On lineage, ritual, and living between worlds

Mangda Sengvanhpheng is an artist, death doula, and the founder of BACII. BACII focuses on loss and grief while providing services and offerings for individuals, communities, and organizations to renew our engagement to life. Mangda’s life and death work is guided by her Lao last name, which means “the light of the full moon.” She was an awarded recipient of Reclamation Ventures grant for under-represented leaders making pathways to addressing grief and loss and her work has been featured in VICE, Vogue, Architectural Digest, NY Mag’s Curbed, and more.

I want to start by saying how fortunate I feel to be having this conversation with you at this moment in time. We’d first connected on an autumn evening six years ago during a death cafe you’d co-facilitated. That experience opened my world up to grief work, and it’s been integral to how I lead my life now.

Ah, this is what I love so much about this end-of-life space. We get straight to the point, heart-to-heart and human-to-human, and I feel like it’s the biggest blessing when I re-connect with fellow travelers from years ago and then get to hear their journeys now.

I’m so grateful. What’s so profound about BACII and your offerings as a grief and death doula is how you’re carrying forward ancient practices within a completely different context to your ancestors. How do you access these lineage stories and situate them into the present moment?

Being Lao, there’s a lot of grief in the human experience because of how disconnected we are from our bloodlines and these rich lineage stories due to survival and colonialism. Sadly, I wasn’t able to learn of my mother’s stories because it was just too painful for her. After her death, there’s still a huge disconnect from my maternal lineage. I wish I could hear stories about what my grandmother was like, or what her great-grandmothers were like, or trace where my gifts come from. Then, from my paternal side, I would interview my father as a little girl and ask, “What is Laos like? What is this place?” I would ask other family members as well, but a lot of their stories were about fleeing war and living in refugee camps, so most of them didn’t want to go deeper.

This is the world that I exist in, that a lot of us exist in. At some point, I need to find acceptance of what is, as painful as that is. I know my mother was extremely intuitive, and had these beautiful gifts that she couldn’t fully activate in ways, but they were there. And even though I can’t access lineage stories through my own blood, I can still listen to community members that share bloodlines, and have these incredibly enriching conversations with Lao descent people within my community, and commune with their grief.

So yes, there’s an immense grief that comes from severed roots, and there’s an immense grief of feeling like an orphan in the world in that way, but there’s beauty in connecting these dots in other ways.

I feel that so deeply. My maternal grandfather, my Abu, passed away a few weeks ago and it’s been one of the most devastatingly beautiful thresholds I’ve ever walked through. His legacy is his gentleness, he was the most tender-loving father to his children and grandchildren and the wind beneath my mother’s wings.

Still, there’s grief I carry about not knowing who he was outside of being our Abu. Whenever we’d visit Pakistan, I’d ask all kinds of questions about his childhood before Partition, to which he’d respond with a smile and a wave of his hand, which meant it was time to change topics. Eventually, I had to accept that I’d likely never get to hear the stories that shaped him.

That’s honestly why I began exploring lineage stories on a cellular level, learning of metaphysical ways to trace and tend to the stories through the body and spirit seemed to me the only alternative. It’s expanded my world beyond my imagination, and I’m better for it, but the grief remains.

I really resonate with what you’re saying. The pain of what we can’t access is heavy. I’m sending so many blessings to you, your family, and your grandfather. I share that pain with you. It’s amazing how we’re trying to connect, mend, and repair as much as we can. I think a huge response to these times is that many of us are asking ourselves, “Where do we go from here? What needs to evolve?” Especially since many of us haven’t faced the war, fleeing, and tragedy that our elders have, we have this privilege to actually turn toward the grief and move it towards healing. It’s an immense privilege, and an immense responsibility.

Absolutely. It feels instructive. I imagine that part of the responsibility when doing this depth of grief work, especially when working with more-than-human worlds, is discerning between what’s yours and what’s not yours to carry. How do you hold a heightened state of empathy for the world and for the soul of the world while still remaining tethered to your own root system?

Throughout my whole life, I’ve always moved towards mystery. I was always this inquisitive and curious kid, asking about the things I wasn’t being told. From such a young age, I’ve also had this huge respect for the invisible worlds around us; I’ve never wanted to mess around with those realms, and this was before knowing what I’d be doing now. I just always had a feeling that if I didn’t know how to work with them, why would I provoke them? I was always aware of the harm that could be done.

Now, as a grief and death doula, where I offer more of this forward-facing grief, death and communal care, I’m often working with the invisible world, and there are so many different layers of the invisible world that I’m working with. So in terms of how I discern, I honestly start by asking. I’ll ask, “What is coming through that would be helpful? What would be of highest service during this time?”

I’m intentional about calling on and being clear on who I’m calling on to be next to. I’m very protective of not allowing in the energies that I don’t want around me. I hold a strict program because of the thresholds that I’m in. There’s so much sticky energy out there, and there are so many different energies around me because I’m opening up portals all the time. So it’s really important that I have an intentional relationship with the invisible world when doing this work. I have my rituals and tools, and I’d say to anyone who recognizes that there are invisible forces around us, it’s important to have clear intentions and rituals, call in what you want and expel what you don’t want, and have the practices to protect and shield yourself, too.

Are you willing to share some of the tools and rituals that keep you rooted and protected on your path?

I’d say my tools and practices all began very intuitively. I think that’s where everything starts: intuition. From there you start learning, fine-tuning, and adding your gained wisdom and knowledge.

In terms of what those rituals are, I always start by asking to be protected in what I’m doing, be it in my work or in my life.

More recently, I’ve also been asking to be divinely aligned in everything I do and in everything I offer. I think there’s so much surrender in that. I’m not asking who, what, when, and where I need to be, I’m asking to be in a state where I can just keep flowing closer to the people, places, or situations that I need to be in order to be of service. It’s become almost a daily prayer: to be protected and to be divinely aligned.

I also start everything by lighting incense, and I’ll have my own affirmations and intentions. Then I’ll anoint the space with smoke, including all the materials I’m working with. If I’m meeting with someone online, I’ll even sage the computer. I’m really protective and intentional. In fact, sometimes it’s super easy for me to just be in a cave and do my own thing, but asking myself how to be of service is a reminder to re-emerge and bring offerings back to the world, to contribute to the world. That’s my rhythm, going in to be of service, then going back out.

Learning how to be in this world but not of it.

Exactly. It feels like having a foot on the ground and having a foot in the ethers. And it’s very easy to be one way or the other, but I think it’s also really important to reckon with the world that we live in, to be part of it. Especially in New York right now, the disparity, it’s painful. I personally have always struggled with feeling like I’m not responding enough, or doing enough, or saying enough because there’s real responsibility when it comes to our privileges.

That’s why I have to be so honest and so integrous with myself because my grief work is my own form of responding.vI’ll find ways in which I can utilize the grief and the death work, whether it’s working with immigration attorneys, working with marginalized communities, educating people… I’m working with people in their grief all the time, whether it’s one-to-one or in groups. I know what I’m doing behind the screen.

I think that’s what’s really hard about existing right now, with this amount of information within our hands all the time. I can’t do the work that I do at the degree that I want to and the capacity that I want to if I am constantly responding to every single thing on top of all the things I’m doing behind the screen.

I just know myself, and I think that’s the answer, is knowing my role and knowing what that feels right and true for me. Everyone has a role, and if we start to see our role as a contribution to the collective, it feels like a disservice to not share our gifts with the world.