Friday Care Package
Cutting the Han: Care as Self-Compassion
“Han is the suppressed, amassed, and condensed experience of suffering at the individual and collective level. Liberation requires releasing Han, cutting Han, and transforming Han into new life.” — Suh Nam-dong, Minjung theologian
Han is that heaviness I carry in my chest—the accumulated weight of generational violence, dispossession, and grief. Minjung Theology teaches us that Han is not just personal pain but collective: the rage, sorrow, and bitterness born of oppression that has no place to go.
I know this Han. I carry it in my bones, in my nervous system, in the catastrophic anxiety that hijacks me and spills out sideways. For years, I didn’t have language for it. But now I see: what I carry is not only my own trauma, but the accumulated trauma of my ancestors, of my people, of those the world has deemed disposable.
Theologians of the Minjung tradition say we must cut the Han—release it, compost it, allow it to be transfigured into something else. To hold Han without release is to be crushed by it. To cut Han is not to deny anger or grief, but to transform it. It is to compost rage into love, despair into solidarity, grief into generative care.
This is the work I am learning in real time. I am practicing self-compassion by letting my Han speak, then letting it go. I am composting anger and rage instead of transmitting it onto others. I am cutting the Han so I can live. I am becoming sober of mind.
bell hooks said, “To love well is the task in all meaningful relationships, not just romantic bonds.” And Minjung theology insists that cutting Han is itself an act of love: for self, for others, for the possibility of another world.
This is what care looks like for me right now:
Composting rage instead of weaponizing it.
Letting grief breathe instead of silencing it.
Cutting Han so that I might recover my body, my breath, my capacity to be in relationship.
Han is not mine alone. It is ours. And as we learn to compost it together, we practice liberation.
So today I invite you:
What is the Han you are carrying? How might you cut it, compost it, and let it become the soil of self-compassion and collective care?
✨ Ritual Exhale:
Breathe in Han.
Breathe out release.
Breathe in rage.
Breathe out compost.
Breathe in grief.
Breathe out care.