BELLY BUTTON

Ilchi Lee (2016). Belly Button Healing: 

                            Unlocking Your Second Brain for a Healthy Life    

Lee is a prolific author who advocates world peace and draws from traditional Korean medicine, yoga, martial arts, and meditation. Some criticize his work as pseudoscience, but I've found plenty of science cited to support the general ideas in two of his books...however, i see no "clinical trials" of his belly button method in this book. 

nonetheless, my attitude toward these things is "try it and see"--the only research that ultimately counts is the one you do on yourself (and we know from the placebo--mind-body--research, that if you believe in the teacher and the method, there's a 30-some percent chance that the method will work for you).

something as simple as pressing on your belly button (through the clothes with moderate pressure) with the index and middle finger of both hands in a rhythmic and fairly rapid fashion for 300 repetitions 3 times a day is purported to: increase blood circulation, increase body temperature, improve digestion and elimination, relieve tension and joint pain, increase immunity, increase clarity of mind and concentration, relax the body and mind, increase the skin's luster and smoothness, and help one feel centered...quite a list of claims, AND consider some of the science:

30-40% of our blood volume is in the abdominal organs

the enteric nervous system (from mouth to anus) has its own "gut brain" that can operate independently from the brain

50% of dopamine and 90% of seretonin is created in the gut

over 1k species of micro organisms live in the gut


give the belly button some rhythmic up and down action for a few minutes, then relax, focus on the belly, body, and breath...how do you feel? 





Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Image
SPIRITUAL SOLUTIONS Wayne Dyer (2003). There's a Spiritual Solution to Every Problem. Dyer earned a Doctorate of Education in Guidance and Counseling, and is a prolific author. His first book that i read in the 1970's, Your Erroneous Zones, profoundly influenced my thinking as a teen.  The theme of this book is that there is a spiritual solution to every problem, that problems are illusions created in the mind by incorrect thinking, and that the solution to these mental problems is to change our thinking in light of the spirit (defined as an energy/intelligence that is the source of all life, i.e., God). Some might call this "spiritual bypassing," ignoring the body in favor of the mind and spirit. The first half of the book is lessons from Patanjali's Yoga Sutras. Dyer suggests that low frequency is associated with the "negative" and faster frequency with the "positive" [for me, at least musically, lower frequencies don't imply negative emo...
Read more
Image
TURN ON Timothy Leary (1965, 1999). Turn On, Tune In, Drop Out Leary was a University Professor at Harvard who is best know for his experiments with LSD. The book is part lectures, part interviews, and part essays. Given all the media hype about Leary, i was surprised at how much common sense i encountered, and how much he speaks to learning, hope, and love.  He begins with a chapter on how to start your own religion (to invoke the rights of the first amendment in US law) with family and friends, a tribe of people living together in community with their own laws...a place where sacrament is consumed (it need not be LSD, but anything that is spiritually meaningful to the community, something that binds the community together in ceremony)...a place preferably in nature where one feels protected and nurtured.  The BIG ADVICE is to drop out of society's robot world/mind, and turn on to God/Goddess (the Spirit), nature, and the body and mind, and tune in (dropping back into socie...
Read more
Image
BODY WISDOM  Therese Bertherat (1989).  The body has its reasons: Self-awareness                                                           through conscious movement.  Berherat takes us on a personal journey in learning body wisdom /awareness using Ehrenfred's method which is radically different than the medical model/method she learned at University. The story unfolds as "sessions" of practices, and the end of the book reveals several "preliminaries" on how to cultivate body wisdom. Among the many practical lessons are:      pause after exhaling to let the body use oxygen before inhaling again--this allows the              body to rest/relax with every breath.      because all parts of the body are integrated, working with one par...
Read more