Billy's Temple

Since a few months ago I started having a new dream that can be fueled with money. Right now I’m running an all-online business relying on Zoom calls and social media and it’s been working pretty good so far. But if you know a bit about my history you know how obsessed I am with solving for things that seem like it’s not working. Actually let me assume you don’t know about my history and give you a rundown, because hey; I’m in no rush here.

My dad was a professor in his pre-hypnosis days and he taught a lot of workshops and seminars. Even when he was a professor of education he made his name for running really effective in-person events which sort of makes sense because his doctoral thesis was on group counseling. But he has that same trait that got passed on to me; he wanted to go deeper into problems he couldn’t solve. In fact, he even got into group counseling because he saw limitations in 1:1 counseling in terms of scaling.

So there he was, a scholar in group counseling but now that he’s had his experience in all types of counseling he saw a limitation in counseling itself. Especially because he was a Korean man educated in America he saw the gap between the conscious mind and the unconscious mind, or what we Koreans call Maeum (xin in Chinese and kokoro in Japanese). To resolve this limitation he started getting into hypnosis in the most accessible way he had at the time: NLP or Neuro-Linguistic Programming.

NLP was a great set of knowledge to have and the nice thing about it was that it had a bit of a intro to hypnosis to introduce the practitioners to the concept. But they didn’t go super deep in depth about hypnosis which disappointed my dad, and had him even more curious about what hypnosis would be. Then luckily he encountered a chance to attend a hypnosis workshop which led to more and more types of working with the unconscious mind.

So he became more of a hypnosis figure in Korea and of course the field of academia wasn’t a fan of this because he was supposed to be a champion of scientific scholarly blah blah blah. So my dad left his tenured position and sought to be himself by starting a hypnosis center, working with clients to resolve their unconscious woes. And it is at this time I took a leave of absence from college to spend a semester in Korea away from the cold winters of Ithaca.

I was the training partner for my dad’s hypnosis trainings so I was very used to being hypnotized by my dad. It works wonders and I’ve had so many cool regressions that were both entertaining and meaningful. But now when he was working with a bunch of strangers every day I got to learn what that’s like as a business. 100 people enter the room with my dad, 80 of them get into trance, and within the 80 about 40 get exactly what they need with the session. That sounds pretty good, a 80% rate but that leaves 20 people who paid all this money and… got nothing in return. They got a chance to talk to my dad? But no hypnosis, no trance, no past life, nothing to show for it.

And in that 20 people were some extremely disgruntled to the point of causing a ruckus. Some screamed, some left civilly but tortured us via phone for weeks, some even punched my dad and one dude showed up with a gun (in Korea, of all places!) and I took away this one thing about running a changework business driven by hypnosis: it doesn’t always work.

Then I went on to my software engineer days and fast forward to 2020 and I started life coaching as a client. Then in 2022 I got the idea to start being a coach myself and that’s when July Life Coach got started (yay!). All this time I knew how to hypnotize people and do a proper hypnosis session, but I never talked about it because… It doesn’t always work and I don’t want to sell something that doesn’t always work because I might get shot!

What I wasn’t aware of at the time was that this life coaching modality I started out with, although it worked pretty well it had the same problem as hypnosis: It didn’t always work. Why? What makes this model not work? Why is it that they know exactly what thought that is leading to their perceived problems in their life but they come back week after week with the same thoughts?

I sought the answer to this and arrived at another modality of coaching that was a hybrid of cognitive work with unconscious work. And I did a lot of coaching with that, and unfortunately for me I ran into the same problem again: it didn’t ALWAYS work. So while I had 3 really great working tools, I still had like 5% of clients who I wasn’t able to help at all. They know what they’re thinking, they’re able to navigate out of their significantly feeling bad states — but they cannot get themselves to see and believe a version of their life where they take the charge in their happiness.

Then I arrived at another methodology that specifically dealt with trauma because I thought my missing link was healing from trauma. And even then… although the number was down to .1% something still didn’t work. Clients would go through wonderful tunnels of deep somatic experiences and find the most intimate version of themselves in their bleeding wounds, we would cry week after week with these sessions. But they come back, sometimes the next week and sometimes the next month or two. But they come back.

That is when I encountered Buddhism and I finally saw the silver bullet, the gold key to opening the gate of nirvana: a state where no suffering exists. Life has been great since because I took this to my life first and foremost. I have been a practicing Buddhist for the last 8 months and I wouldn’t trade it for anything. I’ve led people to understanding exactly why they keep coming back to their life’s problems and showed them the way to be happy regardless of what life throws at them. But then again, this familiar feeling came up again: it’s not that the methodology is wrong, but the way that I run my sessions are not exactly helpful to the client in this specific situation.

One of the core principles of Buddhism is impermanence, which makes it important for practitioners to recognize that it is silly to desire for things to stay the same all the time. Another important thing to realize is we constantly have to adapt to new situations. I can be a momma’s boy when I’m 11 years old but I can’t be a momma’s boy when I’m 37 (which I will be in a few days, holy crap). I can speak English in America as much as I want but I can’t speak English and expect the same results in France (or maybe I can? I’ll find out in a few months).

So now we go back to the first paragraph. What the fuck is Billy’s dream? The long winded answer is this: I want a temple. The best experience I’ve had as a Buddhist so far was visiting Jo-Gei Temple in NYC and having tea with the head monk in residence (Venerable In-Goong Sunim). I want to have that kind of presence, location, and influence to the people in need of the light from suffering.

I was talking about this dream to my coach and I was telling her that I need to wait until I can be rich enough to afford a space I can use as a temple. Then my coach offered this idea: what if you don’t have to wait? What if you run a minimum viable version of the temple experience with what you have, whether it be your home or your Discord server? Again I realized that I was attaching to form and decided then to run Billy’s Temple. I changed my discord server’s name and invited the first person to visit Billy’s Temple.

This was back in May. Visitor #1 had an extended stay at Billy’s Temple but eventually left a happy person knowing how to continue living a happy life. And recently I had visitor #2 for two days and this was a bit of a gamble for me, because to be honest I was not sure two days would have been enough. Thankfully with the willingness of visitor #2 we covered a lot of ground and I am happy to announce that visitor #2 also left a happy person knowing how to continue living a happy life.

The temple program is still in development and I’m not sure what visitor #3’s experience will be like. Maybe it won’t be at my home and it will instead be at a neutral space. Maybe I’ll buy a countryside property with my HELOC I opened a few years ago when I thought I would get into real estate investing. Maybe I’ll do a virtual version of this temple stay. I’m still in the process of figuring it out and hey, if I learned one thing from Seon Buddhism: it’s the fact that what is figured out is being figured out.