The Power to Revitalize Our Lives
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Healing Ourselves: We Have the Power to Revitalize Our Life
By Pyun Ja-seong, Student Editor
‘Healing Syndrome’. Now all the people in Korea are trapped in an attempt at healing. What is healing? It can be defined as a cure for both the body and the mind, especially for your mind with your own energy or help from others. You can feel the popularity of healing everywhere in your life. In bookstores, you can see a spacious corners and bookcases allocated only for books which are written about healing. If you search ‘how to heal’ on the internet, you can find an endless list of healing movies, music, and artworks. We can even find clothing lines called ‘healing fashion’ in magazines that makes you think it over before you get dressed.
Why Healing?
Why has healing become so popular amongst Koreans? The reason is that people feel pressure from their lives and want someone or something to help them to lessen the weight on their shoulders. Only a few years ago, people relied on well-being, which simply means healthy life. It promotes both physical and mental health but it puts more weight on physical health. Anyway, it was the era of well-being syndrome and people made a lot of effort for keeping their body in good shape, eating good organic food, avoiding illness, etc. The effect of well-being syndrome made people much physically stronger, but they still felt emptiness in their minds and wanted to fill it with anything. At that time, a talk show called ‘Healing Camp’ started its broadcasting in 2011. The concept of the program is ‘to soothe your mind’. The guests of this program such as singers, politicians, and actors appear on this show and talk about themselves genuinely with three emcees in nature. Their intimate stories heal the audience. This program became so popular and that it was the start of the so called healing syndrome. People started reading good books, listening to music, doing meditation and experiencing a temple stay. They also followed some lectures to hear wise words from famous or great people such as Ahn Chul-soo, Buddhist monk Beop Ryun, and Park Beom-sin, one of the famous authors in Korea. Through this phenomenon, we can predict that people hope for a magical healing effect desperately.
Exhausted both Mind and Body
How about university or college students? Why do they need to heal themselves, not just simply to let their stress out? Now, Korean undergraduates are in a harsh situation. They compete with others to get superior grades as they have been doing since they were elementary kids. In addition, apart from their studies, they have to take care of their specifications, a required qualification to get a good job. Many of them have to do a part-time job for their expensive tuition which is soaring shockingly high every year, until the level that students cannot afford without any assistance. They are also nervous about their invisible future, especially finding a job. As you can see, there are a lot of tight situations that can spoil the students and their lives.
CNUians’ Self-healing
Let us narrow the scale from common Korean university or college students to Chonnam National University (CNU) students. What kind of situation makes CNUians need healing while at school? There are various tough circumstances that students are suffering from in their campus lives. Amongst these are studying one’s major, paying registration fees, getting a job, and relationships with peers, seniors, juniors or professors in school. These situations are divided into three categories: studying, career, and relationships. Studying is about building knowledge and obtaining the skills of the major. Career is about the future, especially finding a job or going on to graduate schools. Relationships are the problems related to friends and professors. Can you guess what kind of situation is the biggest cause of worry for students? According to the survey result conducted by the CNU Student Life Counseling Center in the first semester of 2012, ‘career and aptitude for one’s major’ got the highest response rate by both freshmen and enrolled students. Choi Da-yae (Sophomore, Dept. of Molecular Biology), said that she is studying her major but she is afraid whether she could get a job with her major or not after her graduation.
Then, what do CNUians do to get away from the depression from these situations? “I had a short overnight itinerary called ‘temple stay’ with my foreign friends this summer vacation.” said Lee Ji-eun (Freshman, Dept. of English Lang. & Lit.). One student said that when she is stressed out, she usually goes to watch a baseball game and support her favorite player to let her stress out, but she said it does not help her to solve her real problem, it is just a temporary solution. Another student said, “I hang out with my friends and chat with them in a café, eat delicious food or see a movie. It makes me feel better, but that feeling lasts just for a few hours and then my stress comes back.” Through these responses, we can see students want their psychological well-being through methods to help them to achieve a stability of the mind.
How to Help CNUians Have Healthy Lives
What kind of help can CNU provide for students’ healing and easing their minds? In this case, healing means the help from others for students to heal their emotional or mental wounds or lighten the weight of worry in their minds. One answer is a Student Life Counseling Center on campus. Maybe some students do not even know what it is and where it is. Nesting on the second floor of Student Union Ⅰ, this center has been helping students to solve the problems in their deep minds, not just giving practical information like other organizations. When you enter the center, you will see two counselors as full-timers who are ready to help you when you need them. What they do is to lead you to find out who you really are because every problem starts from the lack of self-knowledge. You can find your personality and affectivity by psychological testing. They also help you maintain your mental health or solve trauma through personal or group counseling. Other counsel includes troubles with friends, lovers, family or maladjustment to the school environment. The center provides several programs such as career exploration, self-expression, solving anxiety about presentations, and, the most recent, the healing camp which has had favorable responses from the participant students. Kang Hye-ra (Sophomore, Dept. of Library and Information Science) said, “I participated in the camp to find out the bottom of my problems. Through a role-playing program, students could talk about their secrets with others and lighten their burdens in their mind under a confidential system. I could meet some good friends who can share my stories as well. I will take part in programs like this again in the future.”
Practical Support Is Needed
But unfortunately, everyone cannot use these good programs because of a lack of skilled counselors and assistants for this center. “We have only two counselors and two rooms and will not be able to fulfill the duties for the students who need counseling. Therefore, students have to wait in line for months.” Jeong Wook, the supervisor of the center said. For CNU students’ mind healing, various programs of the center should be increased. In order to provide students with helpful programs and more counseling, university support for the center is required. At the same time, students should always think about their true self every day. It would be better if you self-administer your mind by using small healing methods such as reading good books, seeing movies, meditation, exercise or temple staying. If you just let your problem or concern grow and think it is a small problem, someday you may face things that snowballed into a big monster that will inevitably weigh on your mind.
편자성 기자
hui-@hanmail.net