“which is why this idea seems incongruous with what Seoul looks like
today—jam-packed skyscrapers with very little open space.”
While most Koreans would be uncomfortable with the idea of
psychotherapy, they do nonetheless place great authority on
traditional shamanlike healers, called musok-in. By some estimates,
up to 80 percent of Koreans loosely adhere to shamanism in some
form, often while also identifying as Christians, Buddhists or atheists.
What it means today is that the forest trails are starting to fill up
with pale, urban weekend refugees, not so unlike Sepial and me. After
about an hour and half of leisurely walking, we circled back to the
visitors center. We gamely stuck our extremities back into the
machines for a quick physiology check. I clocked a nice little drop in
my blood pressure, from 111 over 73 to 107 over 61. So far, chalk one
up for Nature. But Sepial’s blood pressure was a few points higher,
and my heart-rate variability data didn’t show much improvement
after the 90-minute walk. Park sat down with us to go over the charts,
which were in Korean, with confounding splashes of dots strewn
across an axis. Looking at Sepial’s data, Park told her that because
she wasn’t used to exercise, the walk had actually stressed her out
physiologically. “You need to exercise more,” he said. It seemed a
logical prescription. Don’t health-care practitioners always say that?
As for me, Park said that while my overall stress levels seem
healthy, my chart indicated that the balance between my sympathetic
nervous system and my parasympathetic nervous system is out of
whack. I know how to amp my system up with exercise and activity,
but I could use more practice damping it down. In other words, Sepial
and I appeared to be opposites. “Meditation could be good for you,”
he said. In more bad news, the HRV machine mysteriously gave a
read on how thick my blood vessels are. Mine were showing some
signs of thickening, and any time the word “thickening” applies to
you, it’s not auspicious. Vessels naturally thicken with age, getting
stiffer and less flexible. They have a harder time delivering oxygen