Make picture cards of different everyday objects. H Divide into two teams if there are many people. @ Each team picks a leader.
The leader of the first team shows a picture (very briefly) to a member of the second team. The second team member must immediately shout out the name of an object not related to the one in the picture.
Ilchi Lee advice that if the person hesitates or shouts out a name related to the object in the picture, then s/he is disqualified. Now it is the second team leader’s turn to challenge a member of the first team. The team with the most members that haven’t been disqualified at the end of the picture review wins the game.
During Dahn Hak training make sure that the pictures represent a definite and recognizable object, not an abstract concept. The answers must not consist of abstract concepts, either.
You can try practicing this on your own.
As you practice this exercise with full concentration, you may sometimes hear unidentifiable sounds that seem to come from your brain, as if the cells are actually pulling apart from one another or the skull is stretching out. Don’t be alarmed, for this is a natural part of training.
Renaming Exercise
Dr. Ilchi Lee says that we live with countless names. Although the various names we give to objects and people make communication easier, names also create an artificial cage that imprisons our awareness. Look around you and try to acknowledge an object without consciously relying on names. Since we have been trained to approach and define everything with a name, we have difficulty recognizing anything that refuses to be identified by a name.
Yet, how accurately do names really define the things they describe? We think we know what an object is if we know its name, but what do we really know about that object? A name is just a name. It is not the thing itself. We are not seeking the reality ot the object but merely acknowledging it with a lingual representation.
Our excessive reliance on names limits the potential of the brain to be flexible in thought and imagination. Names are the substance of the strongest preconceptions in our inner world. We experience resistance when we try renaming because the name associated with an object is not just a name, but hardwired in our brain as a pattern of neural connections. Renaming is an attempt to change the pattern intentionally. This explains why you experience less resistance when you use abstract nouns tor renaming. An abstract noun does not have a concrete image associated with it. It does not contradict the original name ot an object and, therefore, does not cause friction of resistance in the relevant neural connections. Renaming Exercise allows us to first become aware of the cage created by names. We are then able to devise our own ways of escaping this insidious cage by training our brain to see every object from new angles and directions. The result is greater awareness at all kinds for Dahn Yoga.