Five Vulnerable Things: Vol. 013

on knowing vs understanding, resilience, losing the plot, urgency, and breadcrumbs

1. The difference between tasting wasabi and knowing wasabi

I relistened to a Know Thyself podcast episode with Dr. K. He’s without a doubt my favorite podcast guest and top of my list of someone I’d love to interview someday on Monsoon Season (planting that seed here).

He talks about the difference between Vidya (विद्या) and Gyan (ज्ञान - jñāna)—both Sanskrit words from ancient vedic texts. Vidya is information and knowledge. Gyan is understanding. And here’s the thing: only Gyan has the power to change behavior. Only Gyan transforms.

His kids tried wasabi for the first time. He warned them—very intense, tiny bite only. They thought it was green tea ice cream. Once they heard their dad say it was intense, they had Vidya. But once wasabi tangoed on their tastebuds? Gyan came in. They understood. Their behavior with wasabi is forever changed because of that experience.

Then he goes deeper. You can read 1,000 books on meditation, but it won’t make you enlightened.

“The understanding doesn’t exist in the book. Because if the understanding was in the book, anyone who reads it would get the understanding. You can have information in a book. The understanding comes from within you. The book serves as a trigger for your internal understanding.”

Oof.

Our western culture values Vidya—we collect courses and certifications like trading cards, screenshot quotes, save posts we never revisit. But eastern philosophy proves that information, no matter how much we consume, is still just information.

When we sit with it, fumble it, fail at it over and over—that’s when Gyan begins to form from inside. It’s been there all along, waiting to be awakened.

You can know that heartbreak hurts (Vidya), but you don’t understand the particular ache until you’re sobbing on your bathroom floor at 2am (Gyan). You can read about boundaries (Vidya), but you don’t get it until you feel the relief in your nervous system the first time you say no and mean it (Gyan).

We consume content daily hoping to taste Gyan, but we’re only getting familiar with Vidya. Vidya is a house guest—polite, informative, temporary. Gyan is home. It’s when something lands in your bones, not just your brain. And it didn’t click because of the words. It clicked from deep inside.

Vidya points to the moon.

Gyan is feeling the moonlight on your skin.

2. My misunderstanding of the word resilience

I recently did an Open app guided meditation with one of my faves Manoj Dias. I struggled to drop into my cushion with crust still in the corners of my eyes, having spiraled from over-gripping and achieving this week, burnt out and unregulated. I hoped this meditation would quietly hold me. Instead, it woke me the f*** up.

I heard him say:

“Resilience isn’t a steady state, it’s a dance between doing and resting. It’s about your ability to meet intensity without collapsing and to recover without withdrawing. That is the essence of capacity.”

I’ve heard this before. I’ve read about resilience. I’ve consumed the content, screenshot the quotes. Vidya. But sitting there, burnt out, body aching, I felt something shift. Not a full click, not yet gyan, but something closer. The understanding was trying to form inside me, beneath all the doing and proving.

Resilience isn’t the ability to keep going. It’s the wisdom to know when to stop. It’s not conquering the wave, it’s learning to float. And I’m still learning to float, still catching myself mid-grip, still mistaking exhaustion for dedication.

3. I almost lost the plot to why I became an entrepreneur

What led me to be on my knees during that meditation was this: I struggle with achievement. This constant need to “be somebody.”

After getting laid off in July 2025, I’ve been working my ass off every single day trying to prove I can be a successful full-time entrepreneur. That I can sustain myself financially with teaching and coaching. Some days are really tough. The bank account dips. I get a lot of “no’s.” But my desire to create, to express, and to tell the truth remains true of heart.

But sometimes I get swept up in the business plan, the cleaning out of my online presence, which should be a simple exercise of auditing my social media channels and streamlining something simple. I make it harder for myself. I complicate it. The funny thing is, I don’t do that with my clients. But for my own business, I quietly spiral. My neck goes out, my body aches from inflammation, and I keep pushing, keep reaching.

My husband was laying in bed next to me one night and said, “You can’t do it like this.” My instinct was to be like, ohhh you just don’t get it. It’s entrepreneurship, it’s supposed to be hard.

But that’s not why I chose this path. In many ways, I had no choice. I can’t work for someone else. I was put on this planet to teach, to inspire, to allow people to see parts of themselves they are afraid to look at, and love them back to themselves.

It reminded me that we can easily create a prison in the freedom that was gifted to us. Because no matter what, the shadows and old beliefs sneak back and try to pull us into the hustle, the doing, the achieving. And that source buried within is whispering: you don’t have to do that, you don’t have to prove. You are that which you seek already.

Anytime I’ve worked and moved from that place, I have stupidly “succeeded.” Luck somehow would favor me. I keep forgetting that this is our nature, our default programming. To be at ease. To destroy ourselves and regrow a little more resilient.

Every now and then (for me it’s daily) with every breath we must get our heads out of our own asses and ask: am I moving from love/freedom or from obligation to prove?

*quick neck stretch so I don’t become a ball of tight nerves

Ahh! Relief.

4. I love getting punched in the gut

“But remember, once you have an idea be quick because one day you might wake up and not care about it anymore.” — Julian Tsai

I watched this short film by a young creator on YouTube. One might say, “Asa, I don’t think being quick is going to help you out of the entrepreneurial nervous system swings.” But hear me out.

THIS IS NOT A TRUTH, IT’S LAW.

Like Elizabeth Gilbert says in Big Magic, inspiration is a guest and leaves to find another host. I have had this happen so many times. When I had the desire to start an Ayurvedic skincare line 11 years ago, someone eventually came up with the exact same name, brand, messaging and idea I had conjured up months after I had abandoned it.

I’m not saying do what I do and jump out of bed or the shower with suds dripping down your back to get the idea in motion. I mean: please stop thinking that the idea is yours forever. Your relationship to it will change. So, if something is alive and burning inside of you to create, now is the only time it matters to make it happen.

I talk to many clients about this. People come to me and share their idea for a podcast, their idea for a book or business, and they have zero urgency. They’re worried about the equipment. They don’t have a big enough following. All of that is utter bullshit.

If you feel like an idea is true in your heart, you must follow it into the depths, into the darkness, and honor it. It’s the divine speaking through you. What is important is not how perfectly you can express or build this idea. It is much more that this idea is just a mere teacher and guide—a breadcrumb into the next iteration of you.

The idea is really empty of nature, so why treat it with such fragility?

5. Speaking of breadcrumbs

I started The Artist’s Way. I’m on Week 01, but this week I posted my introduction—the basic tools and why I’ve been resisting doing it for many years but choosing to do it now.

This is my breadcrumb this quarter of the year, and I’m following it with unattached devotion.

What is one breadcrumb that you will follow?

See you on the other side,
Asa