by Gadhi Asan
Before I discovered this meditation, I really felt like I had reached the end of my rope. I felt like there was always a big, heavy stone in my chest and the pain was so bad that I wasn’t sleeping well. It was stress. I was barely living, carrying the everyday stress and difficulties of my life. Then, I found this meditation. At that time, I started this study sincerely with the intention of getting even a little relief. Even though I have never practiced meditation, this method, made by Woo Myung, was very simple and fun to do.
One of the things about this study that I enjoyed was that I could look back on myself. Since I was a child, I had so much inferiority that I always hated losing to others. My tendency was to focus on winning whenever I competed with others. This made my life very lonely because I was always uncomfortable around other people. And other people were uncomfortable around me. If something happened in my life that I didn’t want to happen, I became stressed. I only felt peace when everything was done the way I wanted and I got my intended result. I was a very self-centered and selfish person who wanted God’s world to bend to my liking.
I once heard this story about salmon. Salmon swim against the flow of the river and fight their way through the strong currents for miles to ultimately get to a calm pool of water where they breed and then die soon after. I don’t know why they die. Maybe it’s because they used all of their life’s energy to fight the strong flow of the river’s current. Anyway, after they mate, they soon die. Many other fish swim with the current and they do not die; only salmon do this. When I first heard this story, I saw myself. I realized that I had always lived my own way and fought against nature’s flow in the world.
As I continued to meditate, I kept coming back to the term “sun-ri” which means “nature’s flow.” Nature’s flow literally means following the law of the world. Accepting the world as it is and not trying to ‘swim against the current.’ Humans were put on this earth to live according to the will of the world. But, only human beings violate the law of nature’s flow and create an existence in their mind called the “self.” We are living in a false world that our self has made and we are not living in the real world. No matter how I want to live, the world is driven by nature’s flow. My life became hell because I couldn’t accept the world as it is and I was constantly trying to live according to my own world. This is what caused me so much stress and pain.
I always blamed everybody else and the world when things didn’t go my way. If something I was doing didn’t work out as expected, I would direct my anger towards my family or others and never once looked at myself. I just lived with my resentment. My health was getting worse because of my constant stress. I thought, if I continued in this mindset, there would be a great possibility that I could lose my loved ones. I could get sick from stress and die.
This is why I’m so grateful to this meditation and the founder of this meditation. This is a precious meditation practice that really saved my life. Through this meditation, I learned nature’s flow. I’m not perfect at accepting the world as it is, but I practice giving up how I want things to be and just let the world move according to nature. My practice now is to find humility and live according to the will of the world.
To me, there’s nothing better than this meditation. It’s something that everyone should do. I always tried to beat the world and it was my habit to be irritable and resentful if things didn’t go my way. Now, I feel so much gratitude – naturally – whenever my self starts to rebel because I can see how I am. Once I found that the problem was in me, I can change. If I never saw this problem, I would never have been able to change.
I will meditate today and everyday to fight with my self. I won’t give up until the day my old thought patterns and habits disappear and I can know the mind of the world and live according to the will of the world. I know now that everything is my fault. I’m so grateful for this study and I hope that everyone can have a chance to do this meditation and see for themselves. The problem is not everything and everybody else. The problem is inside of me and my self. The world is already complete. Even knowing just this much gives me hope.
