Vachon Imagined

The other day, a woman was standing in front of me holding her baby when she dropped her keys.

Without thinking, I moved to pick them up for her.

No one had to train me to do this.

No one had to tell me to be more thoughtful, more compassionate, more aware.

It was instinct.

It was life appearing.

And once you understand this, there is no need for judgment.

Because before judgment, there is movement.

There is response.

There is the natural intelligence of life expressing itself.

A woman is hurt, and judgment comes later.

A man feels disrespected, and judgment comes later.

The first experience is simple:

I hurt.

I feel pain.

Something happened.

But then the mind enters.

The story begins.

You should not have hurt me.

You should not have disrespected me.

This should not be happening.

And this is where suffering begins—not because the pain is unreal, but because we create resistance against what is already occurring.

The body experiences.

The mind interprets.

The story forms.

And suddenly, what was a moment of life becomes a battle between what is and what we believe should be.

This is deeply human.

And it is also where we become distorted.

Before we named life, before we divided experience into categories, before we decided what was acceptable and unacceptable, there was simply creation.

There was possibility.

There was movement.

There was love—not only for the self and not only for others, but an understanding that the two are inseparable.

Love of self and love of others are not competing forces.

They are expressions of the same source.

When judgment begins to fall away, we become realigned with creation.

With God.

With the mystery.

With the self.

The true self.

Not the person you think you are.

Not even the person you feel yourself to be.

But the nature beneath all of that.

The self before it was divided into good person and bad person.

Before thoughts were labeled permitted and forbidden.

Before sexuality was separated into acceptable and unacceptable.

Before we learned all the ways to measure ourselves against an imagined standard.

That original nature was never lost.

It remains within us.

It remains a part of reality.

But when it is held beneath judgment, we cannot see it clearly.

Held in judgment, it appears hidden.

Held in the light, it was never gone.

It does not need to be created.

It does not need to be earned.

It simply is.