Emotional Health and Well-Being

Originally posted in July of 2014 after the passing of my friend, Dr. John.

When I moved to the suburbs of Chicago shortly after my 20th birthday to begin graduate school, as much as I needed to learn about human physiology and clinical sciences, I was in even greater need of general life guidance. Having been raised by ultra conservative immigrant parents, I had more than a few things to learn about how to understand and interact with people.

I had the great fortune of having as a classmate a fellow named John who was 47 years old and excited to begin a second career. He had done well as a real estate appraiser and property flipper on the east coast, and though he never boasted of his wealth, I knew that John had earned enough to be retired, and was pursuing a career as a health care provider because he had restored his own health with alternative therapies and wanted to share his passion for natural healing with others. Read more

Over the weekend, I stumbled upon this video on how Koreans of different ages and life circumstances react to meeting a fellow Korean lady who has vitiligo - for all the insight this offers into the ways in which we humans see ourselves and others, I feel it's worth viewing. Read more

Many thanks to Kent Nerburn and HarperCollins for allowing us to share this chapter from Make Me An Instrument of Your Peace with our readers. - Ben Kim

By Kent Nerburn

I once spoke with a man who had done hard time at a maximum security penitentiary. I asked him what had been the single most significant lesson he had learned from being inside. He looked at me with sad eyes and said, "You would not believe what lives inside the human heart. There really is such a thing as evil." Read more

I've been at a Toronto area hospital over the past several days as my dad recovers from colon surgery. While resting on his hospital bed on Sunday morning, I asked him to share anything he remembers about living through the Korean War. Read more