The greatest change that happens when you recover natural healing power is that you come to have a self-reliant, self-sustaining perspective of life. You move from depending on the outside for your health and happiness to creating these things for yourself. You live truly as the master of your life, trusting in the great restorative power of the life that’s inside of you.
BW: You explain in the book that body temperature is important for the body and mind condition. Why is that?
IL: Body temperature has an immense impact on your health and happiness. The most important internal conditions required to maintain life are our “vital signs”: our heart rate, blood pressure, body temperature, and respiration rate. Which of these has the narrowest range for what’s considered normal? Body temperature. We can say it’s only between 96 and 97 degrees Fahrenheit that we can feel in a normal state.
Also, our body temperature changes according to our surrounding environment or our physical and physiological activity, but it also changes according to our emotional state. Emotions bring physiological changes through our body’s hormonal system, and this leads to changes in body temperature. When you’re afraid, excited, or angry, your body temperature changes accordingly.
If you are mired in an unhealthy emotional state such as worry, anxiety, anger, or sadness, you become depressed and everything becomes irritating. You don’t even want to move. Your body temperature drops naturally when you’re in this condition.
BW: You developed a brain-based holistic education program as a methodology for character education. What is brain education and why is it good for human integrity?
IL: We have brains but we don’t know our brains well. It was not long ago that the scientific world made big progress on brain research. The International Brain Research Organization was founded only in 1961 to gather neuroscientists for the first time, and the Society for Neuroscience was just founded in 1969.
Neuroscience changes the way we understand people. Before, people who were violent, gay, or depressed were considered abnormal. But now we can say it is a phenomenon of the brain. Hormone regulation and body temperature are related to our emotions, and this is all a neurological process.
Our body is like a chemistry factory. When people hear praise or just any piece of positive information, the body secretes good hormones and their confidence increases. But when people continuously get scolded or hear negative information, they lose their confidence and avoid other people.
To make a person very stupid is not difficult. Only thinking about our bad experiences in the past makes us scared and affects our life in the present moment. This, I believe, should not be like that. This is the reason I created brain education 20 years ago. To help people recover their nature and confidence.
BW: If many people in the world recover human integrity through the brain education program, what kind of changes do you expect in the world?
IL: Brain education has been implemented in 16 countries, including the United States, South Korea, Japan, El Salvador, Costa Rica, the Philippines, Liberia, Sierra Leone, India, Canada, the U.K., China, Russia, Germany, Ireland, and New Zealand.
If many people in the world can recover their human integrity through brain education, if people respect others, truly wish for all others to be happy, and get rid of any kind of superiority mindset — by having more money, or more power, or more knowledge — we could reduce the gap between the haves and the have-nots.
Many people are talking these days about the limitations of our material civilization to create a better world. I think when many people recover their great human integrity a new spiritual civilization can begin in the world. Material civilization has taken us far in many ways, but it is also creating human alienation and the pollution of our environment. These problems are created by human beings, and they must be resolved by human beings.
I believe that everybody has a great potential and integrity inside. But due to circumstances, they lose their touch. When we recover our natural rhythm, we can achieve more and help others achieve more. Try to sing and dance for one hour every day until you connect your natural rhythm and until you gain your full confidence. This hour is as important as the time spent eating and sleeping. But do it for yourself, not to show other people. That’s my recommendation.
This article was first published in Brain World Magazine’s print edition.
