insight arising

In 2012, the summer before our graduate program started, we took a dream trip to Asia. We witnessed a teaching by the Dalai Lama in his exiled home and had fresh grilled fish by a river in India. We saw the  sacred temple ruins of Angkor Wat and experienced a sobering visit to the Land Mine Museum. We had the world's best boat noodles for 25 cents and drunkenly roamed the narrow shopping aisles of Siam in Thailand. We visited our parents' motherland and spent time with family eating delicious home cooked Vietnamese food. We visited my dear old nanny and second mother to my dad, an elderly nun who was living in a Catholic convent and died a year later.  In between these beautiful experiences with the world around us, the world between us was breaking down. We did our best to hide the tumult away from the friends we traveled with and visited but I'm sure the hardened distance between us was not difficult to sense. So many of the cracks in our relationship were already present...

The photo of myself represents my feminine, when I was tenderly rubbing my dear friend's feet, she had just given birth at home. The piece represents my masculine, called vajra, a thunderbolt symbol in Tibetan Buddhism that cuts through ignorance.  I committed to a new conscious partnership, within myself, and to myself.  This past weekend, my inner feminine and masculine made vows to each other to create a loving, expansive, and conscious partnership within me. We had a ceremony, made offerings to an altar, and celebrated in dance with sacred community. No other partnership in this lifetime has ever felt more clear and available to me.  From masterful teachers, I've been learning about the energetics within my body. This field of study has given me a new lens for deeper self understanding. We all have a mix of feminine and masculine energies within us, regardless of our sex and gender. From a young age, our energies are developed and shaped by our conditioning within our...

Hi friends and family,  I am super excited to announce the launch of a new podcast called Asian Heart Mind Body Collective ! In collaboration with my dear friend, Adele Ray , a fellow Vietnamese sister and filmmaker, we’re creating a space for Asian sisters and brothers to come as they are to share their healing stories and experiences. Recognizing the harm and violence occurring right now within our communities, we’re taking action in a way that may compassionately bring light to our collective pain, yet also celebrate our beautiful joys and triumphs without apology.  We release Episode 1 today, on the 46th Anniversary of Black April commemorating an important time in history for many in our community. If you’re curious, please listen here ! You can also find it on Spotify and Amazon Music . It will be available soon on Apple Podcasts .  If you could consider passing along this message and flyer today to five or more of your friends, we’d be so grateful! Also, if y...

Receiving this sweet gift from a dear friend that made my heart somersault  I LOVE MAPS! Last week, I reached the one year milestone of A Year of Dana  since I left my job.   Today, I am a very different person. In many ways, I am unrecognizable to myself, yet I know I'm on the path of returning home.  I attribute a large part of this transformation to the practice of dana.  Dana (pronounced dah-nah), is a Pali word for generosity, which is the foundation upon which other important qualities like patience and wisdom are built. From my intentional practice of generosity, I realize, I want to live a life of dana , not just a brief year. I want the practice of generosity to be fully integrated into the way I experience life everyday. Generosity is a way of being through the acts of giving and receiving. It is not a one way practice. It can be learned and trained over time with intentionality. Here are 5 ways to make generosity a lifelong practice.  1. G...

When people walk away from you, let them walk. Let them go.  Bishop T.D. Jakes speaks this wisdom during an electrifying sermon that has gone viral for good reason. His guidance is real, grounded, and truthful.   When I recall moments of being abandoned whether emotionally or physically by my family, ex-partner,  or other beloveds in my life, I close my eyes and can feel instantly, the sensation of trauma spinning circles within my abdomen, as if my insides are being wrung like a towel. It doesn't feel good, yet at this point, I know it's momentary so I stay with it, breathe deeply, and then it passes, like all things in life.  As I grow intimate with my own body, I become more amazed by her and what she teaches me. My body is no longer this thing I have to just feed and train and make fit. Western society socializes us to identify "the self" as our minds primarily - our personalities, values, beliefs, and ideas. Thus, our body becomes this separate thing that ...

We are no different from the Atlanta killer, Robert Aaron Long.  The colonial capitalist patriarchy, and its associated structures and institutions, reinforces the cultivation of inner hatred and oppression in each of us. The system breeds this inner hatred and oppression, seeking ultimately to keep us divided.  To believe we are separate from this white man who murdered eight innocent people in Atlanta would confine us to exactly what the system wants - supremacist ways. To view ourselves as different from him keeps us from seeing the complexities of our human experience as well as the structural systems that entrap all of us. To hate him and everything he represents in return will keep us deluded from the healing we all desperately need individually and collectively.   Robert Aaron Long is unfortunately an ugly mirror for each of us. To see how gruesomely and tragically our inner pain can unravel left ignored. To see where within us do we hold our own hatred or dis...

All my life, I saw my heart as weak.  I grew up being told that my tears were cowardly. That my sensitivities left me too exposed and indefensible to the world. That the soft ways of my heart were signs of my fragility and unsteadiness.  My mom often expressed her greatest concern for me being out in the world, especially when it came to love and relationships.  Má  sợ con sẽ b ị  ăn hiếp.   I am afraid you will be abused or bullied.  My mom was 21 when she had my oldest brother. She was 29 when her entire family left her behind in Vietnam, when the war ended and my dad was taken to communist camp leaving her behind with 3 small children. She was 32 when they escaped by boat with nothing but a few dollars.  Con  phải   giống   Má .  You must be like me.   Strong, resilient, unbothered, and unfuckwitable. All the qualities opposite of a weak heart.  Con  là   cọp giấy .  You are a paper tiger. ...