During my time at The Taoist Institute, I was fortunate enough to be able to spend some time with Yo Hoon Kim. Sifu arranged for workshops with him at the school and I was able to travel up to his cabin in the mountains to sit with him for a while. I also had the good fortune to have lunch with Yo Hoon. And strangely enough, that’s where I was able to ask him a couple of questions that cleared up quite a few things for me.
A lot of the workshops consisted of Yo Hoon asking simple questions and receiving complicated answers. He would usually start with asking what we did that morning when we woke up. Was this morning different than yesterday? Will tomorrow be different than today? Then we would do “experiments”.
He would often challenge us to try to find the line between this moment and the last or this moment and the next. Could we witness the moment when the present moment became the next moment? All of this was to remind us that the past is gone and the future is a “fantasy” and that the only true state of being is the present moment. In fact, according to Yo Hoon, living in the present moment is the true definition of immortality.
One of the best definitions that I’ve heard for meditation is “active rest”. Yo Hoon would talk about meditation as the time world and the timeless world coming together. From what I could gather from the time I spent with him, it appeared that Yo Hoon was always in this state. And if his mind became agitated, he would take a moment to center himself back in the present moment.
Meeting him and speaking with him felt like looking in a mirror. And let me tell you… it was uncomfortable for me at first. I didn’t have a very good opinion of myself when I first met Yo Hoon Kim. He was just so willing to be in that moment with you and in a way he would draw you into the present moment. It felt like what I imagine it would feel like to meet a dragon. I’ve never before or since met a person that had so clearly comes to terms with their own life. When asked if he ever got bored living up in the mountains by himself, Yo Hoon answered, “Oh, no. I’m not boring.”
An aspect of the “present moment” had been bothering me for quite some time during all of this and I finally had a chance to ask Yo Hoon about it in a somewhat coherent way. He had often spoken about the concept of “being of two minds”. One mind in the past and one in the present or one mind in the future and one in the present. He talked about things that might anchor our mind in a moment in the past or anticipating a moment in the future.
When something happens, we may have an honest human emotional response. In that moment, that response and feeling is real. Any moment after that is a fantasy engineered by our brains to relive/replay that moment. And the more emotionally impactful the moment is, the more likely we are to keep ourselves in this infinite loop of “being of two minds”.
This is where I was. I was stuck in the loop and I couldn’t get out. I mentioned to Yo Hoon that I felt like I understood what he meant about the present moment but that I felt like I was constantly fighting with my emotions. I couldn’t let them go. I was afraid of being overwhelmed by them. And he said something to the effect of, “You can’t fight. You have to let the emotions fully express themselves. Imagine you are in a bathtub. Now imagine the emotion growing inside the water. If the emotion still needs to grow, imagine filling the bathtub with water until the emotion can fully express itself. After that, it will lose its power and you will be able to return to the present moment.”
And when I finally felt brave enough to try this seemingly impossible task, I prepared for a tidal wave of emotion to hit me. I was astonished to find out that the raw emotion that had trapped me in the past didn’t drown me like a tidal wave, it lapped over my ankles like it was nothing. Because it was nothing. It was a fantasy! And not only did my mind suddenly relocate to the present moment, I could feel all the energy I had been pouring into holding everything back return to me. I felt absolutely reborn. Sijo Carl Totton had helped me set up the dominoes but it was Yo Hoon that came in and knocked them over.
I highly recommend that you listen to Yo Hoon Kim in the following videos. Most of us would characterize him as a Zen master. He would say that he is a helper. And he would say that the first time you meet him, he might teach you something but that the second time you meet him, you would just be friends. I feel honored to be his friend.
Yo Hoon Kim
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Part 2 of 4
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Part 4 of 4