Vachon Imagined

Rules around sexuality extend far beyond sex itself. Sexuality is life expressing itself, and life is everywhere.

Rule-following and suppression tend to flourish in fear-based systems—religion, schools, families, and just about anywhere people gather. In our waking lives, we judge, divide, and categorize. We tell ourselves, “No, I can’t do that.” “No, that’s wrong.” “No, that would hurt someone.” We create boundaries, identities, and stories about who we are supposed to be.

Then we go to sleep.

In dreams, these same tensions often return in strange forms. A chicken wears the body of a dog. Time folds in on itself. Meaning becomes fluid. Up and down lose their certainty. The subconscious speaks in symbols rather than explanations because a mind at war with itself rarely dreams in straight lines.

So we do what any other warm-blooded human would do: we Google it.

Suddenly, someone else’s interpretation becomes the authority. We search for certainty in a world of symbols. Yet perhaps we do not need to separate the chicken from the dog to understand ourselves. We do not need to dissect every image to understand the body, or to understand sexuality as life expressing itself and returning to itself.

Of course, life expressing itself is not always gentle.

When life is honored, sexuality may emerge as intimacy, creativity, curiosity, connection, and love. But when life is not honored—when fear, shame, domination, neglect, or violence become the governing forces—its expression can become distorted.

The same energy that seeks connection can become control.

The same longing to be seen can become manipulation.

The same vulnerability that invites intimacy can become armored, hidden, or projected outward as aggression.

A person at war with themselves often carries that war into their relationships, their desires, their dreams, and sometimes even into acts of violence. The outer expression changes, but the inner conflict remains. The body does not merely express what we believe. It expresses what we fear, what we hide, and what we have not yet learned to accept.

To understand sexuality, then, is not simply to understand desire. It is to understand how life moves through us when it is free—and how it moves through us when it is wounded.

When we commit ourselves to fear-based systems, we learn to follow the rules. We become agreeable. We move in the direction we are told to move. We learn how to fit into the world.

Yet somewhere in the body we also know that we are not fixed.

We are not permanent.

We are always changing, always becoming, always transcending what we were a moment before.

In that sense, life itself is fluid.

Having a foundation within yourself that you can return to is essential. Not because it gives you more rules, but because it grounds you beneath them. It reminds you of something deeper than praise and punishment.

It steadies you when others celebrate you and when they reject you.

It renews you without effort.

And in that place, there is no division to maintain, no fear to defend, and no part of yourself that must be pushed away.

There is only the quiet recognition that life has always known how to express itself.