Five Vulnerable Things: Vol 23
On the internet, idle walks, communal silence, plans you never wanted, and the freedom of being no one.
Monsoon Season is a newsletter and podcast by meditation teacher and writer, Asa Yee. It lives at the intersection of culture, consciousness, and creativity. It is about the messy, beautiful, non-linear work of becoming. The courage to be seen. The belief that the most spiritual thing any of us can do is be vulnerable, and that showing up exactly where you are, is its own form of sacred practice.
Something is shifting and I am here for it. The heaviness of winter, that thick cocooning energy that had so many of us in our heads and under our blankets, is lifting. What is coming in to replace it feels lighter, crispier, more electric. Spring does not ease in politely. It shows up and rearranges the furniture. And if you have been feeling a slow thaw happening inside you lately, that is not your imagination. The energy is moving, the season is turning, and something that has been quietly germinating in you all winter is about to break ground.
This is the real start of the year.
Let’s get into it.
1. The internet is empty by nature, and that is exactly what makes it magic sometimes.
I have pulled back heavily from Instagram and short form content. I made a conscious decision to stop feeding the algorithm and start building something with depth instead. And most days I feel really good about that. Then I see a video of a kid named Tyler absolutely destroying Keith Sweat’s Nobody at a karaoke night on a cruise ship in front of Black crowd, owning every single second of it, and I am reminded that the internet is not evil. It is just empty by nature. What we pour into it is what it becomes.
That video sent me down a spiral of vintage baby-making R&B (is there any other kind?).
One of my personal flexes is that nobody ever knows what I am listening to on my walks. You could pass me on the street and I am deep in some song that is entirely about making love and I am just nodding at you like a normal person. The internet gave me that moment this week and I needed it. Because what I love most in this lifetime is when people completely shatter your expectations of them. When someone shows up in a way you never saw coming and breaks your perception. At its best, that is what this thing can do. It can show us each other in the most candid, surprising, fully human moments. Also, if you don’t know this song…let me educate you. Thank me later.
2. Raw dogging your walk will change you.
I have been going on long walks without my phone, without headphones, without music, without anything. Just me and the route and whatever my mind decides to do with two hours of uninterrupted silence. And I will be honest with you: it has been excruciating. I teach meditation for a living and I was genuinely scared of my own thoughts while moving. Sitting still with nothing feels manageable. Walking with nothing felt like exposure.
Here is what I have noticed.
Walking with headphones on is like being underwater. Everything is muffled, filtered, processed through someone else’s sound. The moment you take them off, the world becomes sharp and loud and textured in a way that shocks you. I started noticing details on routes I have walked hundreds of times. Smells, colors, the specific way light hits something at a certain hour. My senses had been dulled by constant input and I did not even know it. Giving your mind genuine idle time, not meditation, not journaling, just boredom, is one of the most radical things you can do for an overstimulated mind. Try it once. Raw dog one walk. See what comes up.
3. Communal silence says more than words ever could.
I have been isolated lately, sometimes by choice, and sometimes just because I feel so not in my element as a New Yorker who doesn’t drive in a smaller city like Charleston. This week I was invited back into a community container hosted by a past coach I love and I did not realize how much I had been starving for it until I was sitting in it.
The part that I needed the most was not the conversation. It was the silence. There was an extended period where we all just sat together, quietly, on a screen, and it was one of the most nourishing things I have felt in weeks. Something can be held in communal silence that words cannot touch. Being witnessed without having to perform or explain or produce anything is its own kind of medicine. Community does not require a perfect group or a perfect city or perfect circumstances. It starts with believing you belong somewhere. When you carry that belief inside yourself, the people start to appear. Find your container. Tend to it. It matters more than you think.
4. Asking ChatGPT is not the same thing as asking for help.
I spent almost eight hours yesterday in a Claude rabbit hole, building business plans, repositioning my messaging, auditing my brand, mapping out strategy, pulling every lever I could think of. I was in a full trance.
My husband came home at eight o’clock and asked one question: do you actually want to do any of that?
And I said no.
And just like that, eight hours dissolved.
This is not a one time thing. This is a trap I have fallen into over and over again, and I know I am not alone in it. We use these AI tools to feel productive when what we are actually doing is avoiding the real conversation, the one that requires us to be vulnerable, to say out loud that we are lost or scared or unsure of where we are going.
Asking AI to co-create your vision will never cost you anything, and that is exactly the problem.
Real help requires courage. It requires sitting across from another human, a coach, a mentor, a friend, and saying: I do not know what I am doing and I need you to help me see clearly. That vulnerability is not a weakness in your process. It is the process.
5. “The more you try to become someone, the more inauthentic you become.”
I have been listening to the Know Thyself podcast with Shi Heng Yi, founder of Shaolin Temple Europe, who has been one of the most profound teachers in my meditation practice for years.
He talks about what he calls the freedom of being no one, and this idea that so much of human suffering comes from the relentless pursuit of becoming someone. That when we are chasing an identity, an archetype, a version of ourselves we are trying to construct and project, we are quietly confirming a belief that we arrived here incomplete. That we need to achieve something in order to achieve wholeness.
I want to be clear that this is not a case against ambition. It is not about shrinking or stopping. It is about the energy underneath the pursuit. For a long time my question was how do I get more views, more subscribers, more reach, how do I be seen and heard?
And slowly, almost without noticing, that question has shifted to:
How do I serve better?
How do I say the things that help people suffer less?
This energetic shift has changed everything about how I move.
Being no one does not mean being nothing. It means being so free from the need to prove yourself that you can finally just show up and do the work with neutrality, with inner peace.
Minutes meditated so far this year: 1,774 minutes 🧘🏽♀️
Listen to the latest episode of Monsoon Season
Stay soft,
Asa
