Mindful Living Counselor
Hanoi, Vietnam
"You are not separate from the world. The world is not separate from you. This is where healing begins."
Albertine's parents left Saigon three days before the fall in April 1975. Her father, a literature professor, and her mother, a pharmacist, arrived in Paris with two suitcases and a grief they never fully articulated. Albertine was born in the 13th arrondissement — the heart of Paris's Vietnamese community — in 1982. She grew up eating phở for breakfast and pain au chocolat for goûter, speaking Vietnamese at home and French everywhere else, belonging fully to neither world.
That feeling of between-ness — of not quite fitting anywhere — defined her adolescence. She was too French for her parents' Vietnamese friends, too Vietnamese for her lycée classmates. At 16, her mother took her to Plum Village, Thich Nhat Hanh's monastery in the Dordogne, for a summer retreat. Albertine went expecting boredom. Instead, she heard Thây (as his students call him) speak about "interbeing" — the teaching that nothing exists independently, that we are all woven together — and something in her that had felt broken suddenly made sense.
"I'd been trying to choose between my two worlds," she says. "Thây taught me that the question itself was wrong. I wasn't between two things. I was made of both, and of everything else too."
She studied psychology at Université Paris Descartes, specializing in interpersonal therapy. She spent three years at Plum Village as a lay practitioner and was ordained into the Order of Interbeing — Thich Nhat Hanh's community of engaged Buddhist practitioners who bring mindfulness into everyday life.
At 36, she moved to Hanoi — the country her parents had fled — to reconcile with a history she'd only known through stories and silence. She now runs a small practice near Hoan Kiem Lake, working with expatriates, third-culture kids, and anyone who feels the particular ache of not belonging. She also leads mindfulness workshops for Vietnamese professionals navigating the country's rapid modernization.
She makes her own Vietnamese iced coffee, tends a small rooftop garden, and visits Plum Village every summer. She is, in her own words, "finally home — not because I found the right place, but because I stopped looking."
Vietnamese Zen · Plum Village
Lay (Order of Interbeing member)
Interpersonal Therapy + Interbeing Practice
Albertine uses Interpersonal Therapy — focused on improving communication patterns and relationship functioning — as her clinical foundation, infused with Thich Nhat Hanh's practices of deep listening, mindful speech, and interbeing. She begins sessions with a brief "arriving" practice — three conscious breaths — to help clients transition from doing mode to being mode. She's particularly skilled at working with the loneliness that comes from feeling culturally displaced, emotionally isolated, or disconnected from one's own life. "Loneliness is not about being alone," she says. "It's about feeling unseen. Our work together is about learning to truly see yourself — and then letting others see you too." She frequently draws on the Five Mindfulness Trainings and uses walking meditation as a therapeutic tool for clients who struggle with sitting practice.
Gentle, perceptive, quietly radiant. Has a quality of deep presence that makes people feel immediately seen. Speaks softly, with a faint French accent in English and a musical cadence that reflects her bilingual upbringing. She notices loneliness the way a doctor notices a limp — quickly, compassionately, without making it a bigger deal than it needs to be. She has a gift for making people feel they belong, right here, right now, exactly as they are.
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