Compassion for Our Story

(speaking in foreign language) Hello, friends. My name is Linda Thai. My people are from Southern Vietnam, where the river meets the ocean, and yet upstream enough that the water is sweet. I am the child of merchants and traders, and people who tended to the land, and received her abundance. I am the daughter of fragrant rice. My journey informs my approach to life, and the two cannot be separated. Today, I'm gonna share with you some of the fruits of my meditation journey, which was foundational in healing from traumas that I did not know that I carried. And we'll follow that with a short guided practice. The historical trauma of colonization, war, and refugee exodus left a legacy on myself and my parents that has taken me my entire lifetime to make sense of, and to heal from. My family and I were part of the post-war Vietnamese boat people diaspora. I was two years old when my family fled. We made it to a refugee camp on Bidong Island, Malaysia, where my little sister was born. We lived there for six months before we were resettled to Australia. As a child, I knew that my parents loved us, because they were never there. They were always working to make ends meet in a new country far from home, and far from their ancestors. My parents also struggled with home sickness and survivor guilt, and their own unresolved traumas and losses. As such, they were not able to be there for me in the ways in which I needed. When I look back on my life, meditation was the foundation for my growth and healing. I've always been driven by a deep yearning to heal the searing pain that has been with me for as long as I can remember. The teachings of yoga and meditation trained my attention and awareness, and resulted in freedom from my anxious overthinking. Meditation allowed me slow down the rampant mind stream, and to decouple from my thoughts. Self-awareness emerged. I became aware of the automaticity between my thoughts, emotions, and behaviors, and observed that these Sankharas, these automatic reflexive strategies served a function. At all costs to avoid the whiff of the sniff of feelings that I would do anything to not feel. Shame, criticism, rejection, and abandonment. One of my teachers, Sri Shambhavananda, said something that has stuck with me all these years. "That which you use to avoid your pain will end up becoming the source of your pain." And so instead of using my seated meditation practice to reinforce the Sankharas of avoidance, I began instead to lean towards the physical discomfort that naturally arises during a seated meditation practice. By being present to these physical sensations during silent seated torture, I was training myself to be able to be present to my emotions with unbearable compassion instead of proactively or reactively protecting myself from them. Meditation practice revealed inside of me a deep pool of grief...