Description
There’s a particular hazard in writing a book about your own emotional pain when you’ve already published two bestsellers about acceptance. The reader arrives expecting clarity. The pain you’re about to confess has to fit somehow into the framework you’ve spent a decade refining for them. Haemin Sunim, the Korean Zen Buddhist teacher behind The Things You Can See Only When You Slow Down, knows this trap and walks straight into it. When Things Don’t Go Your Way is his attempt to be the patient and the doctor at once, and the book is most interesting where that doubled role wobbles.
Six chapters mark the emotional weather: heartache, burnout, loneliness, facing uncertainty, enlightenment-not-yet-arrived. Each holds three personal essays followed by long strings of aphoristic stanzas, koan-shaped verses that sometimes hit and sometimes don’t. The book opens with a parable from the Nirvana Sutra: two sister goddesses, prosperity and darkness, who must be invited in together.
The strongest material is autobiographical. In 2020, a Korean television program filmed Sunim at the modest home he had purchased for his elderly parents with book royalties and transferred to his Buddhist order. A senior monk took to Facebook and labelled him a “parasite” and an “entertainer.” A rumor circulated that he owned a Ferrari. The pile-on lasted weeks. He describes himself in that period as “the founder of the School of Broken Hearts” suddenly in personal need of repair — a line that carries the small ache of someone who has noticed the joke without quite finding it funny.
Sunim traces his fear of abandonment backward through months of journaling and rage, until he lands on a childhood memory: “a little boy desperately looking for my mom” in a Korean open market. A strange woman takes the boy’s hand and leads him to a house where there is no mother, only an unfamiliar man. He escapes back to the market. He finds his mother. The detail is the kind of thing no advice manual could invent, and Sunim handles it without dressing it up. He simply lets the small boy stand there in his own panic.
That tidiness is the book’s recurring move. I read this passage twice; the second time I noticed how cleanly it resolves — how quickly the panic folds into a lesson about inner-child integration. A vulnerable scene appears. A framework absorbs it. The pattern is comforting and also, I think, somewhat suspect.
Take the chapter on how you feel about the universe. Sunim contrasts his late father, who lived as if every gain had to be wrestled from a scarce world, with his monastic teacher, who lives as if the universe always delivers. The teacher prays and donations arrive. The teacher prays and the weather clears for the Buddha’s birthday. The teacher gives away whatever he owns and somehow has more to give. The argument the chapter builds is that this is a choice — that you can decide which kind of universe you live in. It’s a warm idea. It is also a closed loop. Every example confirms the thesis because the examples are selected to confirm it. The chapter never asks what happens to the believer whose prayers go unanswered, or the donor who keeps giving and ends up with nothing. There’s a whole literature on survivorship bias that haunts this kind of theology, and the book passes through it without noticing the shadow.
Sunim builds an entire essay around Haruki Murakami’s “small but certain happiness” and another around Sherry Turkle’s “alone together,” extending each only slightly past the source. The aphorisms that follow each essay vary in weight. His distinction that “Loneliness is being by yourself and yet needing someone” while solitude is the same circumstance held differently is the kind of move that does real work. Other stanzas — that the spiritually mature have a more mature idea of the divine, that the truth is something we already knew — read as tautology in stained-glass dress. There are too many of them. They outnumber the essays they accompany, and a sharper edit would have served the prose.
What stays with me is not the framework but the rooms inside it. The little boy in the market. The cousin’s broken filmstrip thrown away in shame. The senior monk’s Facebook post that the Korean press carried for days, waiting for Sunim to argue back. Those scenes survive the polishing the book performs on them. If you read this for the Zen wisdom in the subtitle, you’ll find it stated and re-stated with patience. If you read it for the human underneath, he’s there too — most clearly when the lesson hasn’t quite arrived to claim him.
If you’d like to read the full book in EPUB or MOBI format, feel free to send me an email—I’d be happy to share a free copy with you. Please reach me at: thenovaleaf@gmail.com
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