Some people turn their heads the moment they feel the world is wrong. Others take it on head-first and fight. O2Heal CEO La Yihyeong is the kind of person who chose the latter without hesitation.
He studied hard, entered college as a scholarship student, and walked out on his own. He carried out undercover employment to take part in the labor movement and poured everything from his most brilliant 20s into the worksite where he spent his days. After that, he shifted his focus to the business front, achieved overwhelming financial success, and today he travels between Jeju and Seoul to fundamentally change the inner mindset of corporate leaders.
What La Yihyeong’s book 『The Inner Revolution That Brings Success』 says is not the usual kind of self-improvement. It is a firm conclusion and hands-on guide he reached after going through two major life revolutions: ‘When consciousness is opened, the world looks different.’
01. If you don’t have one, you make the road — and you don’t blame anyone
It started with a boy selling newspapers in Daejeon. Even when he was hit and driven out in a neighborhood where bullying was rampant, he ran through the streets every dawn. Because his family was struggling, he had the tough-minded resolve that he would buy his own school uniform and raise his own college tuition. But he doesn’t remember those days as hardship.
"If you don’t have it, you make the road. I don’t blame anyone. That’s just how I’ve lived."
That one sentence is the starting point for defining the human being, La Yihyeong. He was angry at real-world inequality, but he never got trapped in a victim mindset. Whenever the walls of reality seemed to choke off his breath, it became his long-standing habit to force open a way through — even harder.
02. A young revolutionary who tried to overturn the world, seeing the next path in front of a wall
He truly dreamed of revolution. At the age of 25, working at a company with a workforce of about 1,500, he launched a new union while pushing out an employer-friendly union without using the word ‘worker’ even once. Believing that the world could change if 30,000 workers stood up together, he took a job at a giant factory in Ulsan and threw himself into intense activism.
But what came back was dismissal. He had to jump into the front lines of earning a living right away. Ironically, that massive blockage opened an entirely different second path in his life.
03. Overwhelming success — yet a void and thirst that wouldn’t be filled
In his early 30s, after achieving remarkable success in a construction-related business, he founded the country’s first paid financial planning counseling firm, 〈Podo Asset〉, right after the IMF foreign exchange crisis. The model of proposing only the financial products customers truly needed and charging a counseling fee delivered a fresh and bold disruption to the finance industry at the time.
The contract retention rate converged toward 100%, and he moved in and seized the large corporate B2B market on the spot, including LG, Samsung, and Hyundai. The network of 600,000 union members he built while working in labor activism in his 20s became, 그대로, his strongest business foundation.
It was a road paved with unrelenting success. But strangely, on one corner of his mind there always remained an inexplicable sense of deficiency and thirst. In the middle of severe stress, he met the Jeongtohoe (Pure Land) order through a friend’s recommendation, and for the first time he encountered the teachings of the Buddha. ‘Everything is created by thoughts. This universe is all connected by karmic ties.’ To him, the story didn’t sound like mysticism — it sounded like clear, practical science. After that day, his serious study of the mind truly began.
04. The second revolution that turns inward
In La Yihyeong’s 『The Inner Revolution That Brings Success』, the core concept he emphasizes above all is ‘the level of consciousness.’ Human consciousness has distinct layers. The explanation is that you must move out of Level 4, where surface emotional reactions and fear dominate, and go down to Level 2, where deep inner calm takes root; only then does a completely different world open up for a businessman.
"If a leader’s consciousness doesn’t awaken, management is nothing but suffering every day. Every day you see employees, get angry, blame China, and complain that today’s young generation just can’t work — and in doing so, you end up missing the best opportunities and precious time right in front of you."
Six years ago, he made another decisive choice. He handed over his previously solid business to younger successors without holding back, and established 〈O2Heal〉 solely to help people grow in human consciousness. Then he launched his own meditation and inner revolution program.
So far, about 6,000 people, including roughly 300 CEOs, have gone through the process. Over the past six years, he has directly run the program on-site, and the changes he witnessed were astonishing. Leaders whose consciousness opened through meditation noticeably changed, including in business performance. A businessman who used to take antidepressant medication every day experienced a huge insight during the program and stopped taking the medication that very day. Time and again, companies that had been facing a risk of insolvency rose again. And miracle-like cases began to accumulate in data — including cancer patients dancing together while healing themselves.
Can people really gain a fundamental realization about life so easily? “Buddha, Jesus, Laozi, and other sages already showed the clear way. There’s no reason we can’t understand it.”
His program was the challenge of carrying that out. He emphasizes that the moment consciousness changes is not gradual but happens ‘in an instant,’ and that the process of walking silently toward the doorway of essence one confronts at that time is itself training. His program was the challenge of carrying that out.
05. ‘Real meditation’ that sheds the clothes of religion and mysticism
When he met global meditation teacher Osho and learned from him, he found that one thing had a clear limit. He concluded that methods created in India’s cultural background 30 years ago could not simply be applied as-is to the on-the-ground setting in today’s Republic of Korea.
Difficult Buddhist terms, hard-to-grasp Sanskrit words, and loosely defined words like chakras or the baekhui point — along with distinct mystic elements — were blocking modern people’s access. He delved on his own into neuroscience, exercise science, and positive psychology. And at last, he developed his own set of 28 ‘Active Meditation’ movements, optimized for modern people.
His principle was clear. ‘Whether someone is a Christian, Buddhist, or unaffiliated, anyone should be able to see results regardless of religion.’ To do that, he fully reinterpreted every difficult term into intuitive Korean words and principles at the level of the first year of middle school.
The ability to deliver difficult truths to the public in the easiest way—he says he trained for that exceptional capability fiercely back in his days of labor activism in his 20s with a smile. A 25-year-old young union committee chair who changed the consciousness of an entire worksite without ever using a single word ‘worker’ is now, in the meditation market, cutting through the essence in exactly the same way. This innovative active meditation program has proven its effectiveness perfectly by receiving a remarkable satisfaction score of ‘98.93 points’ in in-service training for teachers affiliated with the Jeju Provincial Office of Education in 2025.
06. “Life is a festival” — that is everything in management and in life
The CEO’s core message to corporate leaders is straightforward. “Life is a festival.”
One bank chairman at a financial institution who participated in a program he oversees got angry, saying, “Every day is tension and war, and you have to fight just to survive — what is all this festive talk about?” La Yihyeong says that such a fierce reaction is actually counterevidence showing just how spiritually dried up leaders’ hearts are.
"Between the person who always tightens their face, worries, and works a business, and the person who is grateful at every moment, supports people around them, and enjoys running the business — who would be more likely to do business better? If you ask yourself only that, the answer comes out."
According to a workplace lifestyle report for Korean office workers surveyed by the global research firm Gallup, the share of people who actively immerse themselves in work is just 13%. By contrast, workers who actively disengage while hoping the company fails account for 17%, and the rest just fill time. La Yihyeong insists that the only high-efficiency solution that can change this tragic structure is ‘a leader’s joy.’ 『The Inner Revolution That Brings Success』 is the book that contains the overwhelming secret of joy-based management.
07. The second revolution happening now, right here
Currently, CEO La Yihyeong is spreading three pillars: [Inner Revolution Workshops], [Active Meditation], and [Hands-on Wellness Programs]. The Jeju center, already established, is being operated stably by two trained facilitators. Now he is expanding his base into Seoul and partnering with 〈Energy Intelligence Program〉 suburban art museums for corporate leaders in South Korea, rolling out 〈hands-on wellness workshops for staff rest〉 and the 〈Growth Resilience 2.0 course for corporate executives and employees〉. From 90-minute immersive experience programs to a two-night, three-day wellness intensive course, the cumulative number of participants who have gone through his sessions has already surpassed 6,000.
For CEO La Yihyeong, meditation is not a mere tool for comfort or healing. It is the most powerful way to fundamentally expand consciousness and turn life into a festival.
The hot-blooded revolutionary who once fought to change the world with force in his 20s is now sustaining a second revolution that fundamentally transforms people’s inner lives. And he firmly believes that this transformation of the inner world creates a far greater and more lasting change in the world.
A festival-like life where success and abundance follow as a natural flow, not as forced effort. It’s hard not to look ahead with expectation about how many leaders and businesses his second revolution will reshape in the future.
[CEO La Yihyeong profile]
La Yihyeong | CEO of O2Heal Co., Ltd.
Books | 『The Inner Revolution That Brings Success』
Key Businesses | CEO Inner Revolution Workshops, 28 independently developed Active Meditations, and operation of corporate B2B wellness programs
