A Living Hologram

I first encountered the concept of the hologram in Hakomi training, as a way of understanding how experience can be held in the body.

Every present moment carries traces of what came before.

In a hologram, each fragment contains information about the whole.

Perhaps our lives are something like that. The present is not simply the latest moment in a sequence. It is where the whole history of a life finds expression.

Through awareness, I can travel across time and space without ever leaving the present.

As I connect with my own heart, sitting quietly in America, I find myself with my dad in Korea, lying alone in his hospital bed at night. I whisper into his ear, “I’m right here with you, Dad.”

Sometimes, in that same quiet presence, I sense my grandfather, who passed away many years ago. I cannot hear his voice with my ears, yet somehow I know it. I feel him telling me that he loves me.

Whether this belongs to memory, imagination, or something beyond words, I cannot say. I simply know that, in those moments, the boundaries between time and space seem to soften at the edges.

My father was born in 1942, when Korea was still under Japanese occupation. Before he was a year old, his mother died. He once told me he wishes he could remember her face.

A few years later, the Korean War broke out.

During the evacuation, the boat carrying him across the Han River overturned. As he struggled in the water, a stranger reached out a hand, pulled him up, and saved his life.

More than seventy years later, when my father told me this story, he could still feel the terror of drowning—and the warmth of the stranger’s hand that saved his life.

He does not remember the warmth of his own father, my grandfather.

Sometimes I wonder where those moments went.

Did they simply remain in the past, in memory? Or do they still live within him—in the way he carries himself, his body, his belief, in the way he meets the world, and in the way he loves?

Perhaps the past is alive in the way we breathe, move, relate, and respond.

Perhaps every present moment is a living hologram, breathing itself into form.

We are breathing holograms.

When I meet people, I am meeting their living hologram.

I open my senses to receive them in their wholeness.

I may not know what it was like to live your story, your history, but I would like to understand.