new frontier in human history -- utilizing the brain to solve the problems of the world. With all the negativity these days about the state of our Earth and humanity, here was a gathering that was about new solutions using the knowledge of brain science and the practices of educational innovation. All of reality's roads leave to and from the brain -- our physical health, our mental well-being, and even our spiritual awareness. For 10,000 years in Asia, there have been exercises for keeping the body-mind energy system healthy. These have been coming into the West and especially North America at a time when greatly expanded medical research on the brain has been verifying that these traditional methods actually do benefit physical and mental health. Given the high and dibilitating stress level of modern life, in a world where planet and civilization are at risk, it is great to find something positive to understand and base action on, for ourselves and our larger communities.

Another thing that I realized is that the Olympiad was largely focused on children learning brain-related exercises and challenging themselves in a competition with prizes (yet it was fairly obvious that everyone was in a sense a winner). The children have open and flexible brains, and so accept that using the body and mind in new ways is normal and even fun. They know when they are being empowered and love the feeling. Since the children are our future and if we educate their brains in new ways, we are fundamentally turning around the negative factors that threaten our world and especially the world that will await them in the decades ahead.

I felt uplifted by the theme, activities, people, results and atmosphere of the Olympiad and Conference. If we make the world by the conversations we engage in, then these three days were a big step forward in remaking our world. Brain education is still taking shape and slowly spreading to more people. It is popular in South Korea, where the previous two Olympiads were held. Brain Education, as innovated by Ilchi Lee, the world's foremost brain philosopher and educator (see www.IlchiLee.com), has the power and potential to revolutionalize the way we see and deal with our lives -- from school to health to the workplace and to the marketplace. What an awesome message the Olympiad and Conference had. What an impressive gathering of scientists, educators, parents and children all engaged in wanting to learn how to internalize, practice and advance this message.

The brain has been an important part of our lives and the critical force in the amazing progress of human civilization. Now it can be studied and educated to get us out of outdated and harmful patterns of human behavior and institutional functioning. Hey, that is worth celebrating, as 700 of us did at the Olympiad, and sharing, as I am doing with you now.

Stress Relief and the Brain

In the afternoon, the Brain Education Stress Relief Workshop was held by Brain Education Instructors Roxana Rybaczuk and Alina Pikula. They led the audience through simple body movements and meditations that can help you reduce stress in everyday life. They emphasized that in order to manage your stress you need to be balanced. And in order to be balanced you need to be able to focus inside yourself, rather than outside on your activities and worries. The lively instructors also took the audience through a simple massage technique they called “making pizza” that you can use to help others de-stress. These techniques are the ones they teach children participating in Brain Education programs.

Afterwards, Sung Lee, MD gave conference participants another tool for reducing their stress, and also increasing their health in general—Jang Saeng Walking. It is a simple walking method that is similar to regular walking. However, in Jang Saeng Walking, you also elongate your spine by “tucking in your tailbone”, lean one degree forward, and focus on a kidney meridian point in the bottom of your feet. The audience tried Jang Sang Walking for about three minutes. Afterwards, one man shared his arthritis felt better. Other people shared that it made them feel cooler, automatically put a smile on their face without trying, or made their legs feel fuller and more solid, and therefore more grounded. Dr. Lee told the audience that he thinks a lot of the benefit of Jang Saeng Walking comes from it making the autonomic nervous system more flexible. He explained that the autonomic nervous system is made up of two systems that balance each other—one for “fight or flight” and the other for “rest and digest”. When these systems respond quickly and to the right extent, our bodies can manage stress and illness well.

Workshop Provides Brain-Based methods of Emotional Control

Pediatric therapist and Brain Education instructor Christie Phelps gave a workshop for conference attendees on the using Brain Education for emotional control. The workshop was very popular, attracting 100+ people to participate. The particpants had lots of fun, drawing with crayons and laughing a lot.

Emotional control is a big part of the third step of Brain Education, which is called Brain Refreshing. The idea is to free the brain of debilitating emotional baggage. Participants learn to look closely at their own emotional patterns and to release negative emotions, helping practitioners to use the brain more constructively and peacefully.

Brain Education Conference: Transforming Education Based on Brain Science

The first two keynote speakers of the Brain Education Conference this morning engaged their audience with the science and history of how people learn. They used interesting demonstrations and facts to illustrate how we learn best. Kenneth Wesson, Ph.D., a speaker on the neuroscience of learning, made a compelling argument of how the current system of education does not support optimal and holistic learning. For example, he said that our brains do not automatically record every detail of what our eyes and ears take in. In fact, they pick out information that seems relevant based on the current situation and past experiences. He also explained how different parts of the brain work together to form a memory and therefore why different methods of learning would better tap into that process. For example, more neural networks are created by having physical involvement, emotional engagement, time allowed for internal dialogue, interactive discourse, and a non-threatening environment open to idea exchange, than from lectures and textbooks. He advocated cooperative, experiential, "hands-on" learning. As one support for his views, he told the audience that most of the neurons in the sensory and motor cortexes of the brain are devoted to the hands. He also advocated movement as important for learning. One reason was because it signals the liver to produce more glucose, the brain's only source of fuel. The major emphasis for learning was having the supportive interpersonal interactions we need not just for remembering information, but for developing our greatest potential.

Warrington Parker, Jr., Ph.D. addressed the history of education and how it was a reflection of a society's needs and focus during a period of time. In earlier times, children learned a lot from their parents and went to school to learn reading, writing, and arithmetic. Now in a society that has become more global and connected, but that has lost its sense of purpose, this kind of purely cognitive learning is not enough. This is especially true when less support or opportunities for non-cognitive development comes from home. Children spend most of their time in schools. Also, because of many factors in their home life, they may not receive everything they need to develop optimally from home. So schools need a different approach. Dr. Parker talked about how Brain Education has been giving schools a tool to empower children to make their own choices, to solve problems, to manage their emotions, to be more connected to their bodies, and to cooperate with each other.

Faces of the Olympiad

The reasons peolple decided to come to the Olympiad are about as varied as the people themsleves. But they do share an interest in bettering their own lives and bettering the world. Let's meet a few of them:




Patricia "Chun Hwa" Console was interested in attending the Brain Education conference because she wants to use the BE training system to help people with drug and alcohol addictions. She says that the method turned her life completely around, and that it can do the same for others.

Lisa "Sol" Peraza believes that the power to change ourslelves for the better resides in the brain. As an instructor in a Dahn Yoga center, she hopes to bring back a lot of wisdom to the memebers there, as well as to her own family.















Kiran Stephen, Capri Corwin, and Christine Cimpian say that the Olympiad is as fun as a slumber party. Brain Window is thier favorite event.

Doug Backer is too young to compete, but Sandy Fletcher, his grandmother, brought him to root for his big brother in the main event.

Kim Jae Hong, Kim Song Tae, Kim Min Song, and Ha Ji Young are all members of a parent's group in Korea that actively seeks innovative educational activities for kids. Thier sons have been in three Olympiads, including this one.

Lucy Lui, a native of New York, is a long time practitioner of Brain Education. She really believes it has the power to change the world. She came because she doesn't want to miss a chance to hear Brain Education's founder, Ilchi Lee, speak.

Katie Brisley Logue is Assistant Coordinator of Brian Education in the New York region. She worked to obtain a proclamation from Senator Bonacic making the week of the Olympiad the official Brain Education week.

Last-minute preparations!

Excitement is building at the Fallsview BEST 5 Resort as last minute details are attended to. The bulk of Olympiad competators and BE Conference Attendees are arriving this evening, so the place is now humming with busy anticipation.

A judge checks and validates the envelopes to beused for the Brain Window competition.

Adult HSP competitors warm up their heightened sensory perception, getting ready for tomorrow's big event.

Hanging huge, colorful banners on the outside of the hotel.

Very busy registration table.

Special Lecture by Ilchi Lee

HSP Brain Workshop participants were able to recieve direct training from Ilchi Lee, founder or Brain Education, on Wednesday evening. Lee gave an especially warm and personal lecture, touching on biographical elements from his early childhood, which provided a sense of historical background for his Brain Education methods.

When speaking of his boyhood, participants gained a sense how he became who he is and why he pursues the study of the brain with such dedication. He said that even when he was a toddler, he would ask his mother difficult questions about the meaning and purpose of his life. When he entered school, he found himself unable to sit still. This problem continued to trouble him, even through high school, so he turned to training his physical body instead of pusuing academics. Gaining some sense of discipline through martial arts, Lee was able to return to college as an adult and finish a degree in Physiology.

He was able to successfully run a health clinic, and had a lovely family, yet he still was not satisfied. Something was gnawing at him to know more about the nature and meaning of his life. So he set off to do deep training in the mountain, where he had profound realizations about the nature of human existance. He was very aware of coming to this awareness through changes in his brain, and felt very strongly that everyone could and should experience the same through their brains. Thus, he began to research and develop his Brain Education training method.

Lee encouraged his audience to keep challenging their brains, and to have complete faith that their brains can do anything they can dream of, even if it seems impossible. He gave the example of the Write Brothers, who never gave up on their "crazy" dream of flying, even when they both broke their own legs in the attempt.