Van Thi Diep, PhD

Phenomenology: Finding togetherness in our brilliance

Phenomenology (the study of experience) is like stargazing with human stories. Each individual story may seem like a speck of dust in the dark night, but together in our glimmering starlight, they become meaningful constellations. The constellation patterns (i.e., study topics) that I find most attractive are the inconspicuous ones that reveal our deepest relationship with nature, both internally and externally.

Shifting Paradigms

To heal our mind-based society, we need to question why we desire knowledge. At the root of this complex question is a simple answer: we want to know more about who we are and why we exist in the world. Therefore, in essence, knowledge is the pursuit to re-discover what we intuitively know but have forgotten as human beings. Since our experiences are made conscious at a personal level, we learn about each other through narratives. At a cultural level, we learn about humanity through a process of storytelling and storylistening.Traditional education, particularly approaches based on the scientific method, assumes that knowledge is objective and research is unbiased. But human experiences do not exist in vacuums. We communicate and make sense of the world because we already have preconceptions of the world within us (Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, 1960). Knowledge is biased because human experience is biased. To create new knowledge means to disturb old biases and re-establish new agreements of understanding.

Empowered Knowledge

Destructive paradigms are created by knowledge hierarchies. That means, some forms of knowledge are validated and institutionalised, some forms survive through resistance, and some forms are ridiculed and persecuted out of existence. To escape the grasp of old paradigms, we first need to learn to acknowledge our own individual way of knowing and being in the world.What people often consider as truth, or how things are, are merely interpretations of experience. Not everyone has the same interpretations of reality. If everyone were to see the world through the exact same lens, you and I wouldn't need to be here. Yet, some interpretations are more nurturing than others and this is where we hold power. We can respect someone's way of knowing but also accept that we have our own choice. We can choose a different meaning in life.We can choose to see ourselves as brilliant beings in an expansive universe or choose to see ourselves as nothing of value—mere dust fading away into nothingness.

Embodied Existence

If we forget to choose and let existing knowledge paradigms take over, we become nothing but walking computers. What makes humans not computers is that our knowing is embodied in flesh and our experiences are emplaced in a landscape. Studying landscapes brings us closer to understanding the narratives of our human existence.Through landscapes, we access our interpretations of nature and culture, reveal the power and limitations of language, learn to acknowledge the reciprocity of life, and choose to participate in the world. If the world was a garden, we would be the soil, the seeds, the plants, the designers, and the gardeners. We each play roles in all the processes of making the landscape the place we come to belong to.Our predicament is knowing when to take on a role, when to work with each other, and when to support another. We clarify our ever-evolving roles by evaluating our past, present, and future participation in this landscape, individually and collectively. To weed out old projections and to nurture an environment of abundance, we make space for more authentic stories of human experience. Our reflections are our stories and they are what create the world.

Ecospirituality: Belonging to Inner and Outer Nature

To know what it means to be human is to understand nature. "Just be. Be yourself. A community surrounds you." This is the message I intuited from the moss that surrounded me in a forest. This wisdom is also what I believe to be the essence of nature experiences: to create time and space to feel, to be witnessed, to be loved, and fundamentally, to just be.

Nature’s Messages of Self-Worth and Belonging

Nature is interpretative. It is the lens we use to relate to the world. This includes the world around us (e.g., trees, rocks, water) and the qualities within us (e.g., human nature as personality). Environmentalists often use the term “nature-connection” to describe health and sustainability goals related to human experiences in nature, but within the idea of “nature-connection” is an element of cognitive dissonance. To connect with nature would essentially be to re-create a human-nature binary in the attempt to connect two ideas (i.e., human and nature) that were not separate in the first place. But with awareness and intention, experiences of nature can teach us how to mend those binaries.

1. Nature is everywhere: nature hierarchy is an illusion

When we create mental limitations on what can be defined as nature (especially “pristine” nature), we create a spiritual narrative of inequitable worthiness: those who have access to nature are more worthy to belong on Earth, to heal, and to become whole, while those who don’t are unworthy of belonging and healing. Well, this narrative is completely false because returning to our nature is our spiritual purpose here on Earth!Indeed, over half of the world's population live in urban areas. Moreover, recreation and wellness in natural environments have historically been, and are still in many places, inequitable occurrences. So, to heal humanity’s relationship with nature, and fundamentally with ourselves, we cannot insist on ushering people into pristine forests, meadows, and beaches for therapeutic experiences.A major component of nature therapy is mindfulness. To recognise the mindfulness opportunities around us, we need the mental space to value nature in urban areas as real nature and not low-grade substitutes for suburban or rural conservation areas, provincial or national parks, countryside, or wilderness.

2. The destination is always our inner nature

Mental hierarchies of nature also shift our focus from our inner world to our outer world. Instead of looking within, people may turn to worshipping nature (and culture) as a way to cope with difficult feelings of unworthiness and not belonging. But to love external nature and to take care of our planet, we need to know how to love ourselves.The capacity to love ourselves in our own nature is reciprocal to the awareness of how much nature loves us. This love is unconditional. It is not an imbalanced kind of worshipping since we are no less sacred, worthy, and natural as the 100-year old tree in a forest.The relational processes found in a forest or another “natural” setting is the same as the ones we have with family and friends. Relationships can be supportive, complicated, or even hostile. We usually feel more at peace in natural settings because other natural beings are not conditioned with judgmental narratives like our human counterparts. These environments more easily offer us a non-judgmental container to work through the stuff in our inner world.

3. Authentic equality is found in non-judgment

In nature-based community activities where all living and non-living beings in an environment exist in reciprocity without hierarchy, we relate in authentic equality. This type of coming together, to me, is genuine activism. Without power struggles, without judgment, we invite change into our world, socially and environmentally.Through humility, openness, and trust, change occurs in ourselves and in the world around us, because nature knows its course.

4. Our home in nature is a commitment of self-love

The harmony of collective humanity is contingent on the commitment to a non-judgmental belief for all human lives: nobody should feel that they don’t belong on the earth they stand on and to the inner and outer nature of their own existence. We embody this belief by honouring our own belonging to life.Our home in nature starts with our sense of self in our individual universes. This home is not built of trees, flowers, or stones, but rather the words we use to bring the magic of trees, flowers, and stones into each other’s lives. The lessons of nature exists well beyond forests and meadows when we endeavour to bring the magic of life to every little universe we encounter.

Learning to be authentically human

For most of my life, I yearned to belong. No matter where I went, I felt simultaneously “too much” and “too little” for the environment I was in. I was labelled by the people around me as shy and talented, but I had always known that they were not really seeing me for who I was. Externally, I was a top student, a good friend, or a valuable employee. But internally, I was a metaphorical sea turtle struggling to come out of its shell.The issue was I didn’t know the difference between who I was and who others thought I should be. This made it hard for me to appreciate the parts of myself that I wanted others to value. In particular, my empathic ability to tune into the energies and emotions of those around me was interpreted as my own defectiveness. Only when the pain of living a misaligned life was too intense that I made a leap of faith; I quit my stable professional job as a landscape architect and returned to school to study the spirituality of landscapes. Not long after, I encountered an existential crisis—or what I would now call a spiritual initiation—and for the first time, I became aware of how much I had deprived myself of happiness because of the stories I believed in of what I deserved in life.Since then, I have been on a journey of healing. From psychotherapy to energy work to mysticism to academic and independent research projects to courses and certifications, I gained wisdom about myself and the world. I discovered what was at the crux of my healing journey: my identity was entrenched in generational and collective subconscious beliefs about disempowerment, oppression, unworthiness, shame, and not-belonging. And so, my personal journey became one of clarifying my role in the collective healing and transformation of humanity. There are many threads to follow in collective healing, but ultimately, it is a co-creative process between awareness and faith. Our ability to change the story of who we are and our humility to surrender to a greater power work together to manifest intention into reality.My role is to help tell a story that we are worthy, we belong, and the world is beautiful. Often times, to retrieve the lost fragments of these stories, I need to bring our shadows into the light. I may use words, images, or just my presence, but my most essential tool is trust—the trust in the nature of who we are and who we were meant to be.

Credentials

My work is based on the combination of intuitive knowing and professional training. Below is an array of qualifications I've collected related to place and belong, environmental design and philosophy, ecotherapy, and life coaching. For more of my writing, please visit my blog. To get updates, join my community, or shop my creative projects, visit A Flourishing Commons. You can also find me on certain social media platforms with the handle leafrhymepoem which is the literal meaning of my Chinese name.