I’ve been spending a lot of online time with my dad these days because we have a podcast together. We started it because I usually talk with my mom when I call Korea and at those times my dad has client sessions or is teaching. When he visited last year by himself we realized how much we aren’t communicating between father and son so we decided to start a podcast together.
Before and after the recording we talk a bit to catch up on things. He told me about his latest celebrity past life regressions, which is a thing in Korean YouTube. The most recent one was a K-Pop boy band called Close Your Eyes and the video got released recently and he shared it with us.
As I was watching the video I saw one of the guys quickly falling into tears. I remember crying in my past life regressions as well, when I was a kid helping my dad to practice sessions. I was too young to understand the stresses of life so I wasn’t crying because of pressure to succeed in a hyper-competitive entertainment market but I cried when I was about to die.
In this past life I was a very malnourished English man. My parents died when I was young and I was practically raised by villagers. I grew up to be some kind of a tradesman but I couldn’t really provide for myself and on one rainy day (hello England) I slipped on a bridge and fell into the river. I made it out alive but became very ill after that and I died shortly after.
As I was about to die I felt this tremendous amount of sadness for my life. I couldn’t achieve anything, all I remember is loneliness and misery. These are very complex feelings for an elementary school kid, but I just felt it completely in my body.
So watching these K-Pop idols, who are actually only a few years older than me when I did my past life regressions, it reminded me of my younger days a lot. But as I continued watching the video I could tell that their tears were a bit different from mine.
I’ve been coaching people for a few years now and I’ve gotten to experience many different kinds of client interactions. One common interaction is, the session starts and they start feeling relaxed into the session and they instantly start crying. This kind of insta-tear was always fascinating to me.
Perhaps fascinating is not the right word, but I’m awestruck by people’s ability to contain their emotion so they can function. How much emotion do you need to have bottled up to instantly cry? And yet with that much emotion they carry on with their lives and I think that’s a very fascinating / awe-striking feature of the human mind.
Now, I know there are people who cry when they are alone. But there is something about the hypnotic induction, therapy space, and/or deep human to human rapport that makes you feel like it’s okay to be yourself here. We want a space where we feel validated, assured, and held.
Being able to be yourself is critical to a happy life, a life free of suffering. But if we cannot be ourselves until a certain condition is met, it’s like we’re asking someone / something’s permission to be ourselves.
I dream of a world where all of us can be ourselves, without asking for permission. Unfortunately this idea gets misunderstood into, “I dream of a world where all of us live a life where everything goes the way we want it to”. I want to be a little bit more realistic and ambitious than that. I want us to be ourselves without changing anything about this world.
Can you feel what it’s like to be yourself, when you’re by yourself? What voices do you hear from within?
Billy Seol
July Life Coach
julylifecoach.com
