Five Vulnerable Things: Vol 24
On ego and aesthetics, hard conversations, aiming higher, emptying the clip, and the art of packaging your gift.
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 honestly, exactly where you are, is its own form of sacred practice.
Hello soul friends!
This week, I feel like nothing I wrote was truly hitting or making sense, but I think that might just be my inner critic trying to play games. So, after many versions, many drafts, many edits, I’m still here…sharing vulnerably some lessons that have emerged in my life this past week.
Enjoy!
1. The urge to throw out everything you own will happen every time you level up and that is not an accident.
Okay so I have gone fully down a rabbit hole. Color analysis, capsule wardrobes, AI styling tools, the whole thing. And I have landed on Dark Autumn which apparently means I have exactly two things in common with Jessica Alba and Salma Hayek and honestly I will take it. But in all seriousness, I have been on a spiritual journey for a while now and one of the things nobody warns you about is that the urge to throw out your entire wardrobe happens over and over again. Every time you shed a layer of self, you look at your closet and nothing fits who you are becoming. And then you gut it. And then what is left is just safe, forgettable stuff that says absolutely nothing about you. And you call it non-attachment. But sometimes it is just hiding.
I threw this into my friend group chat this week because I needed to talk it out, and one friend said it might be your ego trying to stop you from going for it. And she might be right. And also the desire to step more fully into yourself through how you show up visually might also be real and true and not ego at all. Both things can be true depending on what you taste in this present moment and that is actually what being on a spiritual path teaches you, the practice of holding contrasting ideas without needing to collapse them into one answer. I am not trying to buy a whole new wardrobe. I am studying people like Zendaya and Law Roach because every single look they put together tells a story. Style is a signal. It changes your posture before you say a word. And I think for a lot of us, dressing like we do not want to be noticed has been its own quiet way of playing small.
2. Protecting your peace is not the same as avoiding the thing.
Can we talk about how ghosting became a wellness practice? We live in a culture that has fully normalized leaving people on read, cutting things off the moment discomfort shows up, and calling all of it protecting your peace. And look, I get it. I used to be that person. Avoidance felt like self-preservation. But this week I had to have a few conversations I would have absolutely dodged in the past. The kind where your stomach is tight before you even open the thread. And what I found on the other side of every single one was not drama. It was relief. Actual peace. The kind you genuinely cannot manufacture by running from something.
Here is the thing about avoidance that nobody talks about: it does not make the anxiety go away. It just keeps it on a low simmer in the background of everything you do. And beyond your own nervous system, ghosting people and leaving things unresolved is not a kindness, to them or to you. It keeps you smaller. And the flip side of this is learning not to be so easily moved when someone throws their energy at you. When someone ghosts you, or says something that stings, or makes a judgment about you, the question is not what they did. It is why it found a crack to get through. The more rooted you are in yourself, the less other people’s energy can reorganize yours.
That is the oak tree. That is what we are building.
3. You are not aiming high enough.
Okay here is a metaphor that has been living in my head rent free. You walk into a grocery store and you only ever reach for what is at eye level. Not because the other shelves do not exist. Just because somewhere along the way you decided that the eye level shelf is your range. That is what most of us are doing with our lives. We are shopping from the middle shelf, convinced the top one is for someone else, someone more qualified, more connected, more ready than us. So we keep filling the cart with fine. With manageable. With what makes sense given the circumstances.
My husband has been thinking through his next move and I kept watching the conversation circle around what is realistic within the options already in front of him. And I kept wanting to pull the question all the way back. Not what is available, but what do you actually want to do with this specific, unrepeatable, limited time on earth? That is a completely different question and it comes from a completely different posture. The posture of someone who knows they are infinitely valuable. When I started moving from that place, things that used to feel out of reach stopped feeling impossible and started feeling like directions. You do not need to earn the top shelf. You just need to decide you are allowed to reach for it.
And if you aim for the top shelf and miss, you will still land somewhere you never would have reached if you reached for the mediocre middle. That’s the tea, baby.
4. EMPTY DA CLIP.
I know you have a Notes app that is absolutely feral right now. Voice memos you have never listened back to. A Notion board with forty seven half-formed ideas you are saving for the right moment that is somehow never arriving. I have been there. And I used to think that was being organized and intentional. It is actually hoarding. And creative hoarding is just as suffocating as the physical kind, it just hides better.
Because here is what I know from lived experience: sharing is the alchemy, not saving.
When you put something out into the world even imperfectly, even half-baked, you learn more about that idea from what it stirs in you and in others than you ever could by sitting on it indefinitely. Sharing is how you figure out which ideas are seeds and which ones are already full trees. Your Notes app cannot tell you that. Only the act of releasing it can.
EMPTY THE DAMN CLIP.
5. You are not jealous of them. You are jealous of how well they package themselves.
You know that specific sting. The one you feel when you see someone in your field who seems to be everywhere, whose content always lands, whose whole presence just feels so cohesive and magnetic and undeniably theirs. And you feel this thing that you do not totally want to admit is jealousy. But here is what I want you to look at more closely: it is almost never the person you are actually jealous of. It is their ability to package their gift. To take everything they know and have lived and are here to offer, and wrap it in something instantly recognizable, repeatable, and completely theirs.
That is the thing that makes you ache.
What you are not seeing, and what nobody talks about enough, is how relentlessly they stayed in the mess before it looked like that. Good packaging does not come from a single inspired afternoon. It comes from excruciating amounts of patience, bad drafts, rewrites, scrapped ideas, and showing up again anyway. The version you are admiring is like draft forty seven. You are on draft three or maybe even draft eleven and you are comparing. You already have a secret sauce. What you need is the patience to stay in the uncomfortable, vulnerable, exposed middle long enough for it to get refined. So let them be your fuel. Let the jealousy tell you something is alive in you that wants to be built. And then get back to work on your messy draft.
Minutes meditated so far this year: 1,931 minutes 🧘🏽♀️
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Stay soft,
Asa