Haemin
Sunim says a happy relationship and contented children are within reach
for us all – if we could just slow down and pay attention to each other
Some people, if you ask them a question, answer quickly. Others take a moment to think first. Haemin Sunim
looks up, slightly to the right, and allows 14 seconds to pass before
he answers one of my questions. I counted, when I listened to the
recording. And here’s something: waiting for his reply, I didn’t feel
even remotely uncomfortable. Because taking time is Sunim’s thing. He’s a
Buddhist monk who has become internationally famous for it.
His book Things You Can See Only When You Slow Down
was published in South Korea in 2012, quickly rose to No 1 on the
bestseller list and stayed there for nearly a year, selling more than 3m
copies. Written in response to requests for advice on social media (he
has 1.25 million followers on Twitter), it directly addresses problems
facing people around the world. Some of this is based on his personal
experience. Much is based on what he has learned from people who ask for
his help.
“I come out of a tradition of Zen Buddhism,
and I practise meditation. I give lessons. The formal teaching is
Buddhist doctrine and teachings. But in the temple, when people come in
to pray, you might have coffee or tea, and the conversation is not
usually about spiritual matters but about mundane, everyday life. I ask
for questions. And often the questions are not about meditation but
about daily struggle. What do I do to solve this problem, or that
problem? Very specific. I try to offer my own answers.”
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| Haemin Sunim meditates in New York. Photograph: Sangbeom Lee |
Many of the questions are about family life. “I encourage people to
have a very intimate and close relationship with their child, when the
child is one, two, three, four and five. You should pour your attention
and love into them. But when the child has grown up, it’s different.
Often parents are so much in love with their child that they want to do
everything – even when the child is in their 20s. I say, ‘Maybe you can
let your child know that he is already an adult. Say, “I love you very
much but it’s time for you to grow up.” Focusing less on him, and more
on yourself, your partner, and the people around you, will bring
benefits to your child.’”
This was Sunim’s experience. “I feel very lucky. My mother cares deeply
about me, but is very happy with her own life, and doesn’t have any need
to control me. I was in my mid-20s when I realised. I have a cousin,
and like me he went abroad to study.” (Sunim moved to the US to study
film, then found the religious life.) “My aunt would always pack
everything – food, clothes, everything – and follow him to the airport
to say goodbye. And I realised that my mum didn’t do that. Sometimes she
didn’t even come to the airport! Not that she didn’t love me. She loved
me very much.”
Did you ever tell her?
“Yes, I told her how grateful I am. She is a very happy person. The
best gift you can give to your child is to be happy yourself, rather
than trying to make your child happy.”
Sunim grew up in Seoul, South Korea and has a younger brother. The
family was poor, he says. “Especially when I was in elementary school,
but I always felt a sense of love.”
His mother is a housewife. His father sells art. “He has a tiny shop selling paintings. Other people’s paintings.”
Sunim was always interested in spirituality, he says, and the meaning
of life. “What happens after we die – that sort of thing. So when I
went to bookstores I would pick up those books. I started in high
school, with a book that profoundly influenced me by Krishnamurti. There
are so many wonderful books by him. I thought it was very interesting.
That genuine freedom is freedom from your own thoughts. That was such a
powerful teaching. I always thought of freedom as something to do with
politics.”
What can he tell people who didn’t have a happy childhood?
“I get a lot of questions like that.I offer different ways to heal
yourself. If you have the issue of abandonment, you feel that your
parents didn’t care much about you, you were the middle child, or
the last child, or your family was very poor and your parents were
always very tired when they came back from work … Having your own child
can become a way to heal yourself,” he says. “I have heard a number of
times that caring for a child, and giving the kind of love you never
received, can be transformative and healing for yourself,” he says.
And people who don’t have a child? He thinks for a while. “You can
offer the love you haven’t received by doing volunteer work, perhaps in
an orphanage. I heard from somebody who volunteered, and frequently
washed the babies and children in an orphanage, and she always felt
incredibly happy, and connected. So I think you can heal yourself by
giving the love that you haven’t received from your own parent.”
Do you think families pause enough? Or is it always a fight to be heard?
“Usually, it’s a fight to be heard. When we pause, we can connect to
our body, and to the person in front of us, instead of being wrapped up
in our own thoughts.” One reason we don’t do that, he says, is sheer
busyness.
“People have to work for many hours and they are sacrificing their
health to make money. And because of the net and cellphones, people are
losing their connections to family members or friends. They’re always
online, so on your birthday, you get 50 birthday messages and realise
you have nobody to have dinner with. And that’s very common.
“It would be great if we could gift to ourselves a moment of calm and
quietude, to find our own centre, and go out and live more
intentionally, rather than being pulled in many different directions and
getting sucked in, and losing control,” he says.
What are the most useful pieces of advice you can offer families?
“I think that a lot of mothers, with a full-time job, carry a sense
of guilt, about not spending enough time with her child. My advice would
be to think that quality matters more than quantity. So even if it’s a
very short amount of time, shower your child with your full attention
and loving care,” he says.
“That intimacy can have huge benefits for the child, compared with
being there but being stressed and annoyed and anxious that you have to
get away. A lot of mothers, they get depressed because they don’t feel
they have enough time. But maybe because you are working, you feel a
little more fulfilled. And with that, you can bring positivity to your
child.”
“I also get a lot of questions about husband-and-wife relationship
problems. If your child is emotionally upset, it could be because the
husband didn’t pay enough attention to his wife. So being kinder to your
wife can help your child to have balance.”
Does that kind of teaching usually arise in response to husbands?
“Usually wives.”
Do men seek your advice as well? “Usually the husband tells me, ‘My
wife nags, she tries to control me, she tells me: “Do this, do that,
you’re not good enough.”’ So I jokingly tell my female audience, ‘You
thought before you got married that you would be able to somehow change
him, and you now know how impossible that is. And a part of love is
acceptance, rather than trying to change your husband. To a certain
degree, we have to reconcile and accept differences.”
You said something like that earlier, about your mother not trying to control you …
“That’s one of the lessons that I try to share. When you are trying
to control people, you feel that something is missing within you, and
you want to find somebody else who can give you the things that you
need. And in the process, you want to control that person. But often you
can just go out and get that which you have been longing to have,
rather than use other people to get it,” he says.
What did you see, and hear, that made you know that you were loved as a child?
“Well, my parents would sacrifice financial means to give me the best
education. I felt that they were willing to invest their resource into
me. And when I was with them, they asked many questions. Questions about
how I’m doing, how I’m feeling. And whenever I write something, my mum
collects my newspaper columns. She talks about whether this week’s
column is good, or not so good. She’s definitely interested in my
writing.”
So it’s something to do with having their attention? Not lots of hugs and kisses? Sunim shakes his head.
“I say that in my book. If you can pay attention to somebody, without
being carried away by your thoughts, that’s an expression of love. Only
when you love somebody can you do that. Krishnamurti tells us to go out
and get any stone in the world, and put it in your living room, and to
pay attention to it every time you pass by. And after two months that
will be the most important stone in the world. Because you paid
attention to it.”
Do you have a stone in your living room? “Hahaha! No!”
theguardian.com
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