Tony Nguyễn Wiederhold (he/him)

I was born in Michigan City, IN and grew up in a working class neighborhood parented by my Vietnamese mother (a 1975 refugee) and my white dad, who was the son of two of the first European settler-colonists in South Dakota. Mom worked in kitchens. Dad repaired heavy equipment for a slag company. I have several half-siblings. I got to attend Indiana University - Bloomington, where I took a whole lot of Latin on my way to undergraduate Psychology and Biology degrees and somewhat accidentally earned a Masters degree in Organic Chemistry. I spent over 15 years working in pharmaceutical manufacturing, doing my best to protect workers and the environment in an industry uninterested in that, and learning how corporations operate and extract. That is all happily in the past. Nowadays, my energy goes towards caring for my elderly, disabled mother, practicing with other people, bringing forward fresh English translations of Buddhist texts and Buddhist frameworks, a little bit of Chinese calligraphy, and living plainly and honestly in the real world as much as possible.  

My mother was my first teacher. We practiced Buddhist rituals at home, resting our hearts on Buddhas and Bodhisattvas and making offerings to our ancestors. I learned from her suffering and care. Her paternal grandmother was her first teacher. I first became aware of meditation around age 10, when I began attending Chùa Quang Minh in Chicago with Mom and came into contact with the monk Thích Đúc Niệm, who taught me through gifts of books, warm smiles with pats on the shoulder, and just being a kind adult in my life. His first teaching was the most profound: handing me a broom and asking me to sweep. The temple was about 90 minutes away from where we lived, but it was an oasis for both Mom and me. It was a center for Vietnamese culture and container for the ocean of grief of hundreds of Vietnamese far away from home and family, where we would hear the monks and nuns give talks, chant our sutras, do our prostrations, grieve, mourn, cook fantastic meatless meals together, and enjoy a bit of joy in community. I did more eating than cooking in those days, and quite a bit of sweeping. 

On April Fool’s Day 2017, I gathered a group of friends to practice yoga at the 100 Acres in Indianapolis. I had been leading yoga practices at my workplace since 2013 and also had been leading a brief movement practice before the meditation practices at Chùa An Lạc. I didn't set out to create an organization. I just wanted to practice with friends on the grass under big shade trees, free from paywalls, transactions, and bosses, a space with the spirit of practicing-with instead of teaching-to that is sincere and therefore safe for every body. One practice led to another and now we have this beautiful, living organism called Indy Community Yoga, where people can just be their ordinary selves at practice and beyond. At our heart is a commitment to safety that allows people to return to ease and to not-pretend. This no-coercion, mutually nourishing, community care spirit is in our DNA, literally. I think this is really human nature, the ordinary heart of humanity. I love my work, which is making it easier for people to be themselves and encouraging others to do the same both in our practices and in the rest of their lives.

I've completed a lot of training in yoga, western mindfulness, and other practices that revealed the exploitative, authoritarian, and capitalist nature at the heart of the wellness industry. It was time consuming and expensive, but after about 8 years of that, what to do and what not to do became clear. I lean into my Vietnamese Buddhist roots, the gift from my mother, her grandmother, countless ancestors, the monk Thích Đúc Niệm, and the Chinese masters whose works, shared with me with people I have been fortunate to meet here in Indiana. May we all have the courage to be at ease with ourselves, and may we all have the courage to stand with and befriend others.