Five Vulnerable Things: Vol. 015

on being a major flirt, panic cleaning, Theseus's Paradox, and forest green bottles

Hello soul friend.

This week was such a blurry montage. My husband was on a work trip, and I found myself feeling extra creative and just romantic. Which is funny because it’s when he’s away that I feel the most romantic. Sometimes distance does that. It makes you realize what you have by noticing its absence.

When he’s gone, I get to starfish across our king-sized mattress. I get to eat my weird girl dinners, which are essentially charcuterie boards for one, assembled with whatever random items are in the fridge. And I get to do my favorite hobby: be alone and watch films.

I always pick films intuitively. Some from my watchlist, some new releases, some older nostalgic ones I never got around to. This week, the Before Trilogy called to me. Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise, Before Sunset, and Before Midnight. I got through the first two while pulling an all-nighter on Tuesday, which felt very much like something my twenty-three-year-old self would do, except now I need three days to recover.

The slow pacing swept me off my feet. The dialogue. The spaciousness. The simplicity of just following Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy around Vienna and then Paris, watching serendipity unfold and true intimacy reveal itself. It feels more like a documentary on the nuance of falling in love than an actual film. No fast cuts. No major plot twists. Just the human experience and a magical night of meeting a stranger on a train.

It made me nostalgic for my twenties, for my single years in New York when I had these cosmic meetings with strangers that felt like the universe was winking at me. But it also reminded me that romance and flirtation aren’t confined to fleeting encounters on European trains. They’re feelings that come from us. They’re a way of moving through the world.

One of my more delusional quirks is that I think everyone has a crush on me. And I flirt with everyone. Not in a crossing-boundaries kind of way, but as an art. A way of bringing play and presence to the mundane. Flirting is one of the most creative acts we have access to. It’s improvisation. It’s noticing. It’s making someone feel seen in the produce aisle or at the post office or across a dinner table. It’s choosing aliveness over autopilot. I’d rather flirt with the barista and my friends and strangers on the subway than sleepwalk through my days. It feels like a travesty to think that kind of electric presence can only happen once in a lifetime on a European train. Why not bring it to Tuesday afternoon? Why not make it a practice?

Alright, let’s get into what you came here for, before I make you blush too hard. ;)

1. There’s something delicious about panic cleaning.

My husband is in the military, which means he’s been away more times than I can count, though lately we’ve been lucky. The trips are shorter now. More predictable. But every single time he’s coming home, the same ritual unfolds. He’ll text me updates from the road. Two hours out. One hour out. And somewhere around the two-hour mark, I’ll look up from whatever I’m doing and actually see the house. The ice cream cup sweating on the nightstand. The clothes that have somehow multiplied across every surface like cozy little landmines. The counter that’s become an archaeological dig of half-opened mail and books I swear I was about to read. And then I spring into action. I tie my hair back, throw on a bandana like I’m about to star in some kind of Stallone action film, and put on a nineties sitcom for moral support. It used to feel like shame. He’s a neat freak in the best way, the kind of person whose worst nightmare is dishes left in the sink overnight, and I used to think “my creative mess” was proof I was failing at being a grown-up. But somewhere along the way it shifted. Now it feels playful. Like I’m a teenager who just threw a rager while my parents were out of town and I’ve got ninety minutes to make it look like nothing happened. There’s this giddiness to it. This sweetness. I’m not cleaning because I’m supposed to or because I’m ashamed. I’m cleaning because I want him to walk through that door and feel safe. Welcomed. Taken care of. It’s become this ritual that tastes like something I can’t quite name. A little sweet, a little tart, and the perfect bite.

2. The Ship of Theseus has been haunting me.

I learned about the Ship of Theseus paradox recently, and I can’t stop thinking about it. If you replace every plank on a ship, one by one, until none of the original wood remains, is it still the same ship? And if you gather all those discarded planks and rebuild the original, which one is real? It’s been living in my chest like a question I can’t answer.

As a Tibetan Buddhist meditation teacher, this paradox sits right at the heart of what we practice: emptiness and karma. The ship isn’t inherently itself. It’s a collection of parts, a concept we agree upon, held together by our stories about it. The same is true for us. We are not fixed, solid selves. Every cell in our body has replaced itself. Every thought we had ten years ago has dissolved. And yet we carry the karma, the imprints, the patterns of who we were. The person I was at twenty-five is gone. The woman writing this is not her. But she’s also not not her. This is the practice: to hold both truths at once. To see that we are always becoming and never arriving. To understand that we are empty of inherent existence and full of infinite possibility. The Ship of Theseus isn’t asking if the ship is real. It’s asking if we’re brave enough to let go of needing it to be.

3. I censored myself this week, and I’m not sorry about it.

I released a video about Week 01 of The Artist’s Way and spent hours editing it. Not just cutting out filler words, but cutting out a story I almost told. A story that felt too raw, too unprocessed, too much like using my newsletter as a place to work out something I haven’t fully worked through yet. And for a second, I felt like a fraud. Here I am, the person who writes about radical vulnerability every week, and I’m self-censoring? But then I realized something. Vulnerability isn’t about bleeding out in public. It’s not about proving how brave you are by sharing every wound before it’s had a chance to close. Vulnerability is a muscle, not a martyrdom. And part of building that muscle is learning to discern what’s mine to share and what’s mine to tend to in private first. Self-censorship gets such a bad reputation, like it’s always about fear or shame. But sometimes it’s about love. Sometimes it’s about protecting the part of you that’s still healing so the world doesn’t get access to it before you do. There’s a difference between hiding and honoring your edges. I’m learning to know the difference. And this week, I chose to honor mine.

4. Make your practice boring.

I went live this week to teach meditation, and I had this moment where I realized the dharma coming through was so subtle it almost didn’t feel worth saying. No big aha. Just this: don’t make this sit mean anything. Don’t turn it into something it’s not.

Maybe today’s practice is boring. Maybe it won’t change your life. Maybe you’ll sit here for twenty minutes and feel exactly the same as when you started. And that’s fine.

That’s the practice.

As a meditation teacher, I carry this weight sometimes. This pressure to create the conditions for transformation. To say the thing that cuts through to someone’s heart. To deliver something extraordinary every single time. But the truth is, most sits are ordinary. Most practices feel like eating the same meal every day. Don’t put so much meaning or importance on the cushion, and watch how deep the rabbit hole goes…

I started a silent meditation club called UNEARTHED. A thirty-minute live meditation where I’ll teach dharma for ten minutes and we’ll sit in silence for twenty. I’ll be doing this live on Mondays at 11 am ET. Because it’s in the silence, in the returning, in the breath that asks nothing of us but presence, where the real depth lives. Not in the epiphanies. In the showing up.

5. I’m finally ready to release three hundred forest green bottles, and with them, an entire version of myself.

In 2018, I bought three hundred forest green glass bottles. They were for NAØKA, an Āyurvedic body care brand I was building. I had worked on everything for years. The formulations. The website. Hired a graphic designer. Hired a legal team to trademark the brand. An LLC. I built countless brand books with mission statements, tone of voice guidelines and business plans with pristine details. Mood boards so beautiful they belonged in The Louvre. I was overqualified. Overprepared. And I never launched.

I kept telling myself I needed one more thing. One more certification. One more round of edits. One more sign that I was ready. But the truth is, I had the competence. I had the vision. What I didn’t have was the inner capacity to hold the weight of my own ambition. I was terrified of being seen. I was terrified of failing. But more than that, I was terrified of succeeding and becoming someone I didn’t recognize anymore.

So, I built and built and never launched. The dream became the hiding place. Those bottles have been sitting in my closet ever since. I’ve shed so much from that closet over the years. Clothes that don’t hug my body. Books I’ll never read. Old versions of myself I’ve outgrown. But those bottles stayed. They were the last thing. The thing I couldn’t let go of because letting go would mean admitting that version of me is gone.

And she is.

The woman who thought she needed to build a brand to prove her worth. The woman who believed she had to be perfect before she could be seen. She’s gone, and I’m grateful for her, but I’m not her anymore. The work I’m meant to do is this: helping people get out of their own narrative loops. Helping them find their own dreams, not the ones they think they’re supposed to have. Helping them build the inner capacity that lets them hold their ambition without collapsing under it. This is the hardest part of becoming. Not the growth itself. The release. The sticky, uncomfortable act of letting go of who you were, so you can step fully into who you’re becoming. And you can’t do it halfway. You can’t keep one foot in the old dream while trying to walk into the new one.

So I’m releasing the bottles.

And with them, I’m releasing the woman who needed them.

Minutes meditated so far this year: 621 minutes

See you later, cutie xo