Unity Nguyen [p.5]

NHA: If you could describe yourself in three adjectives what would they be?

UN: Fortunate, happy, and hardworking.

NHA: What do you like to do with your free time?

UN: I love to sleep. I take West African dance classes. Time with friends and family is essential. I do yoga and tai chi, but I consider them necessities rather than “free time” activities. I love to camp and travel the world. Cook. Meditate.

NHA: Describe your typical week.

UN: This season, more and more it revolves around intensive studying for the MCATs, but that’s only until the summer. I hope to spend the summer in Africa. For eight years I’ve been waiting to study kora in Mali. Right now, in a typical week I have acupuncture clients and students. Some performances. Lots of studying. A couple of African dance classes. Hopefully enough sleep. Music jams and recording projects with friends, sometimes all night. Chill time. A big part of my work responsibility as a health care practitioner is to be healthy and happy myself, by engaging in things that feed my soul. I can only share with patients as much life energy and wellness as I cultivate in my own being, so I have to spend my time doing things that I love!

NHA: Are there any mottos that you live by?

UN: Be humble. You learn a lot more that way. Stay healthy. Try not to do harm. Do your best at what you take on. Be Love!

NHA: What are you working on now? Any future plans or goals?

UN: Yes, I have long-term and short-term plans. Short-term, which will take about seven years, is medical school. After that, the real fun starts. I will build a Medicine Bus, a mobile clinic that offers a combination of Chinese and Western medicine technologies. The Medicine Bus will run on non-petrol fuel and solar power and whatever the most feasible clean technologies exist at that time. Of course there’ll be lots of music on the Medicine Bus. With the bus I can visit and serve various communities, including our beautiful neighbors in Central America. But I envision spending the majority of my time living on a beautiful land with clean water, building permaculture community, including organic farming, renewable energy, and well-thought-out education programs.

I work with a lovely group called Common Vision that does amazing educational tours on buses that run on used vegetable oil, and they have a lot to do with my medicine bus vision and community building. While I was working as an on-board acupuncturist and music performer for Common Vision’s Fruit Tree Tour last year, the idea of the Medicine Bus was born, and then for 10 nights straight I had vivid dreams about the future Medicine Bus. I told my mom about my plan and about the vivid dreams, and she blew me away with a fact I’d never known about my father, who was a dentist. He apparently got the Vietnamese government to give him a dental bus, and in his free time he used to travel around to poor villages, treating people for free. That blew me away. My dad died when I was 3, and I never knew that he had already carried out my brand-new crazy vision! He’ll have a little altar space on my future bus.

With my music instruments, I’m on the 50-year plan. By the time I’m 80 I want to play some really heartfelt expressive music. I want to have really rich and long-term relationships in my life. When I was young, I wasn’t convinced that I was so crazy about being alive. But studying Chinese medicine makes me really look forward to getting old because I know I’ll be a much more effective healer when I’m old. I look forward to being healthy in my old age, and gettin’ down with the music and medicine. God willing!

For more information, go to www.UnityHealingHands.com.

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