This was originally posted on March 29. I took it down because I got skeered, but am now reposting unabashedly!
Well, making progress in my recently declared war on anxiety & lack of inner peace anyway. I tried some meditating and it worked. A lot. And now I don't like meditating - brought a virtual emotional tsunami to my brain. For a moment, I thought I might drown! It was brought up that maybe I should try GUIDED meditation as I apparently have no problem with "getting there", but more a problem of defining where "there" should be...
Next Monday, I will attempt my first guided meditation session and see how it fares. B has been going to this session for a while now & is quite pleased with it. From what I gather, there is someone leading the group & he gives you a (meditation) path to follow and walks you down it so, hopefully, I shouldn't get lost in the flood of abandoned childhood memories.
Also, at massage last night, my masseuse gifted me a set of meditation CDs - something called the Silva method. I'd never heard of it, but she assured me it was fantastic. When I got home, Yobo took a look, rolled his eyes, said something about Silva being a Jung-ian, then announced that he wouldn't poo-poo on this train and was shutting his mouth.
At school, I am working on an exercise to get to know me better. I was given a stack of cards with words printed on them & was instructed to not think about it, just tape each card under a column, headers being: Korean, Korean-American, and American. The exercise, I was assured, would help me evaluate my values and help me to understand from where my values stemmed. I went through about 20 cards, supposed to do some more tonight. In the little bit we've worked out so far, it appears that my image of Korean values may be slightly negative... which maybe I already knew & wanted to work on, which is probably why I agreed to this exercise to begin with.
Many of my "Korean experiences" left a bad taste in my mouth, but I was also fairly isolated in what Koreans I had access to - only the ones at mema's behest and most of them were at her church (which is also a major source of my discontent with organized religion). I never got a clear picture of what it meant to be Korean as a little person and have found over time that, yes, just like anything else, I need to open myself to knowledge beyond my experience. Mema's church taught me that Koreans are racist (I'm only half, which makes me not whole, which makes me not a real person), women are scary (especially to maturing girls), men are drunks (sometimes mean ones) beaten into submission (by their women), and I will never be good enough. For anything. And nothing means anything unless a Korean told you. And money trumps everything. Everything. Except maybe saving face. But really, everything, because enough money can buy your face a bit of saving. I wouldn't say I was ashamed to be Korean, but more that I wasn't exactly proud of it and felt no desire to explore it. And that is so sad and the first time I have ever actually written/typed that out.
But the birth of the Moose had me cracking open a door I'd locked a long time. While she's only a quarter Korean, it's important for her to know & understand her heritage. I had a very fragmented, misinterpreted interpretation of what it is to be Korean. She should know that there is much more to Korea that what her Nana can explain with any clarity. I cracked open the door almost 2 years ago, so hopefully things have aired out. It's pretty dusty in here, time to get to work!
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