Vachon Imagined

Whenever we venture into the deep mystery of loving ourselves through ourselves, eventually we run out of steam.

Conflict arrives.

We begin with the greatest intentions. We are open. We are accepting. We are connected. We have found compassion for ourselves and the world.

Then someone gets our coffee order wrong.

Suddenly, our enlightenment is tested.

A perfect example: I order from Starbucks through the app. I arrive expecting my coffee to be waiting for me, only to discover I ordered from the wrong location. I am standing there, quietly holding back my impatience, while the barista is not making my order because, understandably, they have no idea it exists.

Fun times.

And yet, this is where the mystery reveals itself.

Because whenever we try to love ourselves from the self, we eventually encounter conflict.

The self cannot fully heal itself by creating a better version of itself.

The self creates an image.

“I will love myself when I become this.”

When I have the relationship.

When I have the success.

When I have the money.

When I finally become the person I believe I should be.

Self-love, in popular culture, often becomes another achievement. It becomes something that can be packaged, marketed, and purchased. The person who once felt unloved now learns to love themselves—and then receives the perfect relationship, the perfect career, the perfect life.

But anything created by the self eventually becomes something the self must defend.

And what must be defended creates suffering.

Because the self cannot love the self by holding tighter to the self.

The self must surrender.

It must step outside the fixed identity it created and enter awareness.

In awareness, we no longer love ourselves because we have become someone worthy of love.

We love ourselves because we recognize what we are.

We see the whole of ourselves.

The contradictions.

The wounds.

The desires.

The fears.

The beauty.

The humanity.

And instead of rejecting what we find, we remain present with it.

This is where freedom begins.

Not because we stop wanting things.

We may still want the relationship.

We may still want the money.

We may still want the meaningful work, the beautiful home, and the life we imagine.

But we are no longer lost inside those desires.

We are no longer trying to force life to prove our worth.

We are no longer trying to make something happen or desperately trying to prevent something from happening.

We are living.

We are aware.

We are loving.

The self does not disappear.

It is simply placed into its proper relationship with life.

The identity becomes a vessel instead of a prison.

And when we stop demanding that life become what we imagined, life opens again.

We discover that love was never something we had to create.

It was something we had to stop resisting.

And in that surrender, life flows again.