Campbell Meditation Story – Abandoning ‘Me’ Who Hurt My Family

Lee Keum Seong / CPA



As I embarked on my 40s, where others claimed I had reached success, I on the other hand, felt no joy in neither body nor mind. As a CPA, I earned a comfortable living, and perhaps it’s because I had, more or less, tried doing everything, but there wasn’t anything new that I really wanted to do.

“I was embarrassed about my family, my colleagues didn’t suit my taste, life felt stifling”

Being smack in the middle as the third of 5 daughters didn’t suit my taste. I was dissatisfied with my father who was incompetent. Since my mother was the bread winner of the family, she was rarely home and so our house was unkempt, which made me feel very wistful. It seemed to me that my eldest sister didn’t look after the younger siblings and that she was living her life in whatever way she pleased. As such, I, as a younger sibling was busy “teaching” my eldest sister. Not to mention that due to the thought that I needed to look after my younger siblings, I tried even more so to “teach” them. I studied hard and took care of the household chores while silently shouting out that I should try to live righteously. But since nothing went the way I wanted it to, I ended up feeling resigned. Everything was a disappointment and my family being the way they were was an embarrassment.
This kind of mindset carried over to my workplace. Of course there were colleagues who did their job well, but there were also colleagues who didn’t do their job well and I couldn’t stand the sight of those people. I would especially worry about projects not being done properly and ‘what if we get fined for not doing something properly?’ And I always worked with the thought in mind that I wanted to hurry up and quit my job.

Because I was living like that, I would wake up every morning thinking, “How am I going to get through the day?” The feeling of being stuck made day-to-day living very difficult. Thinking that this was all there was to life made my heart ache. I couldn’t even get married. If I were to get married, I would need to match to the other person and do things that I didn’t want to do and I didn’t feel confident I would be able to do that. All the while, the one person I could not abandon was me.

“Upon realizing that, in fact, the actual shameful person was me, I was grateful for everyone.”

In the midst of living like that, I came across this meditation and got started. Even though I wasn’t perfect, still, I felt that I had lived righteously as I began to look back on my life. For the first time, I was able to see that I had lived a shameful life which I never wanted to think about ever again. When I opened my eyes in the mornings, the thought of being able to discard my shameful self made me feel grateful as I made my way to the meditation center. Discarding the burden of the thought of having to look after my family as well as my frame of mind that I had to live righteously allowed my body which was always tired in the past to become healthier and my mind became more at ease. I, who had always felt hopeless throughout my life, started to feel hopeful for the first time.
And I, who tried to teach my younger siblings in the past, began to learn from them. The biggest and most important change was the fact that all the hurt that was exchanged among family members had disappeared. I am truly grateful for to my mother and sister who introduced me, the bratty and negative minded person that I was, to this meditation.


I also came to realize that I had no right to judge my colleagues. I am simply grateful to my colleagues who were just minding their own business and doing their work. I am grateful to them for doing some of my grunt work and I let them know of my appreciation. I was able to benefit greatly from their hard work and that only makes me want to treat them better.