Episode 23: A Conversation with Psychologist Vi-An Nguyen: Trusting Your Inner Wisdom While Honouring Your Roots
EPISODE 23
A Conversation with Psychologist Vi-An Nguyen: Trusting Your Inner Wisdom While Honouring Your Roots
In Episode 23 of The Practitioner’s Heart, I speak with Vi-An Nguyen, organisational psychologist and founder of An Tam Coaching and Psychology in Melbourne, about Buddhism, cultural identity, burnout, family expectations, and the journey of learning to trust ourselves.
Vi-An shares openly about growing up culturally Buddhist in a Vietnamese family and reconnecting with Buddhist practice as an adult. For her, practices such as bowing, prayer, mindfulness, and connecting with ancestors have become ways of coming home—to herself, her body, and the wisdom carried through her lineage.
Listening to the Body
One of the themes that runs through our conversation is the importance of learning to listen to the body.
Vi-An reflects on her own experience of burnout and IBS, and how physical symptoms became invitations to pay attention to what was happening beneath the surface. Sometimes the body recognises that something isn't working before we have the words to explain it.
This can be particularly important for therapists. We are trained to think, analyse, and understand, but our bodies can also offer valuable information about what we need, what matters to us, and when something needs to change.
Between Family Expectations and Our Own Values
For many people from migrant and collectivist families, finding your own path can involve a complicated relationship with family expectations.
Gratitude, filial piety, sacrifice, and the desire to make our families proud can sit alongside a growing awareness that the life expected of us may not necessarily be the life that fits.
Vi-An and I explore what it can mean to honour where we come from while still developing the freedom to choose where we are going.
This isn't necessarily about rejecting our roots. It can be about relating to them differently—with greater awareness, compassion, and choice.
Loosening the Grip
Vi-An shares a beautiful metaphor for understanding Buddhist non-attachment: loosening our grip on the steering wheel.
Non-attachment doesn't mean not caring. It doesn't mean becoming passive or giving up our goals.
Instead, we can hold things with less tension.
When we loosen our grip, we may become more responsive to what is actually happening rather than being driven entirely by expectations, fear, or the need to control the outcome.
For therapists, this can be a powerful practice—not only personally, but in the therapy room.
Beyond Intergenerational Trauma
We often talk about intergenerational trauma, but this conversation also invites us to consider intergenerational wisdom.
Our families and cultures can pass down much more than wounds. They can also carry rituals, values, stories, spiritual practices, resilience, and ways of understanding what it means to live well.
For culturally diverse therapists, reconnecting with these resources can become part of a deeper process of identity and healing.
It also reminds us that our wellbeing isn't only an individual issue. Culture, family, gender, race, work, and social systems all shape our experience.
Sometimes what feels like a personal failure is actually a response to much larger expectations and pressures.
Coming Home to Ourselves
Perhaps the deepest thread throughout this conversation is self-trust.
Not the kind of self-trust that means always knowing what to do, but the quieter ability to pause, listen, and notice what is happening within us.
Sometimes wisdom is found in stillness.
Sometimes it is felt in the body.
Sometimes it comes through our cultural roots, our relationships, or the practices that connect us to something larger than ourselves.
And sometimes, coming home simply means giving ourselves enough space to listen.
Listen to Episode 23 of The Practitioner’s Heart for this warm and thoughtful conversation with Vi-An Nguyen on Buddhism, cultural identity, burnout, intergenerational wisdom, and learning to trust your inner knowing.
