LIGHTENING MY ALLOSTATIC LOAD

I’ve been here for 5 weeks now, and feeling more at home than ever. Every time I step out of my building, whether I’m going to class, to the neighborhood bathhouse, or to the subway station, I feel a sense of joy and gratitude for being here.

I also feel a sense of belonging, which strikes me as odd because Korea has not been my home for 45 years, my Korean is still quite rough, and I’m deprived of communication privileges I take for granted in the States. In addition, Seoul is stressful and crowded, and I’m suffering from nature deficit disorder, because of the endless concrete. My body is in trauma mode and a high state of inflammation from the strain of adjustment. And visibly, I am quite different from the fashion-conscious residents in their trendy clothes and dyed, permed hair. Heteropatriarchy shapes society, which, on the whole, is very homogeneous compared to the diversity of the States.

Culturally I feel out of step, resisting the pressure to act and look in keeping with women of my age. Korea ranks 111 out of 136 nations in gender equity. This shows up as pressure on young women to be beautiful, thin, and sexy; strong emphasis on marriage; rampant objectification (including internalized objectification) of women; disparities in jobs and salaries, and much more.

Korean social life is largely defined by age, possibly more than class. People are confused because my lifestyle doesn’t fit my age. In the States, I could easily interact and be close friends with folks from their 20s to 60s and beyond. Here, same age-peers are important, and young folks don’t feel comfortable with older folks around, because of institutionalized Confucianist hierarchy. While I feel respected as an older woman, I also feel somewhat limited. I’m eager to go out dancing, yet many clubs outright reject people beyond their 20s. What’s a Badass Yoga Nun to do?

Perhaps the hardest aspect of life in Korea is the off-the-charts consumerism, even beyond what we see in the States. People shop their asses off and you can’t go anywhere, even on a nature hike, without braving a phalanx of stores and vendors. Seoul is wall-to-wall shopping for miles on end and for several stories up. Like Americans, Koreans go into serious debt to keep up with the latest phones, clothes, and what-not.

I could go on and on about the ways I feel out of place, but really this essay is about my love affair with Korea. If there is so much about 21^st century Seoul that troubles me, why do I feel so comfortable here?

It’s a deep in the bones (and genes) thing, I guess. It’s the land of my ancestors, where I was conceived and born. I think of my mother encased in my grandmother’s womb, and her fetal self as my ovum-self formed in her tiny ovaries. I picture my grandmother in 1936, my mother’s birth year, and what she might have been experiencing during the pregnancy, and how that penetrated into the formation of my mother’s ova. I wonder what of my grandmother I carry now, as I walk through the city where she lived, up and down the hills of Seoul.

As I reflect on why I love it here so much, I realize how much lighter my allostatic load  is here than in the States. In Detroit, living in a majority Black community, I may be able to avoid a portion of the daily ravages of global white supremacy, but I am still routinely “othered,” regarded as exotic and alien, and not quite belonging.

As odd as I am here, I am not the other here in Korea. On the contrary, the lady in the bathhouse calls me “unni,” and the young men in my Korean class call me “noona,” both terms for big sister. Folks even ask me for directions on occasion, which always surprises me since I feel so confused so much of the time. Even though I often feel like a stranger, I’m not treated as such. I blend in—what a concept!

Only now do I realize how stressful it felt to be othered in the USA nearly my whole life. Only now do I feel in my bones what it must’ve been like for my parents, who died early from auto-immune dysfunctions—largely aggravated by stress.

This week, as part of my reindigenizing project, I started seeing a traditional Korean doctor for acupuncture several times a week now. Even though my doc is only a little older than my children, I feel I am reconnecting with my father’s father, a traditional Korean doctor, whereas his son took the Western route as a physician and physiologist.

In a subway station on the way to an acupuncture treatement, I came across this poem:

가족

같은 각도의 입꼬리가 올라가고

같은 염분 기의 눈물을 흘리고

같은 색깔의 방귀를 뀌는

우리는

가족이다

~황성아

FAMILY

the corners of our lips lift at the same angle

we shed the same salty tears

we fart the same color

we are 
family

~Hwang Seong-Ah

Is this the first time in my life that I feel a sense of home, and a kinship that transcends difference? Perhaps. Meanwhile, I am enjoying the lighter load on my shoulders, and re-learning how to breathe.

PARTY AT THE BACK OF THE BUS

Dismantling personal privilege is like reaching the front of the line, but stepping out to move to the back or leave the line entirely. You do this because you realize that there’s a whole slew of folks at the back of the line who will never make it to the front because of the restrictions that define the line. You realize the queue, regardless of its superficial democracy, is inevitably unjust and based on inequality and hierarchy.

What good does it do, one could argue, to leave the line when you were so close to getting your turn, taking that power, and directing it toward whatever you choose?

But you leave the line because you cannot stomach it, cannot bear to be part of a system so manipulative and oppressive. Whatever power and privilege you would accrue would be tainted with complicity, and the price your soul would pay for that would be too high.

Or—at the risk of employing a highly charged racial trope—dismantling personal privilege is like being at the front of the bus because that’s where you have been placed, based on education, class, race, gender, sexuality, nationality, age, etc. You start feeling uncomfortable as you realize this. You walk to the back of the bus, and see that there’s a whole different culture based on a different set of values back here. One that is based more on cooperation than competition, more about creativity than productivity, more about the community than the individual.

For me, leaving Milwaukee, my home of 25 years, and more so, leaving the middle class lifestyle, was a decision to leave the front of the line, front of the bus, and willfully move to the back. Even as I experienced the severe disadvantages of being a woman of color in a heteropatriarchal white supremacy, I still enjoyed many benefits based on class and education. Living in the same city for so long as an artist/activist/teacher, I enjoyed abundant social, cultural, artistic, and political capital, and while I was married, economic capital as well. Because of my various networks, I could get around the city even with my eyes closed and hands tied.

Moving to Detroit was like moving to the back of the bus, while coming to realize, in true Detroit style, there’s a party back there! And it’s a much more exciting party than what’s happening in the stodgy, privileged, front of the bus. That is, what’s happening on Field Street—Field Street Neighborhood Association, the new community garden, New Work Field Street Collective, a prospective women’s collective, the Boggs Center—is much more interesting than anything Downtown or “Midtown.” I don’t have the comfort of my extensive Milwaukee connections, but I am gradually earning trust and developing abiding friendships. I moved to Detroit to be a learner more than a teacher, to embrace vulnerability, and learn how to live more sustainably and interdependently.

Moving to Korea is yet another step in dismantling personal privilege. Even more than in Detroit, I am truly nobody here, Bob Dylan’s “a complete unknown.” To the casual observer in this sprawling, crowded metropolis, I’m a confusing, androgynous mess. I look Korean, but why do I dress in such ratty clothes? No make-up, no bra, and so rude to have all that messy undyed white hair. What’s with those weird glasses, and oh my God, is that a tattoo? Either I get a cold shoulder, or sometimes, outright looks of disapproval.

What’s more, when I open my mouth to speak my broken Korean, I confirm my outsider status. If I was white and young and pert, I would be forgiven, and college students would approach me to practice their English. But a 50-something American ajumma? WTF? No one seeks me out, and it’s been difficult to make friends.

Indulge me in one more analogy: dismantling personal privilege is like learning to do a yoga asana not from your strength, but from your weakness. That is, instead of relying on the muscles that are always over-performing, to learn how to hold a pose from the underemployed, less conscious places in the body. For instance, in Tadasana, mountain pose, can you release the grip of the strong gastrocnemius (calf) muscles, and instead learn to employ the deeper soleus muscles that lie under the prominent gastrocs? Can you use yoga to awaken the unconscious, less intelligent parts of the body, rather than simply reinforce established movement patterns?

If I wanted to, I could spend every single day in Seoul with English-speaking expats. Facebook and Meetup teem with groups filled with English-speaking film buffs, musicians, foodies, dancers, literati, and every other interest you can imagine. You know—my people. But that’s not why I came here. I didn’t come here to speak English and recreate my American life. I came to learn, to reindigenize myself, and immerse myself in native language and culture.

What this means is that, at least for the time being while I am still learning the language, I am totally at the back of the bus, the end of the line, the bottom of the social ladder. Because I can’t express myself with any complexity or engage in in-depth conversation, I’m relegated to the periphery.

Korea doesn’t embrace difference, and Seoul in particular presents many difficulties for differently-abled folks of any type. At school the other day I saw a woman in a wheelchair, the first I had seen ever on campus. I watched as folks poured out of the elevator and another group poured in. The woman in the chair was left out. No one made space for her, and no one gave up their spot in the elevator for her. Even being physically large creates problems because of the density of the city, not to mention the extreme cultural bias and fat-phobia.

But I am slowly finding the “party at the back of the bus” here in Korea.  This weekend Jung-In and I are visiting an alternative community called 빈집, Empty House. In Detroit style, a group came and began occupying some vacant houses, and eventually created a community in Seoul. Now they have about 40 low and moderate-income people living there, a café, and a guesthouse where we are staying for 2000 won/night ($2).

Last weekend I went to the courthouse on Jeju Island where a group of activists received their sentences for civil disobedience, for protesting the militarization of Gangjeong village. Despite the somber occasion, I enjoyed sitting with the motley crew of down-to-earth cultural and political creatives.

My people are everywhere, and as always, occupy the fringes with flair, passion, creativity, vitality, and intelligence. Meanwhile, I toil away with my stack of vocabulary words, my clumsy tongue, my willingness to act the fool and be an object of disapproval, to be at the back of the bus where I can see all the dynamics and goings-on, and to be an open channel for whatever learning I can humbly absorb.

Hey, friends, pray for me. And join me in dismantling whatever privileges you have that depend on systemic oppression, while creating a more sustainable life for yourself and others. What other analogies can you offer?

In love and struggle,

Sister Gwi-Seok

The Yoga of Crying

My asthma has not been this severe since 2003, when my body went into a delayed state of inflammation 2 years after my mother died. Anyone less stubborn than me would have checked themselves into a hospital and gone on steroids. Lucky for me (or stupidly) I am too imbued with the Korean spirit of “화이팅!” to give in to big pharma. I know from experience that short term solutions often exacerbate conditions and create long term harm.

I also trust my body enough to know that eliminating current symptoms is not addressing deeper soul issues that my body is communicating to me. So almost nightly I have been breathing my way through wheezing episodes using a mix of Buteyko methods, pranayama, asana, and acupressure points. I have cut out gluten, sugar, and cow’s milk from my diet, I’ve been spending more time in Sirsasana and Sarvangasana, and everything else I can think of. 

One night, unable to sleep because of spasming bronchioles, wondering if I had left any stone unturned, I did an internet search on “cure asthma.” One story caught my eye. The writer described going to a kinesiologist who told them the asthma was unprocessed grief from losing their father as an infant. The kinesiologist moved the energy around, the client went home and cried for 3 hours. After this cleansing, they experienced a total cure from asthma.

As soon as I read this post, I felt like crying. So as not to wake or disturb my sleeping roommate, I went into the bathroom, often the best place to cry, and the tears came quickly. What brought on the tears? One grief leads to another. I thought about my aging mentor on their deathbed, I thought about BKS Iyengar whose death came at a time when I did not have the space to fully grieve. Images and memories of my mother and father arose. I pictured myself as an infant separated from my family. I thought about the Korean movie I had recently seen in which families were divided by emerging superpowers, where sons were pitted against each other. I cried over the 300 children killed in the Sewol ferry catastrophe, and their grieving parents. So much to cry about.

After several minutes I realized my breathing had returned to normal, and that the act of crying had shifted the inflammation in my lungs to my eyes and nose, both profusely watering, and that my lungs had become quiet. I went to bed and slept deeply.

In previous posts, I’ve described the strong emotions that come up for me each day here in Korea. I realized I have not been giving myself enough time to really feel what I feel. Thus I have begun a conscious practice of daily “crying meditation.” I make the time once a day or more to cry for at least 5 minutes. I close the windows so my neighbors don’t worry about me. I choose a time when I am alone, because when I am engaged with others, I am usually more interested in our conversation and our sharing rather than sitting in my sadness, personal and collective.

Once I settle into the feeling of grief, the tears come, sometimes quickly, and other times with reluctance. “Laughter yoga” is popular these days, but maybe we also need a yoga of crying. Like laughing yoga, I sometimes have to “fake it” at first, going through the motions of crying in a way that feels like acting, but within a minute the actor’s tears become sincere tears. I cry for myself, I cry for my family and friends, I cry for the two nations I belong to. I cry for generations. I channel the grief of Mother Earth, the stars exploding and being created anew. 

As I cry, the inflammation moves upward and outward, my heart center becomes brighter and clearer.  I am “화이팅!” and I am healing.

Jindo Crew, Resilience, and Further Opening

Abandonment pounds through the pulse of Korea. Separated families, orphans, missing spouses, abductions, common during wartime. But after war, during the economic boom, the pattern of abandonment continues. “Goose daddies” whose wives and children fly away to the USA for education, women coerced or betrayed into giving up their children for adoption, overworked parents who rarely see their children, and the myriad of addictions that devastate relationships.

My own pre-verbal pattern of abandonment is triggered here. I didn’t think anything special of the fact that my parents left me for 6 months when I was an infant. I thought it was normal. My father, always devoted completely to his profession as a scientist, took my mom and oldest brother, age 4, to Rochester, NY, in 1964, leaving me and my brother, age 2, with my grandmother. This is so common in Korea it’s hardly worth mentioning.

Not until I had children of my own did I re-think this event. Not until I mothered, breastfed, and bonded with my own babies did I realize how wrenching an extended separation could be. I had a hard enough time leaving my infant for 2 hours to go to an appointment, much less 6 months. What did my mother feel as she left her infant and toddler behind to accompany her husband? What kind of withdrawal must my brother and I have gone through as our bonds with our primary caregiver, our father, and our brother, were severed? Luckily we knew our grandmother well. Nevertheless the role of the primary provider, our mother, is unique, and elicits specific hormonal and neurological responses.

I know that infancy abandonment has affected me in many ways, even if I cannot always recognize or articulate them. In my body, I am experiencing Korea heavily in my heart. Daily I break myself open to both joy and sorrow, to both laughter and tears.

At the same time, my elderly friend and mentor in Detroit is ailing. I said my goodbye before I departed for Korea, and it breaks my heart that I cannot be physically present. I have served as a would-be midwife to the dying, for my parents, and for close friends, as a benevolent angel of death, I darkly joke. I am so sad I cannot be there for my friend, and devastated to be so far away, in a city where I do not have a community to celebrate and grieve our friend’s life and ongoing transition into death.

All of this has my body in a state of inflamed red alert. Old asthma patterns have been triggered. Respiratory inflammation roams from sinuses to nose to throat to chest. I strive to be patient with myself, nurture myself, and to lean into the connections that remind me that I am not alone, I am not abandoned, I am resilient, and am always surrounded by love.

My friend Jung-In points out that Koreans do not identify as a colonized or occupied people. She would not be able to live with such an identity. Instead, she experiences Korea at its best as a nation of resistance and survival. She looks to the fierce farmer activists over generations, fighting for the right to grow food, protect the land, and support their families. She works with teachers dedicated to meeting the needs of stressed and burnt-out urban youth. She allies herself with the protestors and hunger strikers at Ganghwa-mun demanding that the government take responsibility and make amends for the Sewol ferry disaster.

I would also like to identify with the b-boys and b-girls of Korea! I had my first exhilarating encounter at a festival last night, with the fantastic Jindo Crew, whose performance took my breath away, and literally left my poor sensitive lungs wheezing. My breathing is back to normal today, and I am bravely opening my heart and lungs further and further, embracing all that green and pink of the heart chakra.

Beyond decolonizing, I am re-indigenizing myself, taking in Korea’s rhythms and flavors, feeling the land beneath my feet, taking a nightly moonbath on our rooftop, feeling the stars watching me even if the bright city lights obscure them.

MUG SHOT

the walls of seodaemun prison

are plastered with photos of resisters

each one my brother

or the sister i have longed for

steady unsmiling gaze at the japanese camera

trademark korean cheekbones

broad nose and heavy lids

the features passed through generations

this is my TSA airport face

when i accept the humiliation of a body search

insisting on eye contact with the agent

to acknowledge our shared humanity

innate equality undiminished by state authority

incarceration doesn't dull

strong jaw of the profile shot

the sharp dignified chin

i rest my forehead on cold stone prison floor

bow down to the ghosts of revolution

meanwhile back on the subway

i gaze at the before and after ads

of plastic surgeons

see how our korean features 

are being obliterated by choice

our solemn gaze

turned into a round-eyed anime caricature

i pray to my ancestors

forgive us the frivolity of our lives

in the holocaust of yours

indulge us our escapism

in the face of your captivity

allow us to forget it all

even momentarily

if that's what it takes

to survive yet another round

another hour, day, or lifetime

of polite senseless savagery

FEET ON HOMELAND SOIL

8 sept 2014

After creatively finding ways to doze in O’Hare airport with 2 suitcases, a backpack, and an ukulele (good thing my Iyengar Yoga training involves the use of props), I boarded the plane and landed in Korea. Immediately greeted by my friend, Jung-In, we took a local bus to her place in Bucheon, a city of 1,000,000 adjacent to Seoul.

She is generously sharing her space with me--a studio apartment across from the university. It’s manageable for 2, Korean-style, with sleeping mats we fold up during the day. The simplicity is reminiscent of India and comforting to me. The location couldn’t be better, since I will be studying Korean for 4 hours/day, 5 days/week at Bucheon University. We are not home together for many hours at a time so we are managing to not bump each other. 

Jung-In (Kiara) works afternoons and evenings at a YMCA after-school program, doing enrichment classes with middle and high school kids. We met in Milwaukee, when she was a graduate student in music. I sought her out as a Korean tutor in exchange for home-cooked dinners. We didn’t get very far with the tutoring because we would get engaged in deep, soul-stirring conversations that required English on my part, and we got to be fast friends. She returned to Korea after Milwaukee, and has been re-learning the culture after being gone for 9 years.

As I’ve been bustling about--getting a prepaid phone, learning public transportation, exploring the neighborhood, meeting folks--I totally understand why many folks would never do this. The simplest task is quite daunting without language facility. Right now I am heavily dependent on Jung-In for the most mundane things, like how to use my $10 phone or an ATM. I’m in an incredibly vulnerable and humble position and lots of times feel absolutely ridiculous. For instance, my silly phone was flashing all night, and I couldn’t turn it off so I stuffed it into my backpack. (In the morning, I asked Jung-In, and as a reassurance to my ego, she couldn’t turn it off either!)

Yet this vulnerability and humility is how we grow our souls. I cobble together idiotic, grammatically incorrect, poorly pronounced sentences and questions as I attempt to converse, and although everyone has been super nice, I know they are confused about everything I say, and that they have no idea who I really am. For someone like me who identifies as a writer, wordsmith, language artist, and deep conversationalist, I feel severely handicapped. My main tool has been taken away. So where does that leave me? 

Even my body language is culturally inappropriate. Women in Korea keep narrow personal bubbles. Yesterday I found myself at a bus stop with my arm straight out at my side as I leaned into a column. I realized I never see Korean women standing like this. Then I sat down and took my knees and feet wide and let my skirt fall between my knees. That also felt totally un-Korean for a woman. I’m a poor Confucianist. So there is much to learn, perhaps without completely scrapping my American self.

Nevertheless, I feel very welcomed. People address me as “seonsaeng-nim”--teacher--and I truly feel they are happy I am here and want to explore what I have to offer. I’ve already started teaching a beginner’s Iyengar Yoga class in Bucheon and will add 2 more in Seoul beginning later this month, including a teacher’s study group and an intermediate level class.

However, I am really here to be a student, not a teacher. I’m frustrated at my limited Korean, and shocked at my ignorance of Korean history and culture, and I know 4 months is just the tip of the iceberg. Daily, I must remind myself that where I am is just fine, and that any small amount of progress and learning is still growth. I recognize that this will be one of many trips to Korea, and that I have the whole rest of my life to learn and to heal.

Jung-In and I went to Gwanghwa-mun, the central mall where protests and demonstrations are regularly staged, historically and currently, and another day to Seodae-mun Prison, where resisters were captured and tortured and executed, primarily under Japanese occupation, but also used until 1987 under Korean dictatorship. The prison has become our own holocaust museum. I feel I must weep for months to process it all.

Yesterday, we had a small Chuseok (fall harvest moon) celebration with friends near Gimpo in their cozy traditional restaurant, and it was a most extraordinary meal, followed by a walk to a Koryo-era Buddhist temple, and a visit to a park on the Han River. Later Jung-In played flute with their son, Jin-Kyu, her former student at Gandhi School, a talented guitarist. As they riffed off American jazz standards and Korean folk songs, I felt a glimmer of what healing could be. A warm vibration filled the restaurant, overflowing into the street as pedestrians peered through the windows, under the hazy, almost-full moon. Syncopation, improvisation, deep listening, and play are our tools.

I am here. That is enough for now. More to come.

Poems from Korea

4 sept 2014

EARLY CHUSEOK

watching moonrise
as i eat brown rice and lentils
metal chopsticks tap on porcelain

waxing before my eyes
invisible to my north american friends
who doze in the thirteen hour lag

my moon glows
as your sun rises
i picture lamb’s quarters and queen anne’s lace
in the unmowed section of the field street garden
waving in the pink light

undeterred by clouds and bars on the first floor window
i soak up rays of the virgo moon
it washes away the vague sense of shame
which is a korean birthright
internalized confucianism
distorted into the guilt of not-having-done-enough
for abandoning my nation at the height of occupation
for losing my tongue to speak
the language of the colonizer

this is the season of self-forgiveness
in the generous glow 

of an early harvest moon

2 sept 2014

dozing on and off over dialectics

of being korean

and not

i am most integrated in air element

soaring above overheated

pacific ocean

how am i like

the ajumma flight attendants

and how not?

my hair is not permed and dyed black

i drape my bare feet rudely

in window ledges and seat arms

bunch up my skirt

so i can take my knees wide

but when my feet land on soil

i cannot help remembering

i come from revolutionary stock

impassioned and disciplined

who march in phalanxes into tear gas

and set palanquins on fire

who hunger strike for weeks

to willingly embrace the vulnerability

that connects them to the suffering

of the world

i’ve crossed the ocean

to shed yet another

colonized layer

to come down from yet another perch

of american privilege

where i could gaze from afar

and pretend the the children on the sewol ferry

had nothing to do with me

or that the lawsuit filed by the women

enslaved by their own government

for sex with american soldiers

were in fact not my mothers and aunties

being fucked by no one i know

i could insist it all happened in the past

as if the past

could be encapsulated like nuclear waste

never to harm us again

ha!

i could pretend time is linear

and not spiraling

i could numb myself with shopping

and gorge myself on waffles and iced coffee

but instead i am groggy with uncertainty

embarrassed with ignorance

tongue wrapped around broken korean

i squint at newspapers

that only leave me more confused

and remind me

that every healing crisis

begins with an aggravation of symptoms

i wait for it to get worse

before it gets better