Hello, thanks for stopping by.
I'd like to share with you my journey on how I arrived here.
For as long as I could remember, I was always more sensitive than those around me. I tended to cry or respond emotionally to socially inappropriate circumstances and I would spend a lot of time by myself. I would be sick, experience headaches, feel physically weak, or have pain in my stomach for much of my childhood for no particular reason. Looking back, I wonder if I was already picking up on messages that I could not fully comprehend.
However, I only really came to truly connect with a spiritually charged experience when I was in middle school.
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I was deeply upset with a teacher at the time and wanted to set a classroom on fire. Over the weekend, I planned to break into the school to commit my crime. But to do so, I had to climb over a 10 foot tall fence. I managed to make it to the top, but accidently placed my foot in the wrong groove of the fence. This resulted in me tumbling over onto the other side quite ungracefully.
As my head hurled towards the ground, in front of me was a sharpened steel rebar that was planted firmly into the earth. In that moment, it had turned out that my shoe had somehow wedged itself between the fencing. After I carefully landed on my hands and feet away from the rebar, I decided to forego my low-minded plans and reconsider what had just happened.
I couldn't help but wonder if I'd been spared by something, or someone.
Another poignant series of events came when I decided to attend Burning Man in college during my sophomore year, on August 31, 2009. I did not know anything about the Temple at the time, but ended up wandering into the sacred space, connecting with the many shrines, tributes, and eulogies placed there for deceased loved ones. The experience brought up strong emotions in me, of course, but what took me away was the strong sense that someone or something was speaking to me the following words,
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"Your father only has one year left to live."
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​The message came at a time when I was struggling to create a meaningful relationship with my father. It seemed like an opportune time to put more effort into connecting with him, regardless of whether it came from my own mind or was truly a message from beyond. Like a last chance to actually find meaning in our existence together as son and father, in this lifetime. I took that message as seriously as I could.
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I did my best to make a more intentional effort to relate with my father in that year, but what truly made the difference was when his brother - my uncle - passed away. My father was not an emotive man, who had been scarred by his experiences as a military physician during and after the Vietnam War, where he had been placed in a re-education camp by the Vietnamese communists. During the funeral, I had a moment where I felt as if someone wanted to speak with my father, presumably a message from his deceased brother before us.
After I whispered the message to my father, for the first time in my life, I saw tears in his eyes.
"Your father only has one year left to live."
The journey...fell apart before my eyes the harder I pushed.
When my father did pass away on August 18th, 2010, a year from that first communication at Burning Man, it became clear to me that I needed to listen to whoever, or whatever, was speaking to me. From that day on, I started feeling called to walk across the United States, to honor the steps he could not take, as he had spent most of my life partially paralyzed. As the vision for the walk took shape, I vowed a second commitment - to walk without any money of my own and to rely solely on the generosity of others along the way. I would only walk so far as I could without financial resources of my own, as an experiment in seeing how far I could trust in the Universe to provide the way forward.
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After graduating from college, I attended Burning Man one more time to carry my father's belongings to the Temple to be burned, and began my walking journey on January 15th, 2012 at The Shire dormitory at the University of California, Irvine, my alma mater. There is much that could be said about that journey, from the spontaneous moments when folks would stop their cars and hand me a sandwich, a bottle of water, or a $20 bill without a word, to the many coincidences that led to people offering me a meal, shower, and bed in their homes for the night. Regardless, I ended up walking 2,000 miles from California to Louisiana over six months in this way, mostly sleeping beside the highway.
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What ended up stopping me was the following that occurred right before I entered New Orleans. I had a cart with my belongings that I pushed along the way, which had been perfectly fixed with new wheels by a kind stranger a few weeks earlier. As I got closer to New Orleans, I started to hear the message in my mind that I would be killed and thrown into the Bayou if I continued on. I pushed on, hoping to achieve my original intent of walking all the way to the East Coast. However, at some point the wheels of my cart mysteriously fell apart. When I attempted to find a shop to repair the wheels, leaving my cart behind on the highway, someone had taken all of my belongings from the cart - the first time that had ever happened on the journey.
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I stubbornly marched on without my cart.
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When I approached one of the bridges that entered into New Orleans, a police officer forced me into his vehicle and drove me into the city, eventually breaking my continuous streak of walking all of the miles I had taken up to then. The journey, which had been nearly effortless and graced with good fortune before, seemed to be falling apart before my eyes the harder I pushed. My sense was that I was being asked to stop and to return home. And so I did, chalking up the entire excursion as having walked from the West Coast to New Orleans, the first city my father lived in when he arrived to the United States.
At the time, I had deferred a doctoral program at Stanford University to have the time and space to complete the walk. Towards the end of the walk, I had been accepted into a second, concurrent graduate program in the School of Medicine as well. And so I picked up where I had left off with my education when I returned home.
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However, I was still very porous to the energy around me and was struggling to re-adjust to rigorous academic life. This heightened awareness became increasingly more challenging to hold when I started attending a required course in anatomy. As the human cadavers were being dissected by the medical students, I could hear the near-blistering cries of agony in my mind, from those who had not yet fully passed on or retained their belief that they were still flesh and bone. Visions of the unfortunate ways these individuals had passed, whether through accident, murder, or illness, passed into my visual mind space each night.
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Unable to reconcile what I experiencing with the environment I was in, one night I decided to walk to the train station beside the campus. My plan was to commit suicide, to stop the onslaught of voices and visions. However, right before I stepped off the platform, I felt something hold me back, not unlike the moment I felt in middle school where my shoe jammed into the fence.
And these questions spontaneously arose,
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"What are you willing to lose to remain alive? What contract will you accept to continue your life?"
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And in response, I told that voice, I am willing to lose anything and I will accept anything. After that night, I checked myself into the psychiatric ward at Stanford Hospital and soon after withdrew from both graduate programs. With a diagnosis of major depression, I left that campus in despair.
"What are you willing to lose to remain alive?"
...something kept gnawing at me...
Over the course of 12 years, I slowly reconstructed my life from that pivotal moment. I banished from my mind this idea that I had had these unconventional experiences with the dead and proceeded to put my head down. I turned off my sensitivities to anything related to the afterlife. I started dating the woman who would later become my wife, eventually went back to and completed graduate school, wrote a book, started a business, bought a house, and worked on a documentary. My wife and I rescued two dogs. I focused on mundane goals and just hoped for the best.
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But in the background, something kept gnawing at me and would not stay quiet.
On July 14th, 2024, my mother was hit and killed by a car while riding her adult tricycle. Strangely, the police and coroner's office could not get a hold of her two primary emergency contacts who both lived nearby in Southern California. Instead, it took over 12 hours for them to eventually find my contact information and call me in the middle of the night while I was asleep. I was living in Washington state at the time.
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There were several experiences that occurred during and after her funeral that suggested a metaphysical connection was forming between me and my mother past her death.
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One example was when my wife and I were starting to clean out her home, and we joked out loud that it would be helpful if my mom could help us figure out a way to pay for her funeral. I went to sit down on my mother's favorite chair, where she would sit in an odd position with one of her legs bent and her feet touching the back of the cushion. I attempted that seating position and found it uncomfortable, but noticed that my toe was touching something that felt like an envelope. When I opened the outer covering of the seat cushion, there was nothing there, but I noticed a second zipper that was covering the foam.
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I opened the second compartment and found that my mother had placed $7,900 in cash in that envelope, and written on the outside was "Wedding". The funeral costs were about $7,700.
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Another example was that I'd started hearing messages in my mind in the middle of the night, which I began writing down as notes on my phone. These messages seemed to be directed to different family members, some which contained very personal information such as childhood moments in Vietnam between my mom and her siblings or her parents. Many of these memories were not anything my mother shared with me. When I shared these messages, it became clear to me that they were precious moments and experiences that had real emotional weight to those who received them.
...my mother was hit and killed by a car while riding her adult tricycle.
I realized I needed to take [her obituary poster] back to the Temple to be burned...
As the initial energy of her passing died down, I began having regular conversations with my mom, much as we did in life. I started asking her for advice on different matters, from business to relationships, and connect with her in a way that I did not think was possible for us during life. And I was hearing more than just her - I started getting communications from other deceased individuals. I also began experiencing new ways in which my body was processing information from the external environment, like a heightened intuition about the intentions of others or being able to find obscure pieces of information, objects, or people with higher accuracy. Making choices became easier as long as I was following my inner voice, as if I was being guided along like I was during my walk.
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These new experiences became increasingly frequent as time went on, up until the one year anniversary of my mother's passing. That's when I spontaneously took on a series of pilgrimages to close out the year, much like I did for my father.
This was, of course, all in the middle of a highly tumultuous time in my marriage, business, finances, and relationships.
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I traveled to the Stanford campus for the first time in 13 years, after being accepted to a new graduate program I applied to in the d.school and eventually declining. I walked the same path as I had from the fateful night that I almost took my own life, and standing on the threshold of the train platform, I returned to that same moment. I allowed the near endless tears of gratitude to fall as my entire body remembered how far I had come and the contract I had made to continue to stay alive. I thanked whatever it was that had saved my life that moment.
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I returned to Burning Man for the first time in 14 years, taking along with me the traditional Vietnamese obituary poster of my mother, originally meant to be cremated along with her body, and the traditional Buddhist ornaments for a family shrine. At the time of her funeral, I did not know why I was meant to keep the obituary poster. I realized I needed to take it back to the Temple to be burned, so that my mother could be reunited with my father on the Playa.
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I attended a sacred intimacy retreat called the International School of Temple Arts (ISTA). I had remembered this moment where I had seen their retreat offering in the organization's early days when I was in college, and somehow had made a commitment to attend in the future when I had the financial resources to do so. Here, my original intent was to begin the process of healing nearly a lifetime of exiled sexuality, which I had long separated from my spiritual practices. It was also here at the retreat that I openly shared my capacity to communicate messages from those who had passed, and began practicing these communications with individuals outside of my family for the first time.
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Finally, I traveled to Antarctica on a cruise ship for a conference on psychedelics and mental health, beginning my voyage on my mother's birthday of November 13th.​ Interestingly, I did not feel the need to partake in any psychedelics on the journey, and while my more conventional intention was to learn more about the current advances in psychedelic medicine for healing from a scientific point of view, what I gained most from that experience was connections to others with similar sensitivities to beyond life and death. What I had learned most from the journey was that a part of my past identity as a scientist, consultant, and entrepreneur needed to pass away to make way for this spiritual aspect that had stayed hidden for so long.
I created this intentional space as a way to share, explore, and grow this next chapter of my life. I do not know where it will lead me or what it will entail, but I know this is what needs to manifest for me to continue on. I have held back for far too long.
My hope is that whoever reads this, will be meant to connect with me and be a part of this journey as well. May whatever I have to offer be of service, and vice versa. I also trust that the Universe will take care of my material, temporal, and financial needs as I enter into this exploration, much as I had given over all control during my walking journey.
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Thank you for taking the time to read my journey. May all that comes be for the sake of all beings, both corporeal and ethereal.