Tony Nguyễn Wiederhold (he/him)

I was born in Michigan City, IN and grew up in a working class neighborhood parented by my Vietnamese refugee mother and my third-generation German-Polish dad. 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, and learning how corporations operate. That is all happily in the past. Nowadays, my energy goes towards building spaces of community care, mutual nourishment, and collective liberation with friends and taking care of my elderly mother, who has dementia. 

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 pressure, a space with the spirit of practicing-with instead of teaching-to that is sincere and 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 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.

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. 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. 

Yoga came later. I completed a 200 hour yoga teacher training at Peace Through Yoga in Indianapolis in 2013 after practicing there for four years. The physical practice helped me to reacquaint myself with my feelings and, together with my nascent home meditation practice, created conditions for me to be sincere with myself. Over the next two years, I received instruction and immersion on Vedanta philosophy through Hindu sacred texts at Arsha Bodha Center in New Jersey and Arsha Vidya Gurukulam in Pennsylvania. My experiences there led me to reconnect with my Vietnamese Buddhist roots at Chùa An Lạc in Indianapolis, where I practiced meditation in community with other people for the first time in 2014 and continued once a week for four years. From 2018 until the COVID shutdown, I practiced at the Indianapolis Zen Center with Linc Rhodes and still practice there occasionally. I also experienced “secular” mindfulness through retreats led by Mindfulness Based Stress Reduction (MBSR) teachers and completed a yearlong Training for Mindfulness Facilitators program at UCLA in 2019.