Note: we use Korea to refer to the present-day place and Corea to refer to our decolonial indigenous heritage

QUICK SUMMARY:

We are “Gut Feeling” (read on to see where that name came from) a team of 11 disabled/neurodivergent QTBIPOC artists, activists, abolitionists, and spiritual healers from various historically marginalized communities and first-generation/low-income immigrant families. We are coming together to aid and uplift our chosen family member, “Friend” (we are using this pseudonym to protect their identity, privacy, and journey) on their path to expanding their healing practice and becoming a culture bearer of indigenous Corean traditions.

The 11 of us will be traveling to Seoul, South Korea for 11 days to perform the transformative (and at times, death-defying) indigenous Corean ritual that will initiate Friend as an officiated baksu mudang (a Corean shaman-priest).

A good portion of this undertaking (roundtrip international plane tickets for our 11-person team and documentary equipment) has been generously covered by Friend’s repurposed gender affirmation surgery savings. And while we each bring our own gifts and resources to the table, our little village is struggling to afford the rest of the out-of-pocket costs and still needs help gathering funds for lodging, food, transportation, ritual venues, ritual items, and disability needs. We need to raise $10,000 by December 20th, 2023–and a total of $15,000 by January 5th, 2024–in order to make this happen. So, we are reaching out to you, our global community, for help!

WHO WE ARE & WHY THIS IS IMPORTANT

Friend is a trans queer Korean victim of police brutality who, as a direct result of this violence, suffers from a life-altering brain injury and chronic disabilities that forced them to survive years of DV and a year of homelessness. Both before and after (and even during!) this horrific period, Friend has dedicated their entire life to serving as a tireless advocate, organizer, and community leader for their disabled QTBIPOC communities—even going on to transforming their own lived experiences into life-saving nationwide policy changes for survivors of the Medical Industrial Complex/psychiatric incarceration, suicidality, sexual violence, police brutality, and housing injustice.

While no stranger to life-changing traumas, what sets this near-death incident of police brutality apart is the way it opened Friend’s mind to visions of their Ancestral homeland, lineage, and futures of healing for our communities—as well as the language to understand their symptoms and years of unremitting bad luck as shinbyeong (the divine shamanic illness suffered by those who are chosen by the gods to become an initiated shaman-priest).

In particular, gyopo, or Korean diaspora, often have difficulty even discerning that they have a calling to become an initiated shaman-priest due to the cultural gap that keeps many of us from knowing the ways of indigenous Corean folk practices. For Friend, it was only after much suffering and seeking—divine tests from the gods—that their Spirit Mother confirmed that the spiritual heaviness they bear can only be healed once they honor their ancestral call to become an initiated shaman-priest, or mudang. With the Corean shamanic initiation ritual, Friend will become a medium through which gods will heal their ancestors’ generational trauma (han) and empower Friend to give back to the community as a shaman-priest—expanding and adding the tools of their indigenous Corean ancestry to their already life-saving healing work. For all of this to happen, Friend must travel to Korea to scale a sacred mountain, among a slew of other daunting Herculean trials, to demonstrate their worthiness to be a vessel of healing for their gods and their communities.

Our team, Friend’s chosen family and collaborators, is committed to making this happen. We’ve even cheesily nicknamed ourselves “Gut Feeling” (as gut means “ritual” in Korean—not to mention severe IBS tends to be one of the many symptoms of shinbyeong and trauma shared by a handful of our team members #TMI).

However, Friend’s discovering and surviving the tumultuous mudang path is only the first hurdle. That’s why we need your help!

HOW YOU CAN HELP:

A shamanic initiation has historically involved entire villages’ worth of resources from the community, [blood-related] family, and the initiated-to-be. Traditionally, these rituals can cost upwards of $20,000 - $60,000 USD! This is more than twice the salaries of many folks on our team, including Friend—and as an out and proud queer and trans person, Friend has not had access to biological familial support for nearly a decade. As Friend’s chosen family, we wholeheartedly believe in this mission and are making sacrifices to our own work, schooling, and savings to back our Friend up—but we are still falling short.

Friend’s initiation is currently planned for mid-January 2024. We still need help securing funds to reserve our lodging, transportation, mobility aids, ritual venues, and ritual items in advance—aiming for $10,000 by December 20th, 2023. An additional $5,000 by January 5th, 2024 would substantially help us relieve the collective burden to afford food and remaining in-person costs for ritual paraphernalia, transportation, and mobility/accessibility needs. That is a total of $15,000 that we need your help gathering in time for our big trip that will change all of our lives!

WHAT WE'LL BRING BACK TO YOU:

In true alignment with Friend’s life commitment to art and activism, they are also working to set up their shamanic initiation to serve the dual purpose of being a shareable source of healing and empowerment for future generations of Corean diasporic survivors and our queer, trans, and disabled communities! To accomplish this, Friend (with the help of 10 chosen family members, who are serving as disability aides and spiritual, creative, and healthcare professionals for this expedition) will archive their journey as a VR (virtual reality) documentary to invite fellow seekers of healing to become immersed in their intimate transformational process. This medium has specifically been chosen to make this historic event accessible to disabled queer and trans Corean gyopo who otherwise could not survive or afford to make pilgrimage to Korea to heal their ancestral trauma—as well as those who wish to grow their care, empathy, and support for these communities by witnessing and learning about our beautiful histories of survivorship and powerful resilience in the face of impossible odds.

Beyond this GoFundMe campaign, for those of you who’d like more tangible mementos to connect with us and our journey, our team is also working on creating some goodies for you to enjoy at home! These include: a calendar of Corean shamanic images/ritual tools utilized by mudang and a children’s book based on a famous Corean folktale, “The Tiger and the Hare.”

We’ll also be printing hella t-shirts with our Gut Feeling logo (featured on this page) for a fundraiser sale soon! Look out for a poll on this page and on our Instagram in a couple weeks to VOTE for which products you’d like to see our Flaming Hot Belly Buddy: from mugs and tumblers, to journals and totes, and even stuffed animals?!

All the proceeds from these sales will go towards our trip, and we’ll be sure to update this page as we make progress!

LET'S CLIMB THIS MOUNTAIN TOGETHER

This holiday season, please share our fundraiser widely and donate anything you can to help us make this transformational healing journey—and come back in one piece! No donation is too small, nor too big! Even words of encouragement would be so energetically valuable to uplift our small but mighty team, as we scramble to make some magic happen in such a short period of time!

This is not an easy path, but we trust Friend and who they are; their work ethic, natural talents, and powerful spiritual attunement; their proven track record of saving lives, pouring everything they have into their communities, making the world a better place, and being a kind and generous soul time and time again even when they are running on empty. It is as clear as day that Friend was born to actualize our collective dreams for community-centered healing and love as a baksu mudang. So we humbly ask you—our global family—choose us back and choose to be a part of our journey by giving what you can to make these dreams come true! No donation is too small, nor too big—and every single contribution will be treasured and carried with us on our journey to Korea and back Home, where we are excited to share what we learn with all of you!