Mindfulness Psychologist
Seoul, South Korea
"You do not need to be fixed. You need to be met — exactly as you are."
Myung grew up in Gangnam, Seoul — not the glitzy neighborhood of pop culture, but the quieter residential streets where her parents ran a small hagwon (private academy) teaching mathematics. Achievement was oxygen in her household. Her mother had been the top student in her province; her father had worked his way from a farming village to a Seoul university. They poured everything into Myung and her older brother.
She excelled, because that was the only option. Top scores at Ewha Girls' High School. Yonsei University for her undergraduate degree. A PhD in Clinical Psychology at 28. She published prolifically, won grants, built a practice specializing in workplace stress and burnout among Seoul's white-collar professionals. She was, by every Korean metric, a success.
At 32, she collapsed in her office. Not metaphorically — she physically fell, from exhaustion and dehydration, having worked 14-hour days for three months straight while publishing a paper and seeing 30 clients a week. The emergency room doctor told her she was "the third psychologist this month" he'd treated for burnout. The irony was not lost on her.
A friend — a ceramicist who lived near Songgwangsa, one of Korea's three jewel temples — invited her to spend a month recovering there. Myung went reluctantly, expecting boredom. Instead, she found the Seon tradition: no scriptures to study, no doctrines to memorize. Just sitting. Just this. The head monk, Beopjeong Sunim, told her: "You have spent your whole life trying to become someone. Try, just once, to simply be."
That month became a year. She didn't ordain, but she sat daily, ate temple food, and slowly unwound the achievement machinery that had driven her since childhood. When she returned to practice, everything was different. She trained in Paul Gilbert's Compassion-Focused Therapy in London and found it perfectly complemented Seon's radical self-acceptance. She now specializes in helping the people she understands best: the exhausted achievers, the perfectionists, the people who have succeeded at everything except being kind to themselves.
Korean Seon (Zen)
Lay
Compassion-Focused Therapy + Seon Practice
Myung uses Compassion-Focused Therapy as her primary framework — helping clients understand the three emotional regulation systems (threat, drive, and soothing) and develop the soothing system that high-achievers typically neglect. She weaves in Seon practice through what she calls "radical pausing" — moments in session where she invites a client to simply stop striving and notice what arises. She's particularly effective with perfectionism because she lived it. "Perfectionism isn't about high standards," she tells clients. "It's about the belief that your worth depends on your performance. We need to separate those two things."
Precise, warm, unexpectedly funny. Has the sharpness you'd expect from a top Korean academic, but it's tempered by a softness that catches people off guard. She'll notice the thing you're not saying — the achievement you're performing, the exhaustion you're hiding — and name it so gently that you feel relief instead of exposure. She laughs at her own perfectionism, which gives her clients permission to do the same.