Ep. 2: Helena Soholm

Chanhee: Hello, everyone. This is Chanhee, and you’re listening to Cha-Tea Circle. In today’s episode, you will hear from Helena Soholm, a Korean American shaman and healer who has been channeling Korean Indigenous traditions in her therapy practice for the past 18 years. We explore how her practice supports the healing and growth process of clients facing intergenerational and cultural trauma. We also talk about her role as a shaman in contemporary society, her immigration journey from South Korea to the United States, and the immigrant’s relationship to Indigenous land. 

[Sounds from the ceremony in January 2024, in Denmark]

Chanhee: Hi, Helena. Thank you so much for being here with us today. Today we began with sounds from the ceremony you offered last January in Denmark. Even though we just heard a very short portion of the recording, I could feel the great intensity of the sounds with the Muryeongbell (무령) and Janggu (장구), a Korean drum. And for me, as someone who grew up in a Korean Christian family, the sounds were very familiar in the Korean context but, at the same time, quite foreign in the Christian context. So, can you walk us through what was happening in the ceremony and your role in it?

Helena: Thank you for having me, Chanhee. This past January, my husband is from Denmark, so since we got married, we've been going back to Denmark, and annually now. But this is the first time I offered a ceremony in Denmark since becoming a mudang (무당; shaman). So that ceremony–it was special in that it was a culmination of many things that happened back in 2018 when I became initiated as a Korean shaman. I received a vision when I came home, and the vision was of the ancestors of all the Korean adoptees around the Western world. Korea adopted out nearly 200,000 babies to the Western world, and Denmark took in about 9,000. So, there's a huge group of adoptees in Denmark that I didn't know about, and then when I became a shaman, many adoptees started coming to me in my shamanic practice. And naturally, they were interested in connecting to their culture. So, at the ceremony, there were Korean adoptees, and they were from Denmark, and actually, several came from other parts of Europe. There were Korean immigrants or children of immigrants who also came from America, well around Europe. And then, another group was indigenous people. So Denmark was a part of colonizing, brutally colonizing Greenland and the Inuit people there.

And I visited Greenland last year, sorry, not last year, 2022, and made some friends who were Inuit. And so, several women who were Inuit, originally from Greenland, were at the ceremony, and then a Sámi person from Norway also came down to the ceremony. So there was a group of Indigenous women. Then the last group was white Europeans from Denmark and nearby countries. So, we all gathered to honor our ancestors together, and the Danish adoptees were responsible for keeping the Korean government accountable for what's been happening in the adoption world. So apparently, Korea was involved in falsifying lots of adoption papers so that children could be adopted out, and there was a huge article from the New York Times and the Guardian in 2023 in the fall. So I didn't know about this as I set the ceremony in motion. And then, the week, the very week of the ceremony on January 20th, both Denmark and Norway stopped all international adoptions to their countries, because they knew that there was so much corruption happening at the adoption, international adoption. So I was surprised that all this was happening together with the ceremony. And, of course, the Greenlandic people also suffered deeply, and one of my friends who was present at the ceremony, the Greenlandic Inuit woman, was coerced to be adopted. So these stories were all intermingling in the ceremony, and we honored all of our ancestors, and hopefully relieved some of the pain and suffering of our ancestors. So that's what you're hearing. The music was provided by Professor Dong-Won Kim, who has been a part of Yo-Yo Ma Silkroad Ensemble, and I will talk about him more later and how he's a very important figure in my development as a mudang. Another person from Switzerland who was a student of Professor Kim also came to play, and she herself is a Swiss woman, but was initiated as a shaman by the great Manshin (만신) Kim Kum Hwa. So there was lots of support for the ceremony in a way that I couldn't even imagine. 

Chanhee: As I’m hearing about how the ceremony happened with all different support from individuals, I'm curious to hear what are your thoughts or feelings when you mediated two worlds or when you helped individuals to connect with their ancestors.

Helena: So when I do the ceremonies, it's pure magic. I feel ecstatic. I feel a sense of freedom that I don't feel in any other space in my life in the world. And it's an expression of primal energy that's inappropriate in most polite society. So, there are parts of the ceremony if I allow myself to completely be taken over by letting go of my inhibitions, I access animals–maybe from actual, you know, animals from our planet, but mythical animals and energies and different spirits. So it's a sense of freedom that I get, and it took a long time to get there to be able to let go of the social rules around who I should be so that I can get to this place of expressing these pure energies. And it's not only for my benefit, right? The shaman's role is to help the community and the tribe for their healing. So, I'm only a vessel through which these energies are coming through. And I want to help people experience a little bit of this magic and use it in their own lives. So it was our first healing space as a group, but if you think about current times, there are very few spaces where people can access these states. 

Chanhee: I want to talk more about these rare spaces you operate as a shaman. How do you define the role of the shaman in our contemporary context? What does “contemporary forms of shamanism” mean to you, and how does that work in practice?

Helena: I think it means a lot of things. I want to talk about what I call a kind of soul loss that exists in modern societies. Both in my psychotherapy practice and my shamanic practice, many people come in, and they're materially successful. They had good educations. They have good jobs–many of them earn really high salaries, especially in the region that I live in; in Seattle, people are in the tech world and corporate world. They're successful. They have relationships. They may even have families, but many are anxious, and they don't know why. And this is the puzzling thing about modern existence. That we should have everything that makes our life so convenient, yet there's something missing.

And that's a bulk of my practices. So, the modern shaman piece, the contemporary forms of shamanism, is that we have to evolve. Shamanism has to evolve to meet the needs of the people. And I believe I'm part of that process and it's happening globally. There is such a need that is outside of institutionalized religions to meet spiritual needs. So then, contemporary shamans–what are they doing? How are they going to meet this need? Well, I'm looking at my academic learning. And, one of my first influences into the world of shamanism was Mircea Eliade. I had a professor–his name is Lawrence Sullivan, who is a scholar of ritual and native and Indigenous healing systems from Central and South America, and he taught me about Mircea Eliade's work. He was trained under him at the University of Chicago. And when I took his course and I learned that there were lots of different ways of healing. And this really introduced me to the world of shamanism academically. 

And, of course, I'm influenced by the work of Carl Jung, who talks about the spiritual illness of the modern man. We have progressed; we have technology; we have sciences. However, we're missing a piece in our existence that can't be met by the conveniences of the modern world. So that's where my work is in the middle of, and I do this through helping people–I suppose go through rites of passages that were not available to them. So if you don't grow up in a traditional culture, you're not going to have a lot of supportive elders or a community, who take you through different developmental stages and guide you on what your gifts might be, what your challenges might be, and then help you integrate that information to how you can become an adult that contributes to our world.

Chanhee: Thank you. After hearing from you about contemporary forms of shamanism, I still think about a particular form of your ceremony. When you connect your clients and their ancestors, you utilize a form of Korean shamanistic practice, Gut (굿), which may or may not be relevant to your client's cultural heritage. What role do you see this distinct form of Gut (굿) playing for your clients who do not necessarily share the same cultural heritage? 

Helena: This is a really important question. We're talking about “Can people who are not Korean connect with their own ancestors through the technology of my own culture?” And absolutely. Because these–I call it a technology; these are indigenous technology. So, for instance, I'm going to speak a little bit about my own development as a shaman because this has taught me about the cross-cultural nature of healing and how it can be utilized for many different types of people. 

But it is also about contemporary shamanism because of the focus that traditional shamans have vs. people today. So one of the first ways that I opened up to shamanism was through the Amazonian medicine ayahuasca, which has become very well known now, and many people travel to either Central or South America to experience this powerful psychedelic. And I had a friend here, he's no longer alive. He was from the Ecuadorian jungle. His name is Natem and he offered ceremonies here. He grew up with the medicine, and I was lucky enough to meet him here and experience the medicine of his people here in the United States. And in the first ceremony that I did with him, actually my Korean ancestors came through. A funny story of a grandfather coming in, and he was laughing; he was speaking in a Korean dialect that I didn't even know about. It was a Jeju Island dialect. And he was stroking his beard. So I was stroking a beard that didn't exist on my face. And he laughed at the foolishness of all humans, how we worry about things that we shouldn't worry about, and how petty we are, and how we're so concerned with things that don't really mean a whole lot. And this is an experience I have quite often when the spirits come through. It helps me to relax to know that sometimes we worry too much about things that we shouldn't worry about so much. And other beings like dragons came through, and it was an entirely Korean ceremony, even though the medicine itself came from the Amazonian jungle–so first-hand experience the power of these technologies opening up what is within your own ancestral line. So this is really important. 

Another experience for myself in my development was–I want to mention Professor Dong-Won Kim again, the master percussionist who helped me on multiple levels. So I met him in 2023. I organized the first Korean pilgrimage with diaspora, the Korean diaspora, made up of children of immigrants and also adoptees. I needed musicians to play for the ceremony, but I didn't know how to access them. And quite frankly, I'm a little bit intimidated by engaging with the Korean shamanic community. I find that I work very differently and think differently than many of the people in that world, so I've actually cut myself off completely from that world after initiation. And because of the corrupt nature in which a lot of mudang work, I don't want to criticize the people who've helped me, but it's a general trend that many of them are charging between $10,000 to $40,000 for ceremonies. And I find it very distasteful that healing work is done in that kind of very materialistic and capitalistic way. So, on my social media, Professor Kim was there and I thought surely he would know some students who could play for the ceremony because I didn't have a large budget. And when I told him about the project, he agreed to play for us. He wanted to play for us. Professor Kim has a huge heart, and he wanted to be a part of something that I was putting together. So he and his students came to play for us and I suppose this is the first time outside of the Nerimgut that I experienced traditional music triggering a deep ancestral knowing. And during the ceremony, I was able to access spirits and realms that I wasn't able to do on my own before. And as an example, I will give the story of when he played one song and he also sings. He sang this beautiful song, and I immediately went on the ground and did a keun jeol (큰절), which is the big bow, towards the altar, and I could not stop crying. The ancestors of the Korean diaspora who were in the room came through, and my heart was just torn apart from the pain and suffering of these ancestors who lost their descendants and that disconnection.

And after the ceremony was over, we all went to go get coffee. I asked Professor Kim, “What was the song that you played for me? Because I really had a strong reaction to that song.” And then he said, “Well, it's a song that's played in a ceremony when the shaman bows to the altar,” and that was exactly the motion I fell into when I played the song. So these are the moments where I learned about how tradition can trigger this. 

Now your question about how do we translate this into people outside of my culture. Well, I already explained what happened with the ayahuasca ceremony, but it's also that I've taken my academic training and experiences of learning about human consciousness and how to access transcendent realms and mystical realms through different ways, through my training as a transpersonal psychologist, and I'm also a certified hypnotherapist. So there are different ways that we can access these realms. And then I took the best of my tradition, the Korean tradition, and I kind of integrated it. And when I first started doing ceremonies–because I was cut off from the tradition, that was a really big decision for me. I knew that by cutting off the tradition and all the people in it, I would not have access to the learning, because the Korean ceremony is very elaborate. It takes years to learn all the songs, the rituals, and the steps. It's beautiful, but I knew that I couldn't live with the spirit mother for years to learn this because I live here in the United States, and I have a life that I have to lead, and I couldn't go to Korea frequently enough to learn those.

So part of me was very sad, but something told me to let go. By letting go, I will be given something entirely new, different, and unique. And I did. And one of the first ceremonies I put together–I did a ceremony here in Seattle but also in LA, and I started recruiting musicians who were able to do improvisation. I have musicians here that are wonderful that I work with in the Seattle area. And I'm also interested in developing this as some kind of a larger project in the future where I can collaborate more with other musicians to do cross cultural work. In the ceremony setting, because of the nature of the topic, most people who end up coming to my events are also very sensitive people, and many of them are healers themselves. And they also validate the process and the experience by having their own experiences. Sometimes they report seeing or sensing things that match with what I was experiencing, which is adding to the data, I suppose, of what was happening for all of us. 

Chanhee: For me, it is very powerful to hear about Indigenous technology that evokes certain emotions or bodily practices. And it is also amazing that whichever the form is, whether that's indigenous or contemporary, your work seems to aim for healing. I want to ask you what made you think about doing this healing work and why is it so important for you? 

Helena: It's something that I've been obsessed with for most of my life. I believe the only way we can heal our world is through healing ourselves. I'm just a piece of the puzzle and helping people heal because what I'm noticing is that we're really at an important point in our evolution, I think, where we can self-destruct, or we may come out with something special. And that can only happen through the integration of modern sciences but also wisdom traditions. And there's been a turning towards the Indigenous ways to learn from Indigenous people, not to go back to that way of living because we can't–we've lost it; we can't go back to that, but we can certainly integrate. And I will also talk a bit more about my own background, my personal background that led me to be obsessed in a way with healing, because I've been interested in human beings and how we operate ever since I was a child. It fascinated me in terms of why people do the things that they do. But it's also beautiful. Life can be so much more than just living a comfortable existence.

Chanhee: You just mentioned your childhood being interested in human beings. I'm curious to learn more about your upbringing. What was your childhood like? And your website also mentioned your immigration journey. So could you tell us about your childhood and how you came to the States as well? 

Helena: Let's see, my childhood. So I was born in Incheon, South Korea, in the 70s. Before I came to the United States, my childhood was ordinary in a way, but with some interesting occurrences that gave me a sense of difference early on. So I grew up with my mother and her family. My father went to the United States when I was three years old, and initially, that was to prepare for the entire family migrating to the United States. But that separation turned out to be a longer-term separation from my parents. Their marriage did not survive his leaving physically. So I was brought up in a single-parent household, but I had a large family, maternal family. And church was a huge part of my life growing up and this is really important in my development. And, for this question, I want to tell a few stories because these stories are, I think, entertaining, and it will tell you something about who I am and my development.

So, in early life, I was different in some ways. I was very independent. And one story that my family tells when they gather, when they used to gather, was–this is all happening before the age of six. 

So I have a cousin who is the same age as me, and she had just moved into a new neighborhood. We were hanging out in her neighborhood and she was showing me around. We had to go back to where our family was and as we were walking, I got the impression that I didn't agree with her on her directions. She wanted to go one way, and I thought I was right, and I told her we should go a different way, except, I was not the one living in that neighborhood–she was. So I was very independent and self-assured, and I argued, and I would not go with her. She has, I would say, a kinder personality and a softer personality, and she left on her own, knowing that I was wrong, and she cried all the way home. And so she went back to our family, and they were asking, “Where's Hae Ryeon? (That's my Korean name.) Where's Hae Ryeon? Where did you leave her?” And she told the story of how I argued with her and went a different way. So I have memories of this moment when the panic set in that I was very wrong, and I was lost.

So I remember looking around and thinking, “What am I going to do now?” I really put myself into a pickle now and I saw some neighborhood children playing who were older than me. So they were like, you know, teens and I remember them being boys, so I went up to them. I said, “Oppa (which is the term for older brother), can you help me? I'm kind of lost here.” And I asked for the police station. Each neighborhood, yes, each neighborhood had a police station. It was very communal. And although I was panicked, I don't think that we have that sense of community now, especially in the United States. So this is an example of the communal living, collective living that we had in my childhood. So I asked these neighborhood kids where the police station was, and they pointed me to the police station. So I went there, and the neighborhood had an announcement system, where they could make an announcement to the entire neighborhood, and everybody could hear it from the system. And my grandmother was taking a nap at the time and she heard, “If you're the guardian or the parents of Choi Hye Ryeon, please come to the police station. She's here.” And my grandmother got up and was like, “What? Choi Hye Ryeon? That's my my granddaughter!” She ran to the police station, and she was shocked by the scene that she saw: all the policemen were so entertained by me. I was a very verbal child. They had sat me down on their desk and I was entertaining them with all sorts of stories and singing. And I had memorized tens of hymns from church and Sunday school; memorized verses from the Bible and stories. So I was telling them about my family, how my father had gone to America, and my mother had a new child–just entertaining everybody. 

Chanhee: You were not scared at all!

Helena: I was not. I was having a lot of fun, actually. Meeting new people and my grandmother came and got me. So that's one story. 

The second one. I had an older aunt who was from the former marriage of my grandmother. So both my grandparents were separated from their original families, first marriages, and children due to the war, the Korean War. And this oldest aunt, she was a restauranteur all her life. She and her husband owned Korean barbecue restaurants throughout their life until retirement. And they were opening a new restaurant down South–I believe it was Cheolla Province (전라도). So they needed help, and my mother at the time didn't have employment, she was a single parent, so she needed the job. She took me and my brother, and we went with them to the countryside, where they speak a different dialect. 

One of the first days that we arrived, I disappeared again. It seems to be a theme. I just ran out into town, and while the adults were just doing their thing of setting up the restaurant and moving in. And all the adults are like, “Where Hye Ryeon go?” My uncle, the husband of my aunt, went everywhere around town, and he saw me, but he was so shocked by what he saw that he came home and brought everybody over to show the scene. So apparently, I had gathered all the children of the town, standing on a rock, and gathered everybody in a circle, and I was sharing Bible stories. And these children had, they weren't used to the Seoul accent, so I wasn't speaking their dialect. I was speaking in a different way, and I was telling them stories they hadn't heard before from the church, and these are stories of Noah and these are stories of the Old Testament that I learned in Sunday School. So all their little twinkling eyes were staring at this girl from the city. And again, I surprised my family. 

Chanhee: Wow, on your first day in the area!

Helena: I wanted to meet new people. And then this curiosity followed me throughout my life. 

And the third story is that during early life. Like I mentioned, church was a huge part of my life, and one summer they had a Bible School where children came three or four times a day to the church, and they provided a lot of programming, which was nice to give the parents a break. And I was quite independent, like all the children in my neighborhood. We walked everywhere on our own without supervision. And this was a normal part of our life. So, I was a bit obsessive, and somehow I wanted to prove something, I think. I'm not even sure that I was aware of it, but I went to every service–meaning, morning, midday, afternoon, maybe even an evening one. Went back and forth, back and forth, three or four times a day for a period of time, because I knew there would be a reward at the end. And I was expecting some great award, you know, something nice. And at the last day, I got a sketchbook for coming to this every service, and I was a bit disappointed. 

But I'm telling the story partly because I think it's entertaining to hear about these, but it's also the developmental lessons that I had to learn from my own personality.

So the independence sometimes goes into not being able to listen to others and my first story of not listening to my cousin. This can be a gift, but also a challenge in my personality. I had to mature that through my own healing process to become interdependent and to take feedback and to listen to others, and not be so arrogant that I might be the one who knows everything like I used to think as a child getting myself lost in a new neighborhood. 

And then the second story, I've had a curiosity towards other cultures and meeting new people. This has brought me to all sorts of places and meeting interesting people and that was part of my trip to Greenland in 2022. I'm always interested in meeting new people, but also in the spiritual realm. Lots of teachers and mentors and gurus fall into the trap of power and ego. It may feel good to gather a group of people and have them listen to you and ask you for guidance, but I think this is one of the biggest traps that exists in the spiritual world and religious world. And for me, the way I conduct sessions or even ceremonies is that I'm only a vessel and I provide a safe space; I am adamant that people heal themselves, so my job is to trigger your internal healing system through the learning that I have, but I will not be the one doing anything. You are the one who's going to heal yourself. So this is really important for me, that I be able to keep balance through these types of practices, recognizing the power differential that exists in healing. 

And then, the obsessive nature of trying to do everything–I've really had to learn the lesson of knowing when to push myself, but also learning how to step back and to flow. And that has become easier through age, not so much when I was younger. But I share these stories because these are the developmental stages and the lessons that I'm thinking about when I work with people. 

Chanhee: Yeah, this is so inspiring to hear about your childhood personality and also your growth and how that is embedded into your philosophy and you as a human being when you interact with other people. And also I keep going back to how an amazing storyteller you were when you were a child and just keep thinking about child Helena, telling a Bible story to all the other children in the town. That makes me think about your transition from a Protestant Christian to a shaman; particularly growing up in a Korean Christian family, it seems to be somewhat natural, but also surprising. So I want to ask you what was the process like and how did your family and community, both in Korea and America, respond to your path?

Helena: So I just talked about my life in early childhood–this is before immigration. And things became very different when we immigrated. It's an important part of my soul's journey that I came to America–to the West because I would not have developed into the human that I am. I might have been a bit more frustrated if I stayed in Korea because of my natural personality and the strict gender rules that exist in South Korea. And I didn't have access to education in Korea like I did in the US. So, my parents are not educated at all. My mother only had a middle school education. She was very sickly, when she was a child, and she had many many siblings. All of them finished high school, but because she was sick and they didn't have a lot of money, she started working in middle school, learning how to sew and she was a seamstress for the rest of her life. This is a skill that allowed her to earn money in the United States to raise me and my brother.

And my father, he lost his father at a very young age. My father was the youngest son, but he had a very strong personality in many ways that I take after him, even though I wasn't raised by him. And he supported his entire family. He only finished elementary school, and he started in a way hustling, I guess, in post-war Korea in the markets, helping his mother with businesses. So a very intelligent man, but he didn't have any kind of formal education. So that's the setting. And when we came to the United States, my mother, my father brought us here, but he left us right away and left us with his family. And because of the friction between my mother and that side of the family, she quickly got employment and moved us out. And we lived in very bad neighborhoods. These were dangerous neighborhoods with gang activity. And I remember having anxiety and stress about the environment at all times. And we lost a family unit–the extended family system. So suddenly, the church becomes your extended family network. So we went to church, and all the other people in the church also were in a similar boat, meaning it became a community. So even if you're not Christian when you arrive in the U. S., you might become one out of sheer necessity that the church provided. And our church was a small United Methodist church. We were Presbyterians in Korea, but Methodists only came here. And I remember going three, four times a week. You have a Wednesday service, Sunday morning service, and Sunday evening service.

Chanhee: Did you get a sketchbook? 

Helena: Well, I worked, you know, we were a small church. Sometimes the custodial duties were on the rotation system. So I remember my mother, my brother, and I going to the church to clean the church, and I played the piano. I played the piano for the church, the worship team, as we call it in church communities, where you provide the music, and so my life was school and church, and I was a loner. I was a very depressed teenager, and I spent a lot of time alone, and I spent a lot of time alone pondering life. I was suddenly in a place where life got very serious, and I was the older child of an immigrant mother who didn't speak English. So I was the bridge for her in terms of the adult world. So I, in some ways, had to mature very quickly, even though I was still a child in many ways. So I was always dying to grow up, and I was so miserable being a young person, thinking I was much older. But anyhow, I lived in a bad neighborhood up until high school, and it really did get bad to the point, there was almost a break-in that really scared my mother, and we decided to move. She couldn't, of course, afford a private school, so she moved us to a neighborhood that was better, and it was a neighborhood that had a large LDS community, the Mormon church, so public school that was well funded by this church and great orchestra program. And when I moved there, things were different. I was nurtured intellectually, and I connected with my teachers quite a bit. And the favorite activity for me as an adolescent was that, you know, I didn't have a car of my own and there was no public transportation, so I would walk to the local public library, and I had watched every foreign film available in that library, and I checked out cassette tapes at the time for different types of music to enrich my mind, and I kind of lived in my own world. 

And I really felt like I gained freedom when I left for college. And that was hard for my mother because I was her, you know, support. And that was a very important point in our lives when I started going off into my own trajectory as a human being. And of course, slowly the church became further and further from my world. And it was really during my time at Smith College in my undergrad years, I minored in religion–my major was psychology–where I took both Old Testament and New Testament courses, so hermeneutics and learning how to read text. And I started seeing, well, well, it's not what I've learned from church. These are texts that are bound by culture and history. When I started learning how to read these historical texts, it didn't make sense to have that kind of faith where the stories are concrete, but that these are myths and symbols. I appreciated the teachings of Jesus and what it brought, but I also saw that there's a lot of discrepancies within the text. And so I gained a different way of looking at Christianity. 

My first Master's was in Theology from Harvard Divinity School. And that was a choice made from being disappointed in psychology, actually, at the undergrad level. Psychology wasn't about healing. We learned a lot about human behavior and motivations for behavior, but I didn't get much content on healing. And that's what I was interested in, and that's where I turned to religious studies. And during my time there, I considered becoming a minister. That was the last kind of decision when I let go of that. It was because I couldn't imagine sitting or standing at the pulpit and preaching only to the people in the church. I had an understanding that I needed to reach more people outside of the church that I wanted to help people have an understanding of life and what it might be about in a larger scale. So that's when I let go of the church altogether. And the divinity school is also where I learned about shamanism and all the different ways of healing. That's kind of the trajectory. 

Chanhee: Can I ask you your current relationship with Christianity? 

Helena: Yes, Christianity for me is one form of humans making sense of God or greater consciousness, just like any other religion that we have created. So I believe it's a part of our human history and our culture. So these are culture-bound religions. They have origins and they have their trajectories and history. So I believe every religion that we have in the world–institutionalized religions are human-bound and human form of understanding and making sense of what might be happening.

I appreciate it, and I know that many people find solace and healing within the church, and that's perfectly fine. Everybody has a right to choose. I think that's really important. So I don't criticize people who are staying in the church. In fact, there's lots of data to suggest that people who are religious tend to come out higher on the happiness scale than people who are secular. This is what I was talking about before. The rise of science and secularism provides us with a different lens, but we lose the community and the meaning-making that we have in institutionalized religion. So people within institutional religions may have a higher level of meaning and how they see the world and organize their world, but they're also limited in what they can explore. And I don't like limits. I want to be free to explore. 

Chanhee: I kind of want to go back to your experience of being an immigrant in the United States. I guess this experience of being an immigrant seems to add more layers to your role as a healer. What is your relationship with your motherland of Korea? And what is your relationship to this indigenous land we are currently in?

Helena: Yes. So, I'm going to talk a little bit about how I actually became a mudang and how that's changed my relationship to Korea. So in my twenties, I started returning to Korea. I had an interest, and I had large family there. Part of it was staying connected. I didn't go back to Korea after immigration until middle school. Then we had a large break. It's just expensive to return to Korea. Then during college, I visited a couple of times, and I spent one year teaching there, right after actually Divinity School. I took a year and taught English in Korea. And that was the first time I really connected with the culture because I was living there, not just visiting.

And I thought there were a lot of beautiful things there. And people were starting to open up to foreigners at the time–that was 2002 and 2003. And I started seeing that also in Korea, they were getting interested in yoga as a practice that came, not yoga from India, but it was yoga that went to the West–to America–and then went back to the East to Korea. So there mindfulness was coming up. So by going back more frequently, I had more contact and my Korean I was able to maintain better, which was important for me. I heard a distinct voice when I was in my teens that told me to maintain my Korean. So I made an extra effort. And then in my thirties, that was really a time of turmoil. I was trying to get my PhD and I was burned out from too much school already. Also, that's when the spirit illness really started kicking me in. I was having nightmares most every night of spirits, and they were so vivid that I still remember some of the textures of the skin of the spirits I would touch to bless them, to help them go to higher conscious levels. And, these were not like dreams, ordinary dreams–I was working on the other side. It was frightening. And I also felt lots of energy throughout my body, heat, sensations they couldn't explain. And here I was trying to finish my dissertation. 

I was finishing up my doctoral training and also working and then I had opened during that time my own private practice working on the weekends. So I was pushed to the brink of what I could handle as a human being with the spirit illness and talking with different mudangs who told me that I needed to become initiated. It was a very confusing time. I didn't know what to do. But what happened is that an ancestor who came in the form of my own maternal grandmother–I believe that it was the older ancestor who took on the form of my own grandmother that I knew, who had passed away, to help me, to put me at ease. And she would come into my dreams and she would give me direct messages. These are direct messages of the next steps to take pointing out the person who would initiate me, pointing out this is how you're going to do it. And then when I talked to her once in a dream, “What about the family? They're so Christian,” I say. And she says, “Don't worry about that. I'll take care of itself.” So I believe it's an older ancestor who came to help me. And in one of the dreams, I was back in Korea, shopping for a white hanbok. And in Korea, the white hanbok is a symbol of death. That's how I understood it at that time. And so when I woke up from this dream, I thought, “Is somebody going to pass?” But then I later realized that the white hanbok was for me to become a mudang because a shaman wears a white hanbok during a ceremony as a sign of purity when she's offering herself to the deities and to the spirit world. So these are dreams that came and I also dreamt of the great bear mother, who is the founder of the Korean nation in the mythology of the bear and the tiger who entered a cave. And so I would have dreams, multiple dreams, where a woman would enter my apartment at the time. And then, a bear would enter my apartment. And then suddenly she would turn into a woman and walk out. And I was not the only one who had this dream. My husband, who's not Korean at all, and who grew up in a very secular nation of Denmark, also had the same dream. 

I take these dreams very seriously, whether it comes from me or often when I'm too stressed or tired to dream properly, my husband gets the dreams. So, you know, I finally decided that I'm going to go through the Nerimgut (내림굿) process. The initiation I went back to Korea on my own. I didn't tell anybody in Korea. I didn't tell my mother and my husband was confused because he didn't know any of this. I was supposed to become a psychologist and I'm very late on finishing my dissertation. And then “You're going to do what? You're going to go to Korea and become a shaman?” But I couldn't explain, I couldn't explain how it was important. And there was a part of me that was also, of course, honored that I was chosen to do this work. And I think we have to be very careful of that feeling. There are a lot of diaspora now who are yearning to do this work without proper guidance, and some people have to do this work, but it's not an easy path and there are a lot of things that have to happen in order for you to do the work–the one day of the initiation ceremony or the ceremony itself doesn't make anybody a shaman. It's your life that makes you a shaman and that's just one step in the process of becoming a healer. So I think it's important to know that that ceremony was important for me, but that's not the only thing that made me into who I am today. But because of that ceremony, I learned how a spirit can work. When the music started playing, I was told to jump, and it's not easy. I jumped for many, many hours that day without the spirits coming in, and I was getting disappointed. My analytic mind was getting in the way. And I thought I had a good life back home; I didn't need this. And I almost had thoughts of giving up everything and just going, but I pushed myself, and there were supportive mudangs there, several of them really helping me, and towards the latter half of the day, the spirits started descending. And when they did, oh my goodness, I couldn't stop jumping. 

It was so powerful. It was power beyond anything I've ever felt in my body. And my body started getting shaped into different forms as the different spirits came through. And there would be a masculine spirit, there would be a feminine spirit, there would be a child spirit. And I would just enact. Because I was actually quite ignorant about the actual tradition, it was validating. These are not things that I knew consciously, because I didn't read much about Korean shamanism, and there aren't that many materials academically on Korean shamanism in English. So, being blind to the tradition was helpful. That I can just follow the energies that came. So I came back, and then I told my mother who was absolutely devastated because she's the one with the shamanic gifts, and she suppressed it all her life. And it was her greatest fear that I would become a shaman myself.

So she never recognized or we never talked about my work for the two years that I was a shaman. And I started learning that the shamanic gift is within her line. My grandfather is from North Korea, and he had a family there when the war broke out, and he had a wife and children. He was a product of prayers to the Ch'ilsŏng (칠성), which is the Great Dipper God of Korean indigenous tradition. And my great-grandmother had a large shrine in their home. They were an aristocratic family. And now, I'm reviving the ancestral energy from that time. 

So, what's happening there now, my relationship to Korea is that I appreciate my culture. This is a part of soul makeup. The soul incarnates into a body with the ancestral memory. So I am Korean in this life, and I appreciate everything about it. It's fun. It's wonderful. It's a rich culture. But there are things about the culture that I don't really relate to, which is the strict role-based society that it is. And it's difficult to maneuver. I need a little more punk energy and rebellious energy to feel free to feel like I can express myself without needing to fit into neat and tidy hierarchy structures. So, it wouldn't be my chosen culture. But I appreciate it. And I think for everybody, it needs to be that you have to balance the gifts of the culture, but not be so attached that you only become defined by it. But you also can't reject it to the point that you don't integrate it into your personality because that will create some conflict within your own mind. But the family, this is turning out to be a longer story than I expected, but here's what's happening now. This is something that pushed me into my full identity as a mudang, I suppose.

Last year, when I went to Korea for the pilgrimage I led, as soon as I arrived, one of my aunts sent me a message representing the whole, which is the maternal side of the family, that they would no longer see me because of my work as a mudang. So they abandoned me right at the beginning of my pilgrimage. These are people who raised me when I was a child. And the youngest aunt who sent me that message is the one I was closest to. She taught me piano. She was a piano teacher. And she lived with us. So I was abandoned by my family right at the beginning of the pilgrimage. I still speak to some of my younger cousins, but the rest of the family is lost to me now. And I also discovered last year that the neighborhood that I grew up in was totally demolished and they're now building huge condo buildings there. So, in a way, it's just that happened to allow me to totally let go of my human side of me to no longer rely on that. And it was painful, but it also freed me to be who I am and to do my work.

Chanhee: I just think about your role as one connecting different worlds and different individuals and different souls while you have to deal with your own loss in this work. So I feel kind of.. I share that pain and I also really admire your work as a healer regardless of this loss. I really appreciate that. 

Helena: Thank you. I think this is the only way we can be when you do, when you're living the heroic life, I suppose. We can't.. the sense of belonging is hard because it is the not belonging that allows me to see a different perspective. So I can't be only of the world. I am a human. I live in the world. I can't only belong to the world because then it doesn't give me the lens that I need to be an outsider to provide a different perspective. 

Chanhee: I’m going back to your relationship to the indigenous land we are currently in. Particularly, in your healing philosophy on your website, you mentioned you help your clients to closely engage with their cultural and ancestral bodies in relation to “the issue of culture and colonization that have shaped their identities within a global context.” 

This reminds me of a particular issue that I have been grappling with in my life. I'm a first-generation immigrant in this Indigenous land. And simply by that fact, I may have unintentionally participated in the violence, theft, and capitalist development of Indigenous land. And whether you're an immigrant or not, no matter how many generations ago your family migrated here, we are guests in this land. So I'm kind of curious to hear your thoughts in relation to your positionality. If someone sees your position as a guest in this indigenous land, who may participate in colonization in various forms, as well as a healer of those who suffered from colonization. How do you see that tension between two?

Helena: Yeah, this is a really great question. It’s not an easy answer, but here's what I've learned so far. The notion of being separate from oneself, one's neighbors, so other people around us, to the animal kingdom, and to the land plant life and everything–that is in the natural environment itself is a colonial idea.

It came through the European Enlightenment that categorized and dissected into separate pieces and which gave us the scientific method and the Western scientific paradigm as we know it now. But this idea itself is the problem when we look at ourselves as separate beings, not as connected beings. So Christianity, of course, reinforced that idea putting humans at the top of the hierarchy, ruling over everything. So there's a power dynamic. This was devastating. And I don't have to go into the details of what happened with the colonization of all the different parts of the world and the effects and the consequences of what we're dealing with now. And even now today, there are active forms of harm done from one group of people to another. So in that way, I have to conclude that we're primitive beings who haven't figured out how to love each other and live in harmony. So we're a very young species, in my opinion. So this is a question that plagues the minds of so many people every day. But what I see is that many people are living in such guilt, and they're overwhelmed and paralyzed by the guilt that they don't know how to move forward. So I think that's also a problem, especially for people who have ancestry with Europeans who colonized. I don't think the solution is to stay in that guilt or to be so overwhelmed that you don't act at all, and you just stay in a place of anger and anguish about what's happened in the past. So I'm a very practical person, too. I like to solve and stay in the here and now in the very moment that we're in now. How do we move forward? So by practicing the art of recovering your own indigenous mind, you no longer see yourself as a separate being. And part of that process is education. So there's no more excuses now. Everybody has access to so much information where they can learn about the colonial history of our planet. And one must, we must learn the history. You cannot remain in ignorance. You have all the information available to you. So I think it is our job as a human being living now to learn the history, educate yourself. But then, this is the really hard part. Everything comes down to living the best version of you, which is that every individual has a responsibility to do their best. Meaning, yes, I know the history of this land that I'm sitting in and living in, and I know my own personal history as a Korean American. And then now, what can I do? So that every relationship that I encounter, which is either in my inner circle of personal relationships or the community outside of it that I do better than what my ancestors did. And in that way, we're reinforcing the idea that when you heal yourself, you're healing the world. But when you harm one person, you're harming yourself and the rest of the world. So when we see the reciprocity, and the energetics of that, the personal responsibility is huge.

When I work with people, sometimes I will have dreams about people, and I not only see them, but I see them with all their ancestors. I've had multiple dreams like this, where I see all their ancestral history, and most people don't think of themselves in this way, especially Westerners. So in my clinical work in psychotherapy when I meet with new clients, I routinely ask them: What is your ancestry? What's your ethnic background? Where did your people come from? And how did they come to America? Because that story, even if you're not aware of it, affects how you operate in the world daily. So in my mind, that's a huge part of psychological healing to know where the heck you came from. So you can position yourself. And then how am I going to turn the story so that I'm not repeating the patterns of my colonial ancestors?

So these are the ways I encourage people to get out of the paralysis of the terrible things that have happened on the planet. And many young people get stuck there and they're sensitive and they don't want to, they want the world to be a better place and we can make it better, but you have to be the one to act within your own life. We all have to do the work of becoming aware of ourselves. And many people still don't. So as long as many people don't do that work, then we're just going to see the reflection back in our world of what's happening. So whatever is happening in the world now at the collective is a part of what I've contributed to it.

Chanhee: Yeah, this conversation has been truly inspiring and intriguing! As a religious historian, I appreciate your emphasis on the importance of learning colonial history and reflecting on what we can do in this world here and now. thank you for your generosity in sharing your time and wisdom.