Five Vulnerable Things: Vol 25
On building what you want to exist, nothing to fix, pinpointing gifts, and my obsession with severance.
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.
Hello soul friend.
No intro this week, let’s jump into the deep end, together.
1. Building community locally is hard.
We’re overstimulated with information, people’s lives, and most of it is non-pertinent data that gets stuffed in our brains until we feel nothing. We yearn for belonging, for feeling seen. We’re touch-starved and drifting through our lives with never-ending to do lists that give us zero sense of accomplishment. We’re starving for connection. Not digitally, but in-person. To have an experience past the neck and head on a Zoom, but to fully be with another and each other. That is what I’ve been yearning for.
So I decided to find a physical place to host a guided meditation for my local community. I live in Charleston, so I started looking up meditation and mindfulness studios. Many of which positioned themselves as meditation studios but only taught yoga in person and offered meditation through recordings and headsets. Lame. I got so frustrated that I started looking at creative venues to build an event experience that I wish existed here. I couldn’t stop thinking about this local library tucked away in the woods on my morning walk, one I had only just recently discovered existed. So I looked them up and showed up this week for a free Tai Chi and Qigong class led by a 92-year-old master teacher. Funny enough, the teacher was out, so the class continued via what I can only describe as an ancient TV and VHS being wheeled into the room. It immediately took me back to junior high, when a sick teacher meant a substitute wheeling in that same clunky setup to play the only video the school owned, which was Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. I started wishing my teachers would be sick every day. But I digress.
The class was filled with senior women. I was the youngest by maybe four decades. I met a woman named Eddy who told me not to be nervous and that she had only started three weeks prior. We spent the hour following our master teacher on video with barely coherent audio. I left feeling genuinely happy, stopped by the front desk, and asked about reserving the space for meditations. I met a sweet librarian named Teyana and her manager Tim, who was busy with a VR headset game but told me it was free, that I just needed to do my own promotion, book through the impossible-to-navigate portal, and not do anything weird.
When we go on a quest for community, if we let it, it will take us down many rabbit holes. Our job is to enjoy the fall and allow the connections and the strangers to be exactly who they are meant to be.
2. There’s nothing for you to actually fix, and that’s a problem.
I went on a client group call this week and shared my desire to build more community and IRL experiences. But another topic kept coming up: my biggest problem lately is that I have an unlimited supply of problems. But what if there is nothing, and I mean absolutely nothing, to fix?
Our mind conjures up problem A, and once that resolves, it moves straight to B, C, D, all the way through Z. It’s like having a scab and scratching it. We keep reopening the wound until we leave it the hell alone.
I brought all of this to the call, and my mentor George Poulos said at one point, “Asa, you have more gravity than you think. You’re a star.”
I burst into tears.
I came thinking I needed to solve the problem of not belonging locally and the problem of fixing myself into oblivion. What I actually needed was to be seen, cheered on, encouraged.
All I needed was someone to believe in me.
We don’t always need to be solving problems about ourselves. Sometimes all we need is someone to see us, celebrate us, and give us a nudge to keep going on the quest.
3. Be so for real, you don't even know what your gifts are.
Please take five minutes right now and text three to five people you deeply trust asking them what your gifts are. I’ll be right here.
The people closest to us can often see us more clearly than we see ourselves. I collect all of it into a document and just sit with it. It’s fascinating. You’re out here trying to figure out your positioning, your special sauce, your offer, your way to serve humanity, and it’s all right under your own nose. Sometimes we need clean mirrors around us to point us in the right direction, especially in weeks when self-doubt creeps through the cracks in our armor. Thanks to Zoey, Maggie, Katie, Fatima, Kat, Tiffany, and Violet for helping me see it this season.
4. I'm realizing there is a level of self-censorship I cannot shake.
I’ve been making content for over 15 years, most of that time for successful multi-million and multi-billion dollar beauty and wellness brands. When I stepped into creating for myself I felt like a lost baby deer learning to walk. It’s hard out here. Expressing yourself and shit. Sheesh.
I have no product or thing to hide behind. I just have to be myself, which is completely impossible the second you hit record. I try to keep showing up and revealing the most honest parts of me, but I still get wrapped up in packaging, perception, storytelling. I consciously and subconsciously censor myself. It’s an impossible task to teach vulnerability while embodying it online without performing it or martyring your personal life for an audience. Whenever I play back an episode I still pick up on this almost imperceptible thing where I hold my throat chakra from opening completely.
I’ve been taking singing lessons to try to open and heal that. But it’s stubborn. So I decided I want to do a 30-day raw and authentic challenge (first introduced to me by George), posting a stream of consciousness video here on Substack daily. Nothing scripted. Just me, some tea, yapping.
I’m calling it Vulnerabilitea. It’s cute, right?
I’m trying not to see this as a problem to fix but as an adventure and a social experiment in loosening my grip on my voice, and letting that baby run wild.
5. Are we all severed?
I’m late to the party, but I’ve been watching Severance on Apple TV. If you haven’t seen it, it’s about a company that has select employees sever their work self from their home self. Many mysterious and mind-bending themes follow.
What keeps coming to me as I fall deeper down the rabbit hole of this series is how many ways we sever ourselves in this world.
The way some of us sever the artist from the pragmatic adult self. The way we sever our friendships, keeping friends for different versions of ourselves. The way we sever into past versions of ourselves when visiting family. The way we sever the gifts we innately have from the logic of the adult who has responsibilities, bills, and student loan debt eating away at the subconscious. The way we sever our playful sides from the sides that need to show up polished to fit the confines of authority. The way we sever our vulnerable self from the self that always keeps a brave face.
We are all severed in many ways. Some obvious, some not.
The more I meditate, the more I notice the severances and fractures in my own mind. Beliefs that don’t quite match my lifestyle or reality just yet. The way I keep moving the goalposts.
What I feel most called to share is this: reintegrating all the fractured parts of our soul is a lifelong, necessary pursuit. We must, one by one, reintegrate the broken identities, compost the beliefs that no longer serve us, and recycle the self-talk until we feel whole again.
We do this first by being vulnerable and honest with ourselves. Then by making a list of people we need to come clean with. You’ll be surprised how many times you’ve hidden yourself or lied to someone about something so small you don’t even know why you did it. We think that once something is out of our peripheral view we’re free of it. But it lingers. It shows up in the shadows, in the dreams. It haunts us.
Tell the truth. First with yourself, then with the people that matter. This might seem simple but it’s excruciating to face. What’s so interesting though is the reward. For living an honest version of yourself all the time, no matter where the chips fall, no matter who stays or goes, whether you find the success you’re looking for or grow a fondness for life exactly as it is, the reward is peace.
Peace is being good with you. That is more valuable than time, admiration, respect, money, or feeling significant.
That’s what freedom tastes like.
Random things I’m loving right now:
I love Pema Chödrön. She is such a treasure. This clip of her talking about uncertainty is profound, but what I love even more is how she mentions that Alice in Wonderland tumbling down the rabbit hole is her inspiration for letting go. How can we ever find the wonderment of our reality if we don’t fully fall without gripping the edges of the darkness?
This twinkling brown eyeshadow is giving me so much life. It’s by Violette_FR and it’s called Marron Glacé. The color is described as a twinkling candied chestnut. As someone who doesn’t wear makeup most days, I forget that a little color, a little sparkle can be a subtle way we find joy and highlight ourselves, not just for others to behold, but as a way to see the beauty in ourselves in the mirror. It’s been described as jewelry for your eyes and I absolutely adore that.
Currently reading Hold Nothing by Elena Brower. It’s one of those books where every two pages I put it down in my lap, take a deep inhale and exhale. I noticed how fast I was reading it and started intentionally slowing down, reading it out loud to make it last longer and feel into the insights more. Highly recommend reading out loud or asking a partner or friend to read a few pages to you.
I’ve been loving the YouTube channel FLEXFORM for gentle and deep stretches, because chilllleeee, this fascia and body need it so bad.
My obsession: Arizona Diet Green Tea cans. Do they make me feel like a geisha? Absolutely not. Are they a sophisticated choice for an actual tea lover? Nope. But do they bring me immense joy and a comforting nostalgic feeling of being a teenager in Brooklyn stopping by the bodega before school? Yes, very much so.
Minutes meditated so far this year: 2,050 minutes 🧘🏽♀️
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Follow the white rabbit,
Asa