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Changing a Nation with Brain Education

Salvador Sánchez Cerén and Ilchi Lee

On September 12, Body & Brain Yoga Tai Chi founder Ilchi Lee was honored by the president of El Salvador with the José Simeón Cañas Slave Liberator Order at the El Salvador Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The award comes after seven years of work by the International Brain Education Association Foundation to implement Lee’s holistic mind-body training program known as Brain Education in the country’s public schools.

           El Salvador has been suffering from gang and drug violence for decades. The schools often look like prisons with armed guards and bars on the windows. Lee says, “However, as a result of implementing this training over the years, these schools and the communities they influence have become places where people work together in harmony and where they are not as afraid to come to school.”

      In 2011, El Salvador’s ambassador to the United Nations learned of Brain Education and began implementing it in a single school. Now, Brain Education is taught in more than 1,200 public schools in El Salvador, which is approximately 25 percent of the country’s total. This has brought camaraderie into the communities and peace back into the nation.

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