I was in search of mulberries. With a bag in hand, I had a mission. Coming to VA, my only real intention was to attend my nephew’s high school graduation. Once that was accomplished, the rest of my time in VA was spent hanging out with my sister’s family. Mornings were lazy. I’d wake up at 8:30, fall back to sleep, and wake up again at 9. Breakfast stretched into lunch, lunch stretched into dinner, and once dinner was done, my brother-in-law would start nodding off even as he was still sitting a the dining table. Our schedule at home was loose but somehow seemed full of endless tasks, with people constantly moving about.

I found and settled into my own nook in the formal dining room, the dining table commandeered as my office. I liked it. I liked being able to spread out. My books, my laptops, my notepads and pens all laid out. I could get used to this.

On the third day, I discovered mulberries. The sweet little berries that grew on trees. I remembered them from my childhood, the tree growing close to the entrance of my elementary school. I remembered they were the foods of the silkworm. I remember plucking them and eating them, savoring them.

In Virginia, they were prolific. In one block there were multitude of trees, with branches overhanging the road, or the sidewalk. I searched in vain in my sister’s spacious property after my brother-in-law brought my hopes up. While on my wanderings through the neighborhood, I seredipitously found one not by looking for them but by simply looking on the ground. Beneath the branches of a mulberry tree are the telltale purple signs of the dropped mulberry, crushed underfoot of unsuspecting pedestrians. Eureka!

Once found, suddenly my consciousness was wired to be sensitive to other trees in the area.

in the evening, I told my sister I was going for a walk. It was really to go foraging for the berries. Bag in hand, I trekked through the neighborhood, through the woods. This time, the berries weren’t as prolific as I remembered. They were small, and sparse through the trees. I reached and strained on my tiptoes and lamented my short stature that made the berries just beyond my reach. I was finally content with my harvest and decided against going any further on the property lest I get unceremoniously escorted off the property.

I continued on my walk, with a little boost in my step, content with my harvest. Less than 10 feet away, I struck gold. A mulberry tree with low overhanging branches heavy or as heavy as tiny mulberries can weigh down a branch. They were luscious and large. Again as large as mulberries can be. They looked like they were cultivated and had been left to fully ripen without being molested by birds, inquisitve children, or eager foragers like me. It was as if the mulberry tree was waiting for me. How simple it was. I had relaxed my grip on what I thought I wanted. Mulberries.

Not only had I stopped looking, I had stopped thinking about mulberries. I was enjoying my walk, admiring the lushness of the green, the magnificent grand trees, the brickwork in the elegant, colonial (-like) houses. But I had kept an awareness of what I wanted (mulberries) and when I saw the scarlet stained sidewalk, I knew I had found it.. It was easy and fun collecting them and I was mindful of pulling them gently in my hand from the branches, the berries were ripe and tender with juice. When they became more sparse on the branches and it was becoming a strain, I stopped without regret. I looked down at my bag of luscious berries. I was happy.

Lunar New Year 2024 came and went and I almost forgot to acknowledge it. It’s probably the least interested I’ve ever been for Lunar New Year. In the past, there were days of cleaning, cleaning out, and organizing leading up to the day, with last minute frantic cleaning in the last hour before the clock struck midnight. This year, I was lucky to have vacuumed my bedroom. It’s a testament to how clean and tidy I maintain my room that I don’t feel compelled to do it all at once. That’s progress.

I did some reflecting back over the year. If you looked for grand changes, transformative magic you would be hard pressed to find them in my life over the past year. The changes have been gradual, micro movements that have created a shift.

Since I’ve moved to the bay area years ago, I had never missed spending Tet with my mother until the pandemic hit. Things changed after that and my trips to my mom for Tet has been sporadic. Of course, my mom is disappointed and she’ll say something about how even the Vietnamese here will go all the way back to Viet Nam for Tet and why I can’t make the short trip (6-8hours) from Oakland to Orange County. But this year, her disappointment was disguised. And I didn’t hear disapproval until she inadvertently didn’t hang up soon enough before I overheard her say to her caregiver, “Oh, she’s not coming home”. What mattered weren’t the actual words but the tone in which the seemingly innocuous words were uttered. She was annoyed, supremely. It was the kind of tone that I would only hear accidentally from her. It was raw and it was authentic. I didn’t expect to hear the honesty of it. That part of her that was bruised, she wasn’t going to show to me. I was pierced to the heart to hear it. I felt like I had disappointed her. It took me a day to recover and to realize that in order to take care of myself, I had to disappoint her. There was no way around it. I knew it would be hard on me to do another trip, hard on me physically and mentally so soon after the last trip but my mom couldn’t truly understand it. She has never understood it.

That’s the hardest part to reconcile with. To take care of oneself, sometimes, you may disappoint your loved ones. That’s a hard truth to accept but alas, to not do it, I disappoint myself and that is one thing, I refuse to do any longer.

I truly believe that each person will take away from a Vipassana course what they put into it. I dived with an open heart into mine. My intention for what I hoped to gain from the course was simple, distilled down to one word: Clarity. I sought Clarity in making decisions, Clarity in action, Clarity in thought, etc. Despite having a moment of existential crisis on day 3, I never wavered from my commitment of completing the course. It helped that I removed the temptations and distractions of my phone (it’s required) and that I removed my tendency to perseverate by not journalling during the course (also required). For one of the few times thus far in my life, I was fully present. I was committed to learning everything I could while I was there.

Here is what I learned for myself and about myself on and off the cushion:

1. Accept the present reality as though I invited it. Welcome negative sensations. Negative sensations help us break the habituation of aversion. Stay with the feeling of unease, discomfort. That itch on my nose that I’m feeling? That running nose from the inconvenient cold I just developed? They will pass. Everything will change. Eventually. Relax. Let whatever it is that is bothering me right now to happen. It will pass on its own time. Don’t fight it. Because if we do, it’ll likely get worse.
   • Off the cushion: What is the present reality in: a) my relationships with past romantic parters, mom, sisters, and brothers, and friends? Accept it. Resisting or struggling with it only creates more unease. Don’t label it as bad or good. In labeling it bad, I might start having negative feelings about it. In labeling it good, I may start craving it, becoming more attached to it. Don’t be scared of it. It is what it is. Wishing something or someone to be what it/they are not in this present moment creates hope for the future, a future that may never be, but will indeed draw me away from what is available now.
2. Be equanimous with that present reality. Be scared. Be sad. Feel the feelings. Feel them but don’t identify with them. I am not my feelings. I am not my sensations. Allow them to move through my body.
3. Our thoughts are ephemeral. Sometimes, they pass through my mind and then they’re gone to never reappear. Some thoughts stay with us because they resonate somehow or they connect with our past. But our mind doesn’t really get stuck. It’s an illusion because thoughts follow thoughts and we connect them. Just as we connect them, we can also consciously stop connecting thoughts that are negative.
4. Learn to not immediately react to what’s happening. When someone says something that we feel is hurtful, don’t react. Instead, take a beat. Be curious about it. Where do we feel pain? Why are we feeling it? Does it remind us of something else? Do something different than how we would have acted in the past. For most of us, our reactions are usually unconscious. We react automatically to find comfort and relief from that pain, or whatever negative emotions we are feeling without seeing how that only reinforces a pattern. A pattern that does not allow us to fully live. We protect ourselves only to cocoon ourselves from fully living, fully expressing ourselves. So one of the early steps to institute change, is to break the pattern by doing something different than our normal behavior.
5. Accept who I am. And accept who I am not. I’ve been accused of being a sociopath, which is frankly hurtful to say to anyone unless you’re a clinician diagnosing a patient. I’m not an overtly emotional person but that doesn’t make me a robot. I do recognize that I tend to rationalize before I allow myself to feel. It was a coping mechanism for me growing up with a dad who had left early in my life and a mom who was traumatized and codependent before I even understood what those terms even meant.
6. Be willing to speak and share my true thoughts and opinions with courage and not be stymied by fear of being judged. I get self conscious thinking that my thoughts and opinions are not going to be received well, wanting to be perceived as easy going, or good natured so that I would be liked. What a waste of time and energy! We just need to present ourselves as we are. We don’t have to be liked by everyone and that’s ok. Our energy is finite and not everyone deserves our attention.
7. Stop speculating. Being in the same space with the same people day after day during the 10 day course, I imagined stories about who the other students were, why they were there. On the 10th day after we broke noble silence and started talking with one another, we learned the real stories that were unlike anything we imagined. A majority of our interactions in our day to day lives are like that. We have no idea what other people are thinking, what they’re worried about, yet we make up stories to tell ourselves that may have no basis in reality. Our minds are so restless because we allow it to be.

On the 10th day after noble silence ended, I felt sadness in my heart. The silence had been healing for me, giving me a reprieve from worrying about how my words would be perceived, how my actions could be interpreted. The silence gave me an illusion of safety. When it ended and the students filed out of the meditation hall, I heard voices chirp in excitement, almost as though they were bursting out. I felt disconnected from that sense of joy, alone in my sadness. I chose to go into my pagoda cell for another hour rather than join the others, who apparently felt freed from their silence. Afterwards, I walked into the dining room with some trepidation and with near disbelief at all the energetic chatter. How could all these ladies be so happy? For about 10 minutes I felt loneliness in a room full of women, eating slowly and trying to capture the silence from the moning, before my neighbor came over and stood by me. “Hi”, she said. “I just wanted to tell you how much I admired your sitting”…and for that moment on, my defenses broke down. I started chatting with my other neighbors and even with the male students who were in the hallway.

On that last day, I understood that we may be alone but we don’t have to isolate ourselves. That is a choice we can make for ourselves. I came into the course feeling like an outsider and I had held on to that feeling until the every end not understanding that it was a barrier to being myself. When my neighbor approached me in that dining room, she broke my self imposed barrier. With her kind act of friendship, I started to realize how we had all started at the same place of being strangers to one another, all us of searching for something. From that realization, I decided intentionally to be different than the day before. I would be who I was, as true to my nature as I knew how. If others choose not to like me then, that was ok. I’m not for everyone and I’m (finally) ok with that.

8. Be the person that breaks the barrier to a connection. The person on the other side may just well thank you for doing what they wanted but could not do. Reach out to a friend or a family member that you don’t normally converse with to say hi. Smile at a stranger in line for coffee. It truly doesn’t require much to make a connection.

9. Our life long challenges are not going to simply disappear after a 10 day course, regardless of how powerful it is. At the end of the 10 days, I wasn’t transformed into a person of my dreams, free of social anxiety, courageous in speaking my thoughts, but I was more acutely aware of my intuition and also the need for action. It takes work and constant awareness of our thoughts which lead to different actions. It’s work but it’s a worthwhile life long endeavor.

I opened my journal and found myself at a loss for words, or even thoughts that I think are meaningful to record down on paper. So before I even write, I am already judging myself for being unworthy.

Writing for me has always been my way of processing my thoughts, finding insights to my actions and to the world at large. Words come to my fingers as I write, seemingly without conscious thought. Is that how everyone writes? I wonder.

So I try to journal everyday. I know it’s like a muscle that I need to exert daily, otherwise it is quick to atrophy. When I get lazy and my entries become shorter and shorter, I start to worry that I’m getting shallow mentally as well, or is it torpor? Is my life so uninteresting that I don’t have anything worthwhile to share? But I stop this line of thinking before it makes me start feeling bad. If one person could relate and find hope in what I share, that is enough reason to do it.

[Written in August 2023 and published in Oct. 5, 2023]

Three more weeks till the vipassana meditation retreat. I feel cautious excitement. I want to say I’m ready but I’m more nervous that something will crop up unexpectedly related to mom. Her recent hospitalizations are a sober reminder of what happened last June. After anticipating for months, I had to cancel my first attempt at attending the vipassana after mom fell and I was nominated to be the family spokesperson. Why is it always the case that the role falls on me to take care of mom’s affairs?

I want to support her but I have a feeling she doesn’t care about my needs if it prevents her from receiving what she wants. Sadly it’s my intuition talking bourne out of experience. Though I am cautious, I don’t want to be transactional. I don’t want to keep a count of what I do and do only what I know will likely be repaid. I know that’s not true generosity.

I’m looking forward to this experience but do I believe it will be transformative? It could be. Not sure what to expect. Because I already have a regular meditation practice, I’m setting my sights lower and viewing this experience as a new challenge, to be fully present for whatever happens.