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.

Each person will take away from a Vipassana course what they put into it. I put in everything 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 stick. It’s an illusion because thoughts follow thoughts and we connect them. Since 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 I feel is hurtful, don’t react immediately. Be curious about it. Where do I feel pain? Why am I feeling it? Does it remind me of something else? Do something different from how I 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 your 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 if you’re not 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 before, 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 erected barrier. With her act of friendship that was also very kind, 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 chose not to like me then, that was ok. I had done my part.

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. It’s my intuition bourne out of experience. I want to be better than that. I don’t want to keep a count of what I do and do only what I know will be repaid.

I’m looking forward to this experience but do I believe it will be transformative? It could be. Not sure what to expect. Having 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.

I’ve read that when people have near death experiences, their lives, if they survive, are forever altered. Their perspective becomes crystal clear and they see the harmony that exists in the universe that they were never before aware of. They see that everything is as it should be, in this moment. They have awakened to the beauty and true nature of life.

But how do we awaken this clarity within ourselves without resorting to putting ourselves in danger? How do we awaken our minds without having a near death experience?

We typically live our days with many distractions, busying ourselves with work, children, parents, family, daily obligations that can go on and on without end. We can go from task to task, chore to chore, email to email, and by the end of the day, we fall exhausted to our beds to awaken to another list of tasks, exercises, and duties. Most people live out their days like this with the same routines only to awaken at their deathbed and wonder what their whole life was about anyway. But me, I did the opposite. I tended to think too much or as my partner used to say, I perseverated. I spun in circles.

My ex-husband used to take it a step further and tease me that my middle name was regret. Admittedly, my life has been mostly led by decisions made in doubt, or sliding into decisions while remaining simultaneously noncommittal, or waiting until too much time has passed making other choices obsolete. I struggled with constant doubt with nearly every decision. I wanted to make the one right choice but think about all choices long enough, pretty soon, one by one, none of them look like good options. But why?

We’ve been conditioned since the early part of our lives to think that there are either right or wrong choices. We’ve been conditioned by the people who seem to have the answers, our parents, teachers, or the mainstream media until we grew up and realized that no one really knows the right answer. They were just really good at convincing they did and they were doing the best they could too!

I never learned to trust myself and were always looking to others for the “right” answer. The more I leaned on others for guidance in making decisions, the less I trusted myself. It was a slow decline into low esteem and confidence that knew no bottom.

But I’m coming to a sneaky suspicion that life is truly a game. Who knows how life would have been better if I had chosen path B, as opposed to path A? Partner A versus partner B? Once one deliberates and thoughtfully weighs the benefits and cons of choices, the choice ultimately selected is as likely to succeed as the other. No one living is omnipotent to tell you otherwise.

And how do we know when we’ve considered all our options? I don’t believe we can ever eliminate all our options in life. There is an infinite number of choices for just about everything. Just look at the number of choices of peanut butter brands in your local grocery store and you’ll get dizzy pretty quickly. But who’s going to stand around deliberating on every brand of peanut butter before deciding on one? Unless you’re really particular about peanut butter, you pick the one you ate last and enjoyed. Done.

We’re faced with countless decisions every day, some we choose subconsciously out of habit, some we take a moment to think, others where we are thoughtful and methodical and more thorough in considering before choosing. Trusting in oneself, doesn’t mean that it’s going to be unequivocally the right choice or that the same choice would be the right choice every time. It’s simply the choice I have chosen in that moment but trusting myself to be thoughtful and aware as much as I am able while making decisions. That’s really all we can do.

If we can let go of what we believe our lives are supposed to look like which is mostly based on past programming anyway, and simply pay attention and see what life is showing us, then we can live our lives with such richness that we didn’t even know existed.

Zen buddhism emphasizes immediate action. If there is anything that needs to be done, do it immediately. Don’t overthink it. But be thoughtful. Calculate the risks and and then take action. Like the Reebok slogan, “Just do it.” Come to think of it, I’m pretty sure Reebok was led by Zen and not the other way around. The point is, when we start questioning ourselves as we’re thinking through a decision, there is too much interference in our brains; then we wobble and we make mistakes. So take the risk. Go for it and make adjustments as necessary. Once we are on the path, we may find that other avenues open along the way, those we couldn’t see at the start probably because we were too preoccupied with making the decision to start to see anything else. And contrary to what Hollywood shows us, life does give us more opportunities than just one. More than one great love, great job, etc, etc. It may be different or the same, but opportunities for second chances will come. I’ll be better prepared for them when they arise if I am aware of what’s in front of me and not fixated on the past or dreaming of the future. The past can teach us valuable lessons as long as it doesn’t make us so afraid to repeat our mistakes that we become immobilized in the present. Life is too short to wait around for what we believe are the “perfect” conditions, the “perfect” time, the “perfect” partner to enjoy what you have right at this moment. Start today. Start where you are, imperfect as we are. Each day can present a new beginning if only we can see it that way.