Santa Clara Meditation Relationship Improvement – What was your bullying experience?
I was bullied for a year when I was in 4th grade. I was 10 years old. My experience at this time was heartbreaking, and I think it had a big impact on how I viewed people I met and who I made friends with.
One day, a pigeon came into my class through a window. The pigeon landed on the floor of the classroom and couldn’t fly because its wings were injured. My homeroom teacher asked the students if there was anyone who wanted to take the injured pigeon home and care for it. I quickly raised my hand. When the girls saw me with my hands up, they started bullying me, saying that I was being condescending. After that, I ate my lunch by myself and no one talked to me. I was like air. No one tried to make eye contact with me and I walked home alone on my way home from school. The pigeon I brought home gradually couldn’t open its eyes and soon died. I wrapped the pigeon in a white cloth and buried it in my yard. When I was in 4th grade, my school life was so depressing and gloomy. It was hard going to school. It was scary to sit in the classroom.
The seemingly endless misfortune ended when I was in 5th grade. Students who didn’t know me became classmates and I got lucky. A very kind classmate of mine gave me a hand and we both became best friends. Her name was Eunsook, and she lived in the same neighborhood as me. Eunsook was the third of seven siblings. She was naive, loyal and always took care of me. When I went to Eunsook’s house, her older sisters and younger siblings were crowded in a small house. I loved going to her house. Eunsook had a lot of family members, who had dinner together.
Then, one day, my dad’s job moved to a big city, and my family moved with him. I had to say goodbye to Eunsook. We exchanged letters for a while even after I moved, but we broke up forever after we became middle school students. Sometimes I miss Eunsook. Would she have become a mother like me? What is her job? Does she remember me?
Moving to a big city, I wanted to completely erase my history of being bullied in fourth grade. So I decorated myself so that I could be seen by my friends as a nice person without showing off. As if washing my identity, I changed my dialect, used standard language, and started to make myself seem like a kind person who does favors for her friends. I always tried to be part of a group, pretended to understand my friend’s feelings even if I didn’t understand her feelings, and began to imitate her feelings. My relationships were getting more and more exhausting. Even when I became an adult, I copied other people’s words and images constantly in my mind so that I wouldn’t be excluded from the group.
Fortunately, there is a happy ending to my story. I have cleansed myself of my past timid and ignorant self through meditation. Before I meditated, my mind was filled with fear, worry, comparison, inferiority, superiority, and selfishness. My meditation teacher told me those thoughts are all false and if I throw all these away, they will disappear. The different thoughts in the mind must be thrown away with the mind. So, with the meditation method I learned, I started throwing away my harsh experience of being bullied when I was in 4th grade.
Now I’m honest. I am able to accept myself as I am, and not as another person. Relationships with people are comfortable and they tend to like me very much. They say I’m a comfortable person. You wouldn’t know how big of a heart you have until you let go of those mirage-like emotions within you. I hope you find your big and ambitious heart too. True happiness is within you.
by Donna Seo
