She grew up in the southern part of South Korea, where the mountains met the sea and stillness was simply the texture of ordinary life. The landscape held it. She carried that knowing with her when she left for America at eighteen — even as the years ahead would slowly cover it over.
Childhood wounding set something searching in her without knowing what it was looking for. She found her way into high fashion in Seattle and gave herself to it fully. Skilled, dedicated — and beneath all of it, an ache that no external beauty could touch. The beauty she chased was always elsewhere.
Then burnout arrived — and with it something harder to name. Life felt empty. Sad. A mind that couldn't rest, couldn't settle, couldn't escape from itself. The suffering was real and relentless, and it finally asked the one thing she had been avoiding: to turn inward.
About fifteen years ago, that search led her to Buddhism — and the Four Noble Truths. There is suffering. Something in her went completely still. Someone had finally named what was happening — and pointed toward a way through. The curiosity that arose was immediate and uncontrollable. That was the beginning — of studying the mind, of learning to sit with it, of going steadily deeper.
After years of searching and studying the mind, her curiosity even led her towards deeper states of consciousness. She packed a bag and traveled to the mountains of Peru, sitting in retreat for a month. Everything she had been studying turned into direct experience. The self she had built over a lifetime dissolved — into complete emptiness, into the absolute interdependence of all beings.
What remained was unshakeable: this life does not only belong to this body. It belongs to something much larger — and she was here to live and share it.
The habitual mind doesn't dissolve with peak experiences. Coming back, she found it waiting — the old patterns, the forgetting, the gap between what she had touched and how she was living. This is where practice truly began. Not in the dissolving. In the returning — expanding the capacity to stay with what causes suffering. In that awareness, things shift and understanding deepens. What reveals itself was never built — pure awareness, always already here.
Two years of backpacking followed — sitting with teachers, attending silent retreats, letting each experience deepen. Then, wanting to know whether the monastery was her true home, she arrived at a 100-day Korean Zen retreat in the mountains, carrying a single question: What is this?
Halfway through — at three in the morning, when the world was still and sleeping — she stood in front of Sanshin-gak (산신각), the mountain spirit temple. And then, from within the hall, a voice rose — chanting the Heart Sutra. Unhurried. Ancient. Completely at home in the dark.
The moon was present. The stars were alive. Two pine trees stood before her. The sound, the light, the cool air, the silhouette of the trees — none of it separate.
So vivid, so precise — she went immediately to write a poem. Pinned it to the message board — for the voice she didn't know. Not knowing who would find it.
That was how she met Jingfu. Through his presence, through his sound, through a poem written at three in the morning to a voice she didn't yet know.