Welcome friends. It’s been a minute, and a lot has shifted in my life. I wanted to share a few highlights over the Summer - and will dedicate future writings toward breaking it down deeper.

Over the Summer, I along with a group of other practitioners met up in California to film and document the psychodrama structures work led by Linda Thai. I was fortunate to have met Linda early in her career and there during the first retreat she led in Santa Cruz. Over the years, I accumulated 10+ workshop experiences, as an assistant and as the protagonist working on my own work.

It’s hard to describe what the work is without experiencing it, and yet there’s such a need to put that work out in the world so it’s accessible to others. I’m at the point in my life with enough priviledge that I can put my bare soul out there with less professional consequences.

In the moment, it’s hard for me to know what the pathway toward healing will be, and looking back, I can see the dots connect.

Each workshop unlocks another layer, compounding on each other. In the filming, I had two Asian men side at my left and right side, something that’s hard to manufacture when you don’t have the right group representation. I had another man sit at my back, supporting me.

I lived a life unsupported, and when anyone attempted to do so, my guard comes up and I push them away. Even if I could get it, I wouldn’t even want it.

But I needed it.

With the presence of the support, I could feel the bomb that lives within me. I held up my hands representing the holding of it, my body starts to tremble.

The charge I carried required more than my inner capacity to hold, and yet the survival imperative was to do it quietly and not get caught.

With this support, I could then project out into 3D space my father, who was sent to re-education camp after the Vietnam War ended. His experience was my experience.

For another day, the story will be told, but in short, my father needed a friend back then to be with him through the hardest moments.

Seeing that reflected the absence of male friendships in my life, the buddy that’s there, when things get hard.

Parenting while healing is like building the plane while it’s flying. There’s a lot I wished I had made aware before hand, and I’m proud that I’m doing this right in the middle of the formative years.

The own work I’m doing to seperate and individuate myself from my parents gives me the space to also see my son as his own being, not the holder of my unmet dreams.

Put it in his words, “I’m just existing.”

And that’s enough.

It’s a hard belief to accept, that I am enough.

I signed up to attend Grieving Man, a four day men’s retreat that brings together grief rituals, music, beauty-making, and reconnecting to the land.

It’s an edge point for me, working with men, being with men, and being seen by men. I’ve spent nearly a year, in a committed men’s container working on rites of passage and ritual facilitation.

And yet, Grieving Man, was the scariest of all. The event brought together 80+ men, a larger group of BIPOC/PGM (People of Global Majority) led by Aaron Johnson.

As an assimulated Vietnamese man, I spent my life adjacent to white people. It was my survival adaptation, and often, I am weaponized by people that look like me.

My edge work was to run toward the PGM group, especially when and if things get heated rather than toward the white group, which is my programmed conditioning. I walk the thin edge of trying to prove my worth to the dominate group, often at the destruction of those deemed lesser than.

I get to then hold THAT, in the presence of the group that I have caused harm to, and to not perform my circus trick to win over the white people.

I came into the land with so many eyes staring at me (that’s how I walk the world), and my nervous system was scanning each to determine how I should be around each person to make them safe.

And at the end of the retreat, I was on the dance floor, holding a man grieving, while staring up at the circle of men dancing around me, and I noticed loving eyes. Each man was wishing for my peace and healing, not out to get me.

I brought with me the thread of the Village, that the Village was dancing, drumming, and singing just for me, and it was doing the same for each man, each one on his own lived journey, and that each of these journeys need to co-exist.

To the women reading this (if you’ve gone this far) - I often get questions like why is it just for men, what are guys doing, and are you getting the perspective of women.

As I’m walking this path, there’s always an intersection.

Have we considered the lived conditions of the People of the Global Majority?

Do we have the guidance of elders, the right ones (whatever that means)?

What about the war refugees actively being bombed?

What about me?

I’ve learned to stop being defensive, and to not neglect the question, and not not try to solve the world’s problems in one go. I can only make one rep, one rep at a time, and hope that each one moves me one step in a direction. What I know deeply now, will only exist in this exact moment, and tomorrow that will shift.

What does matter to me, is am I leaving enough room for you to exist, and if I am not, what would help create that space for you to exist?