This year celebrates my 20th year of practicing Body & Brain. In fact I realized this yesterday, on January 11th, because that was the exact day that I joined as a member of the center in Waltham, MA., just a few miles from my parent’s house.

I know this because the master of the center had written my name and joining date on my uniform, which I practically lived in. I wore that uniform so often that one day my friend turned to me and said, “Could you at least take it off when we go out in public?” Hahaha ~ I had no awareness of those kind of things back then. All I wanted to do was practice. I only thought about when I could go back to the center next and do some training, some cleaning, drink some tea, have a profound conversation with someone, read a book, water the plants, listen to a peaceful song… I felt most alive when I was at the center. The center that was tucked behind a gas station, above a dry cleaners, that housed a couple of pigeons and vibrated from the machines below, was a place of magic and wonder to me. A place of love and authenticity where I felt rescued from the insanity of the rest of the world. I had no idea on the day that I first walked in that I would become a life long practitioner, but in just a few months it was very, very clear to me. I had found myself and found my home.

Never before or since have I been so clear or certain about such a decision. My path, my practice & my teacher mean so much to me. I am proud of myself that through all of the waves of hardships and struggles that I have experienced in the last 20 years, I have been able to hold on to my Truth. I have been able to maintain the choice that my Soul made way back then – when my hair was long and I rode my bike to work – the choice that I couldn’t help but make when I encountered the pure light in my heart. I felt I needed to honor and protect that light and make a choice to really live my life dedicated to it. It didn’t make sense to others around me – to be so dedicated to something that is not seen by the physical eye or valued by this physical world. But my spiritual eye had opened and from that perspective there was only one thing to do. Live for something bigger than my small self. Choose for something greater than my small life. This brought great joy and peace to my heart, and continues to.

I am thankful that with my choice I gave my heart room to expand, I gave my Soul an opportunity to truly grow and I gave Danielle a clear direction to walk through this chaotic world. It’s really not an understatement to say that I feel eternally blessed.

So at this celebratory moment, I’d like to offer my thanks. To Heaven for guiding me. To Earth for loving me. To my Seu-Seung Nim for showing me the way. To my many fellow travelers who walk beside me and give me hope. To all of my mentors who rescued me in hard times. To all of my students who make me a better person. To those of my family and friends who supported my choices along the way. To all of you – my readers – who have allowed me to experience the joy of sharing across space and time. And to myself. For never giving up.

It’s 2020. It’s monumental. Let’s make it really mean something. Let’s Get Bright. I love you ~

2020 is coming. It’s almost here.

I really feel like this is the year. It’s the year to get bright. It’s the year for all of humanity to jump up our collective consciousness a notch and move into a new, more awakened awareness.

I choose this light. I choose it for myself first. I choose to get bright.

I am looking back on this year with awe. There were some really big things that happened and big successes that I would have otherwise overlooked had I not decided to take time to really reflect.

Without that reflection I feel it was just a year of inner conflict, hard decision-making, and a drop of avoidism. Yet, if I see without emotional eyes, there were so many things achieved. Amazingly, there were dreams that I had been dreaming for the last 5 years that were actualized in 2019. And I almost missed the chance to realize it! That’s why honest, non-judgmental reflection is so important.

Heaven is always helping us. I’m not talking about a religious Heaven. I’m talking about the invisible, spiritual world that is moving in accordance with our deepest wishes and intentions. It’s watching and listening and if we continue on with sincerity in our little lives here on Earth, then at some moment it brings to us what we have truly wanted. I have experienced this so many times.

At the same time, we have many “unconscious wishes” that we are putting out into the universe as well. Our emotional reactions and bad habits are also bringing equivalent energy and experiences back to us like a boomerang. An oriental medicine doctor once said to me “It keeps going around and around like this until we return to zero.” I guess this is what can be called ‘karma.’

That’s why I feel it’s so critical for me to really get conscious about this process. That is the only way to get back to 0. To become ever more conscious and intentional in my life. Then, I can truly get bright. I think it’s urgent for all of us who have some awareness and awakeness in this world right now, as we stare into the eyes of 2020, to become conscious about what we are putting out there. Let’s dream the same beautiful dream for our earth and the future of our humanity together, and then miracles will truly be possible. I believe this. Do you?

I am thinking of all of you and feeling you in my heart at this important time. Let’s bring our minds and our spirits together. Let’s get strong, get hopeful, get creative, get honest, get alive, get free, get powerful…..Get Bright!

It’s mid-October and there is only 1.5 months left in this year. I think that it’s a good time to self-assess our 2019 goals!

For me, this year’s theme was “Letting Go, Letting Go, Letting Go.” Yes, I put THREE Letting Go’s in there! What was I thinking ??! 🙂

Well, it turned out that I did have quite a big letting go experience this year. It was an experience that taught me – for the first time – what true letting go really is.

It was not a pleasant experience, mind you. Not while I was in the middle of it, anyway. It felt like dying. Ego dying. Because, in fact, my ego was dying.

The ego doesn’t go out easily. Its instinct is to live. It has its roots in the human body, so it behaves with the same program as the physical body – the program to survive.

The soul, however, has its roots in the Divine Oneness. It exists in and of itself eternally. Therefore, it doesn’t try to live. Because it cannot die. It just Is. It exists, like a great presence, that just watches and waits. It waits for us to seek it out. To find it.

What I came to realize was that my ego was feeding off of so many wants and likes that were living in my head and heart. “I want it it to be this way!” “I don’t want it to be that way!” “I like this!” “I don’t like that!” I had a laundry list of desires that I was attached to in my mind, and I was fooling myself believing that they were the only things that would make my heart happy. But what can really make the heart truly truly happy? Attaining my wants and likes? But then what happens when life brings me things that I don’t want and that I don’t like? Should I just be miserable then? Should I just suffer and live trying to dodge the so-called bad and reach for the so-called good? Personally I found this to be exhausting. And all it brought to me was a bunch of disappointment, a whole lot of unrealistic future fantasy, and a growing blockage in my heart chakra which bred all kinds of emotions such as frustration, anger and pride.

So what did I do to solve this? Finally, after a wild ego fight, I decided to let go of them. I let go of the wants and the likes. I just let go. Stop. Grabbing. For that stuff. And just be. And when the pain of my shattering ego cleared, there was a great light and peace inside. There was nothing, really. So my Soul could stretch out. And I felt freedom. The freedom of letting go.

Now, although I feel that my experience was one of the most profound and important spiritual experiences that I’ve ever had, which led me to a far deeper understanding about myself and life, I feel that it was just the beginning of a new door opening. I need to continually keep my eye on that ego of mine, that starts to build itself back up again in an instant, feeding off of all my opinions and ideas – my judgements and my desires. I’m not saying that the ego is bad, I’m just saying that after awakening my senses with Brain Education all these years, I am able to feel how uncomfortable and unhealthy it is for me to let my ego run my life and make my choices. A far better, although seemingly harder, but definitely greater choice would be to just surrender. Surrender to what is, and let the shell of the self who tries to fight and control it to be otherwise – with endless expectations and untruths – fall away. It’s just a shell after all. A shadow. A story. An illusion. These stories make me sick. And I choose to grow myself into the person who no longer buys into them.

It’s scary. We feel deep down that perhaps we will be painfully lonely if we let go of such stories and habits that have been with us for so long. In a weird way, they have become our “friends.” But such “friends” prevent us from true happiness and peace. They don’t allow us to exist here and now. They are stealing away our precious present moment. That is why we have to take the risk. And when we do, we will find, rising out from that darkness, the truth of Life.

It’s so hard to describe. And, it’s possible that this blog post has failed to do so. However, I wanted to try. Because it is the most important thing that happened to me this year and it wouldn’t have happened had I not had the goal of Letting Go. Letting Go. And still….keep….ever….Letting Go.

I came across two passages in the Connect Book that I especially loved, and resonated perfectly with my own experiences on this journey of growth and transformation. I also felt they were quite relevant to the things I am usually talking and sharing about, so I wanted to post them here for you!

Continuous choosing and practicing are required to be a Power Brain. Just because you’ve had a moment filled with confidence and hope, that condition won’t continue forever. You may go back to a Dark Brain state, pushed there by the inertia of habits ingrained in your body as you’ve lived your life. There’s no other way out but to honestly check the condition of your brain. “My brain is now a Dark Brain,” you realize. “Negative consciousness is occupying my brain again.” Then you can choose whether to continue in that state or get yourself out of it. Isn’t it fortunate that you have been given the power and authority to make that choice at any moment, no matter how difficult or troubling your situation may be?

A Power Brain is someone who has clearly realized this: “I am responsible for my life and the condition of my brain!” Don’t push that responsibility off onto anyone else, and don’t make any excuses. Choose this harsh truth, and choose it over and over again. Practice, and then practice again… To achieve brain mastery, it’s only natural that innumerable attempts, trial and error, and continuous choosing and practice are necessary.

-Ilchi Lee, Connect, p. 162-163

When we trust that it’s all about choosing and practicing again and again and again, we can relax our minds and cultivate patience about our own process. It is, after all, a process that takes time and devotion, sincerity and humbleness. It is a process that strengthens our will and conviction with each and every choice that we make.

When you enter into deep meditation, you’ll clearly see the current state of your consciousness. You’ll realize what has captured your brain. You’ll see that the forms of negative consciousness…are actually heavy baggage continuously pulling you down. You can’t help but be shocked when you see yourself holding tightly to such things, even though all you have to do is let go. Why? It’s because those things are delusions. No real answers are found there, no matter how much you cling to them. You will just spin endlessly through a repeating circuit, going back and forth between suffering and pleasure.

If you tell people to let go of those delusions, though, they often act as if it’s so hard that it’s going to kill them. That’s because they are comfortable only if they are holding onto something. Living that way has become a habit. They don’t realize that they need to hold onto something else instead of what they’ve been grasping. What should you hold onto? There is but one answer: your true self, your original nature! This is your soul, and the divinity your soul wants so much to meet. That alone is true and everlasting.

-Ilchi Lee, Connect, p. 163-164

Letting go, recognizing illusions, choosing your truth. This all sounds so simple but often times feels so difficult to do. However, once we begin to get the hang of it, it leads us to extremely profound and liberating places. And although everything in our lives may remain the same, we somehow feel that we are new.

I hope that you enjoyed the quotes I posted today. If you resonate with them, feel free to share. Also, if you have had a chance to read the Connect book yourself and there were other parts that particularly touched you, please also share with me in the comments anytime!

By the way, do you like the new face of my blog?

I wanted it to give it the flavor of Body & Brain for a while, since these days I am very much focused on my new Emotional Self-Mastery show on the Body & Brain YouTube channel.

I want to thank all of you who have watched that show so far, and who have commented and posted questions. I am so very grateful for your support.

I love writing this blog. It is such a joy to express my feelings and awakenings through words, and to hear your thoughts and responses as we all navigate together our inner worlds together.

I also love teaching. I love meeting my students in the classroom or online and sharing these principles and practices, helping my students to awaken themselves, and witnessing before my eyes their various transformations.

However, trying to deliver all of this content that means so much to me and has such a power to heal and awaken, on a little black screen to I don’t know who is sometimes….. well, I don’t know. I’m undecided on how I feel about it.

My goal and purpose is to help people help themselves. It’s to make this world a better place in doing so. It all comes from the deepest place in my heart and that’s why I want to extend my heartfelt thanks to those of you who have been supportive and participatory.

I welcome your continued support, questions and comments! I truly pray that we can help even more people in the process.

I have now added a new vlog section to this blog so you can check out the show right here. It will be a reinforcement of all that I am always writing about on Healing Tree, and another venue for us to interact and hold hands together on this great Healing Journey!

When I say “watching”, I’m talking about inner watching. I usually define watching for the purpose of emotional self-mastery as: Identifying without judgement.

Identifying what? Thoughts, feelings (including physical pain and emotions), and beliefs. It’s totally different than mentally examining or analyzing such things, because that would naturally involve a lot of judgement. It’s not easy to stop the judgement, because that’s what our minds are habituated to do. So, it requires getting out of the mind, out of the thoughts and ideas about myself, and into the feeling.

Now, most people have very strong beliefs that negative feelings are “bad” and positive feelings are “good,” so dropping into the feeling can be quite tricky. It’s almost instinctual to try to escape the feeling with some sort of avoiding mechanism, whether it’s just hopping right back into the mind about a feeling, or avoiding it altogether with entertainment, alcohol, food, friends, whatever. Or, some people just endlessly react to the feeling with more emotion and more pain, which often involves some kind of judgement and blame of self or others and now we are just heading further and further away from watching.

The problem is that we identify with our feelings too much. This may be conscious or unconscious, but it’s engrained in each of us and educated by generations. The bottom line is that we have lost our true identity and we keep wrongly believing that we are our thoughts, we are our emotions, and we are all of the information that we have accumulated inside from a lifetime of experience. This is precisely why watching is so important – we need to separate ourselves again and again and again from those false identities. We need to endlessly make space from them, so we can remind ourselves of who we really are and look again at ourselves, our circumstances and all of our issues with new eyes and new perspective. In order to not live our lives as slaves of our false inner programs, we must cultivate the ability to “watch” ourselves – to observe ourselves from a distance. Through this, we begin our road to freedom.

However, as hard as it is, feeling is a mandatory prerequisite for watching. If one cannot feel, one cannot watch. We need to feel everything, so that we can watch honestly, so that we can come to accept ourselves fully. It requires some courage. Courage to face the painful feeling head on. One needs a fierce determination for it and a wisdom that knows, “This feeling is not me, it’s just what I have inside.”

These days, I am personally challenging myself to face what I call, “the intolerable feeling.” It sounds scary, right? But actually the more I practice, the more I enjoy it! What do I need to be afraid of my own feelings for, anyway? No matter how old they are, how deep they feel, what kind of wounds they stir, how dark they may seem – they are not real. I am confident about this. I just have not yet mastered them all. Therefore, the deeper ones that I haven’t been able to take a complete look at yet, still bite me sometimes. And sometimes their bite is worse than others. But again, these are ghost bites. Old memories. Old beliefs. Wrong perceptions. They are not the truth of me. They do not speak of my true worth and value. And I’m pretty tired out from a lifetime of giving them such a power…. Aren’t you?

So, let’s do it. Let’s face the intolerable feeling. Once you get good at sitting in that uncomfortable place, you come to find that the dark clouds do eventually part. There is a clear and bright sun of truth behind them. In simplest terms, this brings a great sense of relief and joy and here’s that word again: FREEDOM.

Recovering our true worth and value is the key to solving so many of our issues. To do so, we must train ourselves to have the strength to feel our feelings accurately and watch them without judging them. We need to see them without reacting to them, face them without running away. I know it’s not easy. If it was, I wouldn’t be writing a blog post about it 😉 Don’t expect easy or comfortable! Overcoming oneself and developing self-mastership involves quite a bit of discomfort ….with so much reward at the end! It’s just like strengthening your muscles. It takes practice. Daily practice. Even hourly and moment to moment practice to stay aware, awake, and alert about oneself. Let’s catch our inner ghosts before they catch us 🙂 One tip I have is: Try not to be hard on yourself in the process! Keep a more enjoyable perspective such as, “Hm, this is an interesting thing that I do!” And have fun solving it through sinking in and getting really real with your feelings. Don’t identify yourself with them – they’re just feelings! They are not who you really are. If you need a reminder of who you really are, look up at the blue sky. Sit next to a tree. Listen to the flow of a mountain river.

We are nature. That knowing will become your vitamin, giving your Soul the strength to stand up again and again.

There is nothing to fear, let’s give it a try. If we fail, we’ll try again! Every moment is a new moment. Let’s cultivate our watching power.

As an adoptee, trust is a huge giant issue for me. It shows up in every single aspect of my life. I have come to discover “trust issues” rearing their ugly head with everything from myself, to others, to my body, to my environment, to the world.

In her most recent comment on Healing Tree, Yvonne posed the question, “How can I trust myself?” That’s a very good question, and not an easy one to answer. I have found that if you try so hard to trust yourself, it’s kind of like staring into a dark hole that just keeps appearing more and more hopeless and impossible, the more you look. The darkness can be enveloping. You cannot find the answer there. Instead, you just keep fighting with your feeling and the feeling keeps growing bigger.

The only thing that we can do in those moments is to use all of our strength to recognize that the darkness is not me. The hopelessness is not me. And the feeling of lack of trust is also not me. This means, it’s not the truth of me. In fact, it’s not the truth at all, it’s just a feeling that I have inside. It’s just a feeling. Feelings are like clouds. They come, they go. They get really black and fierce, then eventually they disperse, and the light of the sun is revealed again. The light of truth. If we are simply patient, if we give it time, if we recognize it for what it really is, the light will always be seen again.

Please recognize that it’s not that you don’t trust yourself, or others, or whatever the untrusting issue at hand may be. It’s just that you have a feeling of lack of trust inside of you. Again, this is just a feeling, this is not who you really are, nor does it have to be your reality. The reality is, you are a bright shining sun and the clouds of distrust are just covering you temporarily.

Try to feel it in your body. Get really familiar with the actual sensations of distrust. Calm your mind and steady your breathing as you examine and observe these sensations in your body. When you do that, you detach yourself from being lost in the stormy clouds, and now you are just observing them with some distance. You can take a good look at your feeling of distrust, and that is when you have made some separation from it. That is very important! It may even be just a momentary separation before you are sucked back into the the whirlwind of darkness that is the feeling of not trusting oneself and one’s surroundings. But, even that moment is powerful for you. Recognize and appreciate it. It’s from that moment that you are on the slow and steady path to gaining some degree of controllability and mastership over the debilitating feeling of self-doubt.

This has been my experience with it. In practicing this, it has lead to a reduced feeling of anxiety inside, less irrational fears, improved relationships with loved ones, more feeling of freedom and happiness, an empowered ability to make healthier choices, and a sense of maturity in overcoming the threatened child within.

And beyond all of that, it has helped me to connect again more quickly and more deeply with my soul – my true essence – which always brings a sense of healing and peace to my heart. It leaves me with a sense of “inner knowing” that there is the me inside who is always with me, always watching me and can never be injured by a lack of trust. In fact, it feels as if this true nature is trust itself, or at least it is a presence that is void of doubt. It is just Beingness.

The work that we have to do is to put in the effort to diligently practice making this separation, to increase the amount of time that we are able to feel our true, pure, original nature. Then we don’t have to try to trust ourselves anymore, because naturally we come to trust that we can handle any feeling, any stormy clouds that come our way. And that is enough.

In simple summary, don’t try to trust yourself. Try to become really aware of the sensations in your body when you are in self-doubt or any untrusting moment. Feel it. Separate from it. And slowly you will realize that the self who is able to do this, is a part of yourself that always has been and always will be existing in a place that is beyond the duality of trust and doubt.

Yvonne, I hope this is helpful for you 🙂