by Michelle Nguyen
Growing up, I lived with my mother. I remember her performing a ritual every weekend. It’s still vivid in my memory. She would lay out tangerines as an offering on our altar, light the incense, and pray at the feet of Guan Yin, the goddess of compassion. She had other Buddhas and effigies around the house, but Guan Yin was the one she prayed to. I remember watching her arms moving slowly up and down as she prayed with the incense. She always had a jade bracelet on her wrist. Jade in Chinese culture is believed to protect the body and spirit of the wearer from malevolent forces. I always had an affinity for myths and legends. I would read the same stories over and over again, but it was the story of the Great Race that solidified the Chinese Zodiac that first exposed me to astrology. Each animal in the story had a different perspective on life that propelled them in the race which really resonated with me. I remember celebrating Tết, the Lunar New Year. Tết was bright, full of food, and it was a complete energetic reset. It made February’s feel less cold. Life felt good. Things were normal. Then all of a sudden, the celebrations stopped.
Tết altar of Guan Yin.
My father was in and out of our lives. Both of them are refugees from the Vietnam War and had very different ways of coping spiritually. My father was raised Roman Catholic, but eventually shifted his beliefs towards Baptist Christian and became a pastor. I don’t know when. He doesn’t speak of it much. When I was around eight years old, my mom told me my dad had converted “us” to Christianity, so my mom and I had to stop doing anything that wasn’t Christian to be able to be “real” Christians. We started going to church, reading the Bible, and praying. We stopped celebrating Tết because it was “secular” and deviated from God’s path. I was so confused about what we had done wrong, and why all of a sudden we were repenting.
Our once-carefree lifestyle had fallen victim to the tyranny of a god I never heard of. I hated going to church. I hated reading the Bible. I hated all the new rules. I hated that we couldn’t celebrate Tết anymore. I hated how my mom changed her beliefs and consequently, her demeanor. She gradually became more angry, spiteful, and more disconnected than I had ever seen. I didn’t understand why things had become so negative. I begrudgingly participated due to the fact that I simply had no say. Around the middle to end of high school, I began actively refusing to participate in Christian practices. I couldn’t stand sitting in a sanctuary anymore with what felt like strangers, despite us attending this church with these people for years. My mother's blind faith in our new religion eventually drove a wedge between us. My father was none the wiser.
When I entered college, like any other college kid, I had the freedom to figure out who I was and what I liked. I began incessantly reading astrology blogs, except this time, it was Tropical (Western) astrology. I was studying for my bachelor's in psychology at the time, and had learned all about the psychologist, Carl Jung. I resonated with some of his philosophies on the human experience, and he heavily relied on the Tropical astrology system to understand the human psyche. Jung, in congruence with me living in a Western culture, inspired me to take the Tropical astrology path. I absorbed all of the information I could about reading charts and symbols. I practiced reading my own chart and then my friends’ charts. I followed multiple astrologers and began paying attention to the cycles and movements of the planets in congruence with the events in my life. After seven years of studying Tropical astrology, I incorporated that knowledge as I began studying tarot cards. While learning the skill and garnering my own card reading style, it was during this time period when I began reconnecting with my Buddhist roots.
Buddhist tarot card set.
The practice of astrology and tarot requires the proprietor to have unyielding faith in the universal energy that connects us all; some refer to this as God, Spirit, the Divine, or the Universe. I use all of these terms interchangeably. This faith includes the belief that everything is meant to be so there are no consequences, and that the Universe is always conspiring for you, not against you. Any hardship is a lesson, and everything else is a blessing. Faith in the Universe is what allows these messages and synchronicities to be on the forefront of my life, and brought my life a peace that had escaped me when my parents converted. I make my decisions based on my intuition and my strong connection to the Universe. I found a lot of similarities between my current beliefs and my Buddhist upbringing in that both systems require me to be responsible for healing my own suffering and facilitating my own growth.
I realized that, like others, my family and I had been convinced by the White Patriarchy that our culture and practices were wrong; my father fell to the mercy of his own strict, Catholic upbringing, and my mother fell to the mercy of my father’s approval. Our practices have been erased from our own culture just for it to be appropriated and repackaged in the New Age of Spirituality as “wellness” and “mindfulness.” Gwenyth Paltrow and her lifestyle website Goop is a prime example, watering Asian ideologies down to profit off of i the modern wellness lifestyle, while misinforming the public. Recently, Goop was hit with a lawsuit after told women to stick a jade “yoni egg” up their vaginas to heal themselves of sexual trauma. Paltrow’s company had to remove the unscientific claims and pay $145,000 in civil penalties, but the “yoni eggs” are still for sale on her site to this day.
Crystal healing is spiritual in nature. It is ritualistic, like praying, and requires intention and dedication over time, and it is only one leg of the centipede of healing work. The appropriation cherry-picking of spirituality by white women negatively impacts BIPOC practitioners, belittling our intelligence and knowledge, by projecting the false idea that our spiritual practice is, unlike theres, not based in science or facts, while we’re left to deal with mockery and skepticism of others, or deal with comments such as “use your crystals to get rid of the coronavirus.”
White oppression has manifested through religious and spiritual practices throughout my life that has negatively affected my relationship with my parents, my identity, and my self-worth. Not only did I have to reclaim my spirituality, I now have to clean up after the negligence of “white spiritualists” with the expectation of remaining calm and peaceful. The spread of ignorance leads to more scrutiny of alternative practices, resulting in even more alienation of marginalized groups where these philosophies originally came from. I do not gate-keep white people, but I want them to remember that while they are welcome, they are a guest in our house when they claim these beliefs. My rediscovery of my spiritual connection felt like the recognition of an old life, and the recognition of my responsibilities in this one: to help other marginalized people heal and reclaim what they have lost.
These days, I am not a practicing Buddhist. My resentment for the Patriarchy and White supremacy hinders me from being a true Buddhist. However, my current practices reflect similar Buddhist philosophies found within the Eightfold Path and the Universal Truths. In addition, I am starting to study Sidereal (Vedic) astrology which is a different system of astrology that has roots outside of White supremacy.
As of today, I have been an astrologer for nine years, and a tarot reader for three. I consider reading tarot and astrology my soul’s purpose. I incorporate tarot cards with clients’ star charts to provide intuitive guidance. My clients are exclusively limited to people who believe or are genuinely interested in the craft, no skeptics. I usually read for adults who are going through a tough time or need guidance for their next big move in life. I have worked with other (adult) children of diaspora who are trying to heal their ancestral trauma.
I have an agenda now: to reclaim spirituality in the name of the oppressed and marginalized, to helping others find their own power and potential, to achieve self-efficacy and inner peace, as I did.
About the writer:
Michelle Nguyen is a Vietnamese-Chinese-American. She is the youngest child of refugees from the Vietnam War, and is the first child who is first-generation. She owns her own tarot business and challenges the boundaries of others regarding the practice as well as themselves, which can be found at odetovenus.com.
Images provided by author or used under creative commons license.
