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The following exercises help create better communication between left and right sides of the brain by using the left and right hands at the same time. These can be difficult at first, so be patient and practice regularly.

Tap and Sweep:

01. Tap your right fist on the right side of your chest while your left hand sweeps up and down on the left side.

02. Now switch sides, your right hand sweeping and your left fist tapping.

03. See how fast you can switch back and forth

Itsy Bitsy Brainy:

01. Put your thumbs and index fingers together, as in the game “Itsy Bitsy Spider.” Your right index finger should be on your left thumb, and your left index finger on your right thumb.

02. Now, separate the bottom thumb and finger and swing them up over the top thumb and finger, touching them together again. Repeat this action, continuing to “walk” up 5 times.

03. Switch direction and begin to walk the fingers down.

04. Now, begin to walk up again, but this time switch to the middle finger. Walk up and down 5 times, just as before.

05. Continue the same action, switching between fingers. When you reach the pinkie, reverse and work back to the index finger.

A truly flexible brain is one that is open and ready to learn and does not avoid the difficult or unusual. The activities in this lesson may be difficult and frustrating at first, but the process of mastering them will build brain” connections that facilitate learning and understanding in many areas of life.

As you probably already know, the brain consists of two sides, the left hemisphere and the right hemisphere. One side or the other tends to be dominant, which accounts for left-and right-handedness. In fact, we not only tend to have a dominant hand, out also nave a dominant eye and foot. (See The Dominance Factor by Carla Hannaford to help determine dominance for yourself or your children.) This is a normal and natural thing, but it can leave the non-dominant side undeveloped and truncate the ability of the left and right sides to communicate. In other words, the brain may be left imbalanced in its development. So try some of these exercises to create more interaction between both sides of your child’s brain.

In addition, it helps to circulate oxygen and nutrients to the brain and stimulates the production of hormones that combat stress and depression.

Just as you guide your children to create healthy habits for nutrition and cleanliness while they are young, guide them also to make physical movement part of their healthy lifestyle. As you may know from your own personal experience, it can be difficult to establish a habit of regular exercise in adulthood.

If your child gains this habit now, it will be very firmly established in the actual circuitry of the brain, and he or she will naturally crave physical movement of all types, rather than avoid it as an unappealing chore.

The first section consists of a collection of basic stretching exercises for kids.

These yoga-like movements are designed to open up the body’s joints, to stretch and strengthen the muscular system, and to promote relaxation. Exercises of this type are wellsuited to brain development because they require the child to use a wide variety of muscles in unique combinations.

Any kind of exercise is good, but these are especially effective for creating a balanced and strong bodily structure while at the same time strengthening unity of the mind and body. And kids will become more aware of their own body as they gain flexibility and coordination. If you would like to adapt them to make them fun and appealing to your child, feel free to do so. The important thing is to move!

from the book ‘Power brain for kids’ by ilchi lee

Brain Education is especially appropriate for today’s children because it offers tools to cope with issues that are unique to the young generation.

Children today are sometimes referred to as “Generation M” because media dominate their lives in so many ways. Media technology, such as cable television and the Internet, provides a constant and unlimited flow of information.

Youngsters must choose which ideas to accept and which to reject. Their choices in this regard will affect their patterns of thinking about themselves and the world around them. The job of the educator and the parent is to help guide children in making these important decisions, which is a difficult task in a media culture more interested in selling jeans and cola than in creating well-rounded, confident individuals.

Brain Education, in its essence, offers simple tools that provide children with the power to choose and use information more effectively.

from ‘Power brain for kids’ book by ilchi lee

The process of Brain Education is divided into five steps. As you progress through the twelve lessons, you and your child will move naturally through these five steps. However, perfecting any one of the steps is a lifelong journey, and the skills gained in earlier steps will continue to be utilized in later steps. Throughout the Brain Education five steps, about which you can ask questions using Ask Ilchi Lee, the creator of Brain Education, You will notice that most of the lessons in this blog focus on the first and second steps, which are most appropriate for children and beginning practitioners.

Step 1

Brain sensitizing: Participants become more aware of the brain and its functions. This step may include some basic understanding of brain structure, but more importantly, it creates awareness of the brain as the organ of all perception, especially sensory perception. Furthermore, practitioners can reawaken sensory perception that may have become dulled through habit or environmental overstimulation. The sensitizing process begins with relaxation of body and mind through stretching and breathing exercises. This step primarily corresponds to Lesson 1-3.

Ilchi Lee suggests in his book Brain Wave Vibration on a wide-benefit brain

The best thing you can do to bring a sense of hope to your life is to discover a sense of purpose. But how can you know your real purpose? Maybe you have searched for that for thirty or forty years and have never found the answer.

I cannot answer that question exactly for you because it is ultimately up to you. What I do know is that whatever your mission in life, you will be of great service to humanity. I believe that every person has a great internal desire to find a harmonious way of living on the planet and to contribute something of value to the world. In Korean we call this the Hong-ik ideal, which refers to the desire to be beneficial, not just to yourself but to all of humanity.

This sort of mind-set can be a great source of continual hope in your life. People who have a clear sense of purpose are never hopeless because they always know they can make a difference, even if just one step at a time.

There is a natural progression to life that unfortunately many of us have stepped away from. It is like many of us are caterpillars who have decided not to become butterflies. Or maybe we have just forgotten that we are able to become butterflies.

Ilchi Lee says in his book Brain Wave Vibration

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 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. To determine your information nutrition level, ask yourself three basic questions.

Ilchi Lee has taught me a lot about the relationship between the brain and information. To me, it is a very impressive to say “Think of information as food for your brain.” Like fast food, you can eat lots of information cheap everyday. That does not mean that the information has high quality. We should care about the information we take, as much as we do about the food we eat.

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Brain Education is especially apporpriate for today’s children because it offers tools to cope with issues that are unique to the young generation. Children today are sometimes referred to as “Generation M” because media dominate their lives in so many ways. Media technology, such as cable television and the Internet, provides a constant and unlimited flow of information. Youngsters must choose which ideas to accept and which to reject. Their choices in this regard will affect their patterns of thinking about themselves and the world around them. The job of the educator and the parent is to help guide children in making these important decisions, which is a difficult task in a media culture more interested in selling jeans and cola than in creating well-rounded, confident individuals. Brain Education, in its essence, offers simple tools that provide children with the power to choose and use information more effectively.

The number of academic articles on this topic is staggering, offering research on almost every possible topic, from learning disabilities to gender differences to brain development. The underlying message of all this research is very simple: to understand the child’s brain is to understand the child.

Ilchi Lee developed the Brain Education method in South Korea in the 1980s as an updating of traditional Korean mind-body health training systems. The principles and practices of the method were then combined with knowledge about the brain gained from neuroscience, psychology, and other fields. Its essential goal, however, remains very straightforward and practical — the physical, emotional, social, and academic betterment of human beings. If you have any question about Brain Education, you can use Ask Ilchi Lee function of Lee’s main website.

Brain Education is currently thriving in hundreds of schools in Korea, and it has recently been successfully introduced in several K-8 schools in the United States. BE curriculum has been especially successful in teaching the English language to Korean schoolchildren in after-school programs, allowing kids to quickly and easily absorb a language very different from their own. Also the Korean Institute of Brain Science has hosted three International Brain HSP Olympiads, in which BE-trained children and adults have demonstrated a wide range of advanced mental skills, including information processing, memory, and even extrasensory ability.