Five Vulnerable Things Vol. 40
On taste, feedback as love, and learning to try different.
Monsoon Season is a newsletter and podcast for self-mastery 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, and the belief that the most spiritual thing any of us can do is be vulnerable.
Hey soul friend!
For almost 11 years I dreamt of starting my own beauty brand. And I did all the things. I got all my ducks in a row, got everything in place to make it possible. I launched everything but the actual product to sell. In hindsight, I’m learning more and more every day that the dream I dreamt for myself was actually too small. I wasn’t destined to sell people body oils and Ayurvedic potions that would make them feel seen and embodied, even though I know if that had been my true destiny, I would’ve made it cool as fuck. But alas, I’m starting to find that my dream was hidden in the rubble of my failures. It was my voice. This whole freaking time. To tell stories, to use my voice to elevate consciousness. To allow others to not just be seen, but deeply felt.
I think that’s what I’m actually here to do. Not to build something, and fill it with myself, but to empty myself out and become the vessel something else moves through.
I don’t know the perfect shape it should take yet. Much of my own suffering happens when I try to force-mold the prophecy into something it doesn’t want to be, when I try to be the architect instead of the vessel. But I have a feeling, and it’s asking for a kind of patience that feels supernatural.
Quietly, in the stillness, it says: be patient. It’s all happening, all coming together, even while it looks from the outside like it’s coming undone. Trust your gifts. Invest the time and space to sharpen them so they don’t atrophy. But trust, too, that this thing can be built by brute force, or it can be built by emptying yourself out and letting the divine architect lay the blueprint, and rise as high as it actually wants to go.
Now, five vulnerable things.
1. Finding taste is hard.
Growing up my father always told me what he builds would be mine. He built many incredible things like schools and libraries in the tiny rural village he grew up in Bangladesh. And I remember just always saying okay, if that makes you happy, I’ll do that.
After he left my family at 16 years old I was left with not only the grief of mourning a father that was still alive, but what I never really talk about is the hole that I felt in my vision. I didn’t know what I really wanted to do. So, I turned to the arts. I studied theater arts in college, and did that for a while, wrote and directed plays, and had the time of my life. After college I had a harsh dose of reality, outside of my weirdo artist bubble, and so I went into corporate and then beauty startups.
There has always been this very strong pull in me ever since I could remember to want to work for myself, to be an entrepreneur, and I realized this year so much of the resistance I feel toward this work is not wanting to be my father. He is an entrepreneur. A really good one. And so energetically I think parts of myself kept sabotaging this path, because how dare I become like this guy??! That question ran underneath so much of my resistance, and I didn’t catch it for years. When you’ve spent an entire life being what other people need you to be, you forget so much of what you actually like, and what YOU really want to do with in this lifetime.
Nobody talks about the real cost of people-pleasing. It’s not that you lose self-trust. It’s that you lose your own taste. You override the gut so much for other people’s happiness, that you have no fucking clue what you even like. It’s a scary place to be, because you feel like a child learning the world for the first time. Everything feels so overstimulating, and you chuck social media feeds in there, and it creates more confusion and chaos in choices. There is no hack or productivity bullshit I can give you other than turn off the faucets of consumption online where you can, and reduce the access other people have to you. Just cut access for a temporary time to really dig into yourself and excavate the hobbies, the passions, the creative pulls that naturally tug harder once the noise settles. I still hate to admit that I don’t know what I’m doing most days, but I am becoming more me, more my taste, more my field of possibility.
2. Collaborate with reality.
I was rewatching Pema Chödrön’s podcast with Ezra from the NY Times for the third time (please normalize watching things or reading things over and over again) and she was talking about this concept that she learned from her teacher “collaborate with reality.”
She goes on to share that so much of our suffering isn’t the change itself. It’s our resistance to it.
It makes me think of the time I was on my first silent meditation retreat in Costa Rica. As we wrapped our opening ceremony in the evening and stepped into full silence, thunder began to roar, and we found ourselves in the middle of a monsoon.
Everyone tried so carefully to get from the shala, our sacred practice space open to the outdoors, back into their rooms across the courtyard, and our teacher, Hector lovingly transported people back and forth with an umbrella.
Most people were trying to not get wet.
Something came over me, and I rushed out into the storm, and met the monsoon fully. My intuition told me go, bask in the rain. I made this for you. It’s a moment in my life I will never forget. It’s a joyful memory that I tug on anytime I feel myself slipping into my own shadows.
Reality is like rain. Resist it, and you’re just cold and wet and miserable anyway. Might as well dance.
That moment for me was the greatest moment of collaborating with reality. I embraced the wetness, the rain, the storm, and in return it gave me everything. It gave me joy, it gave me wonder, awe, and memory for a lifetime. Now, the practice has become how do I take this cinematic memory, and apply it to the mundane day-to-day?
It looks like sitting with discomfort, restlessness and embracing them as I embraced monsoon. Come here, let me hold you. Stop trying so hard to stay dry in life’s storms. Let yourself get drenched. The storm feels utterly different once you stop fighting it.
*Actual footage of that moment was captured by my teacher Hector. How magical!
3. Are you good at receiving feedback?
Listen, most people are not good at receiving feedback. People loooove to dish it out, but honey, they do not like taking it. If you’re too sensitive to feedback, chances are the people around you aren’t telling you the truth, because they don’t think you can handle it. I know this because I used to be that way. Anytime someone gave me feedback I would crumble (in private, of course), and get super defensive. I remember the Creative Director at Glossier pulling me aside and calling me out for taking things too personally, which of course I met with more defensiveness. Naturally.
After that job, I practiced. And honestly, I’m gonna brag for half a second: I am a fucking G when it comes to taking feedback now. I LOVE IT. I mastered it with my 10,000 hours, and every manager I’ve had since has told me it’s one of my strong suits.
Feedback is a form of love. A friend of mine, Sunil, said that once during Meditation Teacher Training, and it never left me. You grow so much when you get good at it.
I had a guest on the podcast, Keiron Miller, and at the end of the episode he asked if he could give me some feedback. I said PLEASE. He said he loved our conversation, but he would’ve had a better time if I’d opened up and let him share his gifts with me too. Here I was thinking I had to be the gracious host, shut the fuck up, and make sure he had the limelight every step of the way, but I was actually blocking a real exchange. I was giving him my gifts to receive without letting him give his back. Let your guest give you things back, he said. It’s the best piece of feedback I’ve ever received as a host.
An older version of me would’ve let that eat me alive, gotten off the call, and ruminated for days about what a bad host I was. But the me that’s practiced taking feedback just thought, damn, that’s a huge blind spot I never wouldn’t have caught, and thanked him profusely. Every interview since then, I’ve made sure I’m right there with the guest, opening up instead of disappearing into the host role. It’s improved my experience, the guest’s experience, and the audience’s a thousandfold.
Don’t just go around asking people for feedback, be intentional about it. But ask yourself, are you actually good at receiving it? Can you handle the blowback? If you can’t yet, that’s okay. Work on your reaction one tiny bit at a time and remember it’s neutral data that can potentially unlock your gifts in a way that you couldn’t even imagine.
4. You are spiraling (not the world).
I took George Poulos’s meditation class this week, which was delightful. I signed up because I genuinely was having a string of shitty “bad” meditations and I thought maybe taking class with someone I trust and love would help get me out of this weird meditation rut. My mind has been a mess lately, very noisy, and chaotic. During the meditation, he prompted us to broaden our scope and he said notice how the objects around you are perfectly still. I looked around at my sea foam green ceramic mug, my X-pole, my vase of fresh electric pink gladiolus, the wood coffee table, the dog toy laying with the stuffing all over the floors, and it’s true they were all still. I was gagged.
Here I was thinking the world was chaotic, noisy. It wasn’t the world. It was me.
Everything is where I left it, whether or not it was an intentional home, everything around me in my environment was just so. Still. I was the one spiraling. I was feeling like the business or the content was spiraling that I was making, I was getting agitated that my growth was slow, or whatever it is.
It’s not the world spiraling. It’s me.
And if you’re honest, it’s probably not the world spiraling for you either. It’s you.
Yes, there are without a doubt so many moments in life that are out of our control, but the reason we practice stillness, is to build that resilience in how we meet the noise, how we meet the chaos. How the inner world meets the outer one. When we’re in that hard place, where the world feels like it’s crashing, that’s when the stillness is needed even more. That’s when the saying no to things, closing off access to you is critical so you can find your footing and have the space to notice that you are right there, just so.
5. New choice.
My college acting professor was a god to me. Shout out Arianne Krsytansky. In college I signed up for one of the most terrifying classes I’ve ever signed up for, Improv 101. The two classes I was most resistant to taking: Intro to Singing, and Improv 101. I’m still recovering from the singing class, and it’s been almost twenty years.
The improv class was absolutely incredible. She would have a student stand up, start improvising, and people in the audience would throw out ideas, and every now and then she’d throw in a new person to shake things up. Anytime she saw a student get in their head, lose the thread, get self-conscious, she’d yell “NEW CHOICE!” And it was our mantra to snap the fuck out of whatever we were doing. Full permission to pivot.
I still use this today!!! Sometimes when I find myself doomscrolling, or stuck in a business building moment, and I’m overcomplicating it like the plot of a Christopher Nolan movie, I say out loud under my breath, NEW CHOICE, Asa. And it’s like waking up, snapping out of a trance. And listen, it works every damn time.
We’re so primed to watch how other people are doing it, how they’re building, how they’re “winning” online. NEW CHOICE has been a lifeline for remembering something simple. I didn’t build this life to fall in line behind anyone else’s expectations. I’m building freedom, so in order to do that I need to think different. I need to move different. I need to choose different. It’s available to you, too. What is this life but one long-ass improv class, new characters walking in and out of frame the whole time. Don’t forget you have the power to call NEW CHOICE and shake it all up.
Stay soft,
🥭 Asa
*Everything is created and written from start to finish by me.
About the Author
Hey, what’s up! I’m Asa (ay-sha)! I am a Bangladeshi-American meditation teacher, writer, and podcast host. I wield vulnerability as a sword, and help all beings that I encounter to become more vulnerable with themselves, so they can serve the world with their unique gifts and uplift culture and the collective consciousness. I’m a native New Yorker now living in Charleston, South Carolina. I’m so happy you are here. ⚔️🫀
Loved these! #1 felt especially resonant. I realized the other day that I am actually beginning to have a pretty clear picture of what the human part of me does and does not like…and that brought me so much glee 🤭 Because finally, I am paying attention to MY OWN RESPONSES to life rather than letting others responses dictate mine.
Love u x