Vachon Imagined

When you deny spirit, you deny yourself.

It is not uncommon for people who have been taught to be strong to also be taught to hide. They learn not to admit pain, not to show emotion, not to reveal the storms moving within them. Yet beneath the words, “I’m fine,” there can be a seething rage, a quiet misery, a tension that the body reveals even when the mouth denies it.

You can sense it.
People show you what they have not yet learned to acknowledge within themselves.

This is not a reason to judge them. It is a warning to honor the boundary between compassion and participation. Until a person takes responsibility for the life moving through them, the wisest thing you can do is step away.

Do not fuel the fire.
Do not feed the tension.
Do not become another place where their unconscious pain can take form.

We all experience anger. Anger is a part of being human. It is a movement of life, but it is not life itself. It should never be mistaken for the whole truth of who we are.

Life is.

Life moves through everything.
It exists in harmony and imbalance, in anger and kindness, in grief and joy. It is present through every human experience, yet it is not defined by any single emotion passing through us.

The danger comes when we become bound to what we feel. When anger becomes identity. When excitement becomes attachment. When emotion is no longer something we experience, but something we become.

Two faces of the same face.

The spirit of tension and the spirit of excitement are both movements of energy. One contracts; one expands. But neither is the whole truth of who we are.

So when someone is consumed by emotion, the kindest thing you can do is not always to move closer. Wisdom looks like distance.

Love is not entering the storm.

Love is allowing the storm to pass.

When emotion settles, when the mind becomes clear, when a person can once again see themselves beyond the feeling moving through them—that is the moment to speak.

That is the moment to meet.

That is the moment to move.