Ilchi Lee

Its final form is an expression of its true nature — its divinity. But in order for this true nature to come out from the inside and shine brightly, the catterpillar has to overcome many challenges and glean lessons from them. Its instinctive knowledge of its final beautiful form helps it to keep going despite the difficult process. I think we all have this instinctive knowledge inside that gives us hope and guides us to our own completion.

The beginning of the song (translated lyrics below) speaks to our innate sense of purpose, hope, and possibility. Please enjoy the English version recording below, and let me know what you think.

"Looking down this dark road
A larva I'm all alone,
Crawling, praying to be something new.
Breaking through my scars to survive,
a pupa asleep alone,
Resting, waiting for my wounds to heal.
Snowy winter covers the night,
but I hold onto dreams inside.
When the spring breeze offers the light,
then you know it's my time to rise, and fly!"

Ilchi Lee, in his book Power Brain Kids, writes: “We say, ‘This makes me happy’ or ‘That makes me mad,’ but in reality, emotions come from within ourselves, from inside our brain.” We need to master our emotions to take full ownership of our brain.

Children can change from one emotional state to another a lot quicker than teenagers or adults. By learning to identify these emotions, it will be easier for them to let go of emotional states as they gain the skills to cope.

As a parent, you need to let your child experience, express and talk about any emotion that he or she may be feeling or witnessing. It is your job to communicate with your children on the meaning associated with these particular feelings. Otherwise it’s easy for children to confuse their emotions. For example, explain that their faces and inside feelings are clues to their emotions.

Lee suggests the following exercise, happy face/angry face, to introduce the notion that your children can choose which emotions they feel. It will also help drain your child of past negative emotion.

From Ilchi Lee (Excerpted from Power Brain Kids):

• Remember a time when you felt very angry or unhappy. Tell about that time, and then blow up a balloon, imagining that all the anger is going into the balloon.

• Tie up your “angry” balloon and draw an unhappy face on it with a permanent felt-tip marker.

• Now remember a time when you were very happy. Blow the happiness into a second balloon.

• Tie the “happy” balloon. Using the marker, draw a happy face on the balloon.

• How does each balloon make you feel when you look at it? Pop the one you least prefer.

The three main characteristics of autism are impaired social skills, repetitive behavior and problems with language and communication. Autism is often called autism spectrum disorder, due to the many degrees of autism, which range from high functioning (Asperger’s syndrome) to lower functioning (Angelman syndrome).

Recently, scientists developed a mouse model to help shed light on the uncertainties that autism carries. A study using the mice model focused on a missing gabrb3 gene, a protein important in normal brain development and adult brain function, in its mice subjects. The mice missing the gabrb3 gene were put through a series of tests to test their social and exploratory competence. According to Dr. Timothy DeLorey, neuroscientist and lead author of the study, the normal mice were, “trying to make friends.” This wasn’t the case with the test mice missing the gabrb3 gene. They showed characteristics of autism found in humans.

While the results of the study aren’t groundbreaking, they are ground moving, and with a disorder that afflicts 1 in 150, movement is improvement.