What Shifts The Energy Around Memories

Vietnam, vulnerability and healing the wound of time

Hanoi: view from my balcony. July 8, 2025. Happy Birthday JohnBoy.

This post comes whilst on a wee - extended break in Vietnam — a reset. What are you resetting, I asked, as my fingers took pose to tap the words that came from ... what ... fragmented version of self?

I visited Vietnam twice in 2019 — the year John died. This is my third visit.

I worked closely with Melbourne’s inner western Vietnamese community from 1988-2008, as a high school ESL teacher and student manager. The nature of our work fostered enduring connections with the communities we served. They were primarily refugees, carrying wounds of trauma and torture.

When the newly elected, Victorian State government (1992), closed or forced the merger of 150 schools in their first round of savage cuts, our school was on the list. The majority of our 325 student cohort were Vietnamese. Other significant representation included students from Cambodia and Laos.

Following the lead of two other inner city schools, our parent community voted to stage a sit-in-occupation. The Education Union refused to support our decision despite backing said protests at the two other schools. Unions had led the way, initiating a 24-7 vigil protest on the steps of Parliament House — John and I were on the roster.

The fallout from the closures were momentous. A mere 88 of our students finished their secondary schooling. Tracked, there were thousands of lost students across the State. Our Principal warned in his final address, the emotional scars will run deep for a long time. I was relocated to a high school in a neighbouring suburb where I continued to work with vulnerable refugee communities.

The union’s refusal to acknowledge the cause for refugee student education — stung.

Memories stored in the body are cyclic, re-emerging when relevant to our soul’s human, experiential journey. So, when my soul utilises my body as a portal, I feel into listening. An underlying benevolence accompanies them — including those we recognise as traumatic. Permitting feeling, the soul offers guidance for emotional shifts.

In meditation we remember what we are, feeling into our soul’s sovereignty of unconditional love. We understand that memories of our human experiences are of our own creation. There is no end date to our expansion.

Trusting one’s intuition induces shadow work, unravelling versions of self — surrender to acceptance. Unabridged compassion for each imagined creation of self, of other. It is an ongoing, continual flow, this shift of energies. This is the juncture to understanding service; soul’s purpose.

And I trust the team’s clarifying guidance will continue to come when I am ready to receive. This is what I understand as faith. The following message dropped in a few days after I arrived in Hanoi:

Memories initially sprout from feelings; the vibrational frequency coursing within your body transmutes this energy to emotions — thought. Thought can cement attachment to fragmented versions of self, and it is with thought that you can transform emotional energy.

To see the light in soul’s expression is a human endeavour. Attachment to emotional thought patterns manifest as stuck energy. Your body is gatekeeper for your soul’s aspiration to sustain energetic fluidity in the feeling and expression of emotions, thus cultivating a presence in memories.

Only the eternal is permanent.

How do emotions traverse parallel versions of self — in memories released and felt in the body? What might have bypassed the heart filter — soul’s essence and expression for its human aspect? What version of self is projected in stuck energy?

Of course, these ponderings are tendrils tethering me to my soul group — the team, and our collaboration re intergenerational and ancestral healing. Exploring how emotional shifts reverberate restorative energies, across all timelines, all lives.

Multidimensional and cosmic — a timely reminder that one fragment of my soul resides on the Earth plane.

The days prior to the message download, I had enjoyed touring the provinces of Ninh Binh, Ha Long Bay, and Hanoi. Visiting temples, pagodas, museums and speaking to guides, I learned that the majority Kinh (Viet) ethnic group represent approximately 85% of the population. They claim no religion. However, the cultural practice of ancestor worship, is observed by all traditions. This seems the glue that binds the Vietnamese people.

Following the lunar calendar, their home altars are attended to on the first and fifteenth day of each month.

Such sacred devotion to ancestors and gratitude for spiritual connection is present, in their be-ing.

It speaks generally of their calm and gentle disposition. Vietnam nurtures the waters of being. I noticed the patterned movement of people. Even the congested traffic flows as a river. Seldom does it stop. There are pauses as motorbikes anticipate the communal space, meandering to make way for larger vehicles. Young children ride confidently; the youngest perched on the parent-rider’s lap while older siblings are pillion, smiling and laughing their way through traffic.

They idle behind elderly women pushing bicycles laden with bamboo baskets of fruit. Others set up mobile food carts along the edges of narrow thoroughfares. Pedestrians walk alongside the road and cross without falter; the traffic simply shifts contours. Horns are beeped in a light staccato of presence, in this shared nexus of time and space.

I spent a week in Hanoi’s Old Quarter. In the liminal transition between afternoon and evening my balcony became an observation deck. My last night in Hanoi fell on John’s birthday, July 8. As I soaked in the lull before the night’s tourist action kicked off, my attention was drawn to a local couple across the street. They lived on the upper floor of an adjacent row of shops and were going about their domestic duties on their outdoor patio. She was hanging the laundry while he, donning green rubber gloves, was washing the dishes.

Vietnamese is a distinctively tonal language. Their sharper sounds wafted across the narrow street — taking me back to the days before renovations and dishwashers, when our bathroom-laundry was outside. I remembered our typical banter during the nightly chores.

The enticing and spicy flavours of the street vendors food preparation infiltrated the sticky air — an interruption. Dusk hastened her cover into night. The couple finished their duties and retreated into their sanctuary.

The domesticity, the ordinariness of our daily routine — the memory can sometimes ache like a cavity, and at other times, prompt joy and laughter. It just is. When I breathe through my heart space, there is a compassionate acceptance of the tears. The energy flows.

I felt the edges of a scab lift enough that droplets of blood appeared around its rim, reopening the wound of time. Seven clicks around the sun — a life time away for John who is dwelling in the timeless dimension of between lives. Despite our ongoing soul connection, my human self can at times feel removed from what was our 28 year partnership.

I can feel vulnerable and anxious in this space, as I am yet to grasp this phenomenon, why I sometimes feel like memories are narrowing. I sense it is related to my human attachment, of sorts. Go gently, comes the poke.

And with that I felt an itch to scratch, to write. The physicality of writing also opens the portals for connection with the team. The process brings further clarity, often as the writing unveils.

Traces of death become disallowed in the spaces that govern linear time.

How can we be expected to forget that which our soul prompts us to remember, given that memories are segmented versions of self? Why would we want to block that which the wisdom of our body serves to remind us?

I can remember waking in a lucid state the previous night. I could feel my chest expanding and knew I was receiving a healing in the heart space. I woke the next morning with a similar knowing and this drop-in:

Our human existence is a pilgrimage of soul memory. Our experiences on the physical, emotional plane is for remembrance of what we are — one.

Context clarifies the synchronicities in receiving. I find comfort in the Vietnamese cultural practice of being grounded in each day, with their knowing that ancestors continue to walk with, and guide them in their life experiences. As, I am deeply grateful for the connections and guidance from my team.

To the people of Vietnam — Thank you ❤️ 🙏.

I will be home on July 24 when I expect to catch up on Substack reading. I hope everyone is well. Thank you for being here and reading. I am grateful for this community.

With love and gratitude, my learning continues.

John and team, thank you for the guidance. I love you.

And so it is.