[A Sip of a Book] Prescribing 'Holgabun' for Your Heart

Some sentences encapsulate the entire content of a book, while others instantly reach the reader’s heart, creating a connection with the book. We present meaningful sentences excerpted from books. - Editor’s note

This is a book by psychiatrist Dr. Jeong Hye-shin and her inspiration, psychological planner CEO Lee Myung-su. It selects 103 essays and illustrations from a series of picture essays serialized on their website over several years. The writings, which have comforted many hearts, combined with the simple drawings by artist Jeon Yong-sung, offer healing energy. ‘Holgabun’ is a term chosen as the highest state of positivity (快, kwae) among about 430 words Koreans commonly use to express emotions. It advocates a unique form of psychological prescription that encourages readers to love and support themselves in any circumstance, so they can feel holgabun wholeheartedly.

When someone brings a newborn baby into a public bathhouse’s hot spring, the atmosphere instantly becomes peaceful. People who were awkwardly facing each other seem to reorganize like a family centered around the baby. It’s not an exaggeration to say it’s like a scene from a movie where, in the middle of a battlefield with bullets flying, a toddling baby appears and the gunfire momentarily stops. Every baby has a powerful healing force. Perhaps this is the archetypal form of the healing power inherent in human beings. After all, everyone was once a baby. They were healing beings in themselves.

It is said that a certain serial killer, on the day before his execution, sobbed during his last phone call with his mother, saying, “There is still the me that you remember inside me.” The ‘me that my mother remembers’ is likely the psychological archetype of a healing energy-emitting human being. There are times in life when we desperately seek the help of a healing presence and look around for it. But usually, this is no different from searching for the bluebird within ourselves ? the process of finding the ‘me that my mother remembers.’ The very moment we recall the ‘me’ remembered by someone we deeply love, every human becomes a healing being. - From “The Me My Mother Remembers”

Currently very popular and reputed to have solid earnings, a certain singer endured three years as a trainee, living day by day in a rooftop room without windows, dividing a single pack of ramen into three meals. When reconstructing that time focusing on the impressive current results, it becomes a beautiful success story of overcoming adversity, but at the time, they could not have known whether those hardships would last three years or ten. Apart from social structural poverty and discrimination issues, there are times in life when one must endure ‘a windowless rooftop room-like time.’ In such moments, one’s gloom, sadness, anger, sense of defeat, and alienation feel endless.

However, just as most people did not notice any sign of liberation until the day before August 15, 1945, when Korea was freed, times of physical or emotional hardship usually end suddenly. What is truly needed then is not an iron will that refuses to give up because you might discover a gold vein if you dig just 10 centimeters deeper. It is self-affirmation that warmly embraces and soothes the present self, not for the shining future self. Then, all times of emotional hardship will end like a lightning strike, inevitably. - From “Times of Hardship End Like Lightning”

Holgabun | Written by Jeong Hye-shin & Lee Myung-su | Illustrated by Jeon Yong-sung | Haenaem | 276 pages | 17,500 KRW