Mindfulness & Psychotherapy

How I Work

My psychotherapy rests on a single clinical observation: that trauma and emotional pain live not only in thought and memory but in the body - in breath, in muscular tension, in posture, in the nervous system’s habits of protection. Words matter, but words alone often cannot reach what the body holds. So my work is mindfulness-based and somatic. By working with awareness and the body together, difficult experience can be not only discussed but processed.

Methods I Practice

Hakomi

A mindfulness-centered somatic psychotherapy that reaches, through present-moment awareness, the core beliefs that shape our experience. I am a certified Hakomi therapist, and through my writing on its clinical application I first introduced Hakomi to the Korean Medicine field.

Brainspotting

A brain-body psychotherapy that accesses and processes trauma held below conscious awareness, through the field of vision. I am a certified therapist and consultant and serve as the Korean representative for Brainspotting. I translated David Grand’s Brainspotting and Monika Baumann’s Brainspotting with Children and Adolescents into Korean, have applied the method clinically from motor-vehicle-accident trauma to disaster response, and from 2027 will take part in training therapists.

Somatic approaches

I have completed Somatic Experiencing through the advanced level, along with the SRR module, and have brought Peter Levine’s Waking the Tiger and The Tao of Trauma, and Stephen Porges’s work on how we transmit anxiety, to Korean readers.

Internal Family Systems (IFS)

I have completed Levels 1 and 2, and keep close the insight that beneath our protective parts there is a Self - calm, curious, compassionate - and that therapy lies in helping that Self lead.

M&L psychotherapy

Mindfulness & Loving-beingness psychotherapy, developed within Korean Medicine. I have taken part in its development, research, and teaching - from PTSD programs to work with women affected by domestic violence and with North Korean defectors.

Teaching and Translation

Much of my work as an educator has been translation in the widest sense: carrying the world’s frontline trauma and somatic psychotherapy into Korean clinical practice - nine translated books, published or forthcoming - and teaching clinicians who want to deepen their practice. That teaching is now becoming, as a natural next step from years of clinical work and translation, the training of other therapists. From 2027 I will take part in training Brainspotting practitioners, and I am preparing to complete the facilitator program of a self-compassion curriculum for healthcare communities (SCHC). What I most want to pass on comes before technique - a therapist’s presence, attunement, self-compassion, and ethics of attention. Good therapy, I believe, begins with who the therapist is as they sit in the room.