Vachon Imagined

If I asked you where your shoulders were, you might point to the place you were taught they are located. You would identify them by memory, by knowledge, by the name you were given.

But if I asked you, what do your shoulders feel like? you might look at me strangely.

“What do you mean? I cannot feel my shoulder.”

Until it hurts.

Then suddenly you can say, “My shoulder hurts.”

But awareness of your shoulder is something slightly different. Most of the time, you are not aware of it at all. You are simply moving through life, carrying your body, moving your arms, turning, reaching, existing. Your shoulder is there, but it is unnoticed.

Then someone brings your attention to it.

And now you can feel it.

You can “see” it.

Not with your eyes, not by standing in a mirror and looking at its shape, but through an inner seeing. A knowing that arises when awareness touches something that was already there.

This is the seeing we speak of when we enter the inner world—before you called your shoulder a shoulder, before you called the world the world.

Before the name.

Before the interpretation.

Before the mind took what was alive and turned it into something familiar.

The shoulder was always there. The world was always there. But you were not experiencing it in the way you believed you were until awareness returned you to it.

Through pain.

Through a question.

Through a moment of stillness.

And now you do not only experience the shoulder; you experience your relationship with it. You experience the feeling of it, your presence with it, your connection to what is here.

Now there is clarity.

Now you see.

You begin to see yourself, and the world, as it actually is—not as the collection of names, memories, judgments, and ideas you have carried about it.

You are no longer lost inside the experience.

You are no longer deceived by the image of it.

The world is simply the world.

A shoulder is simply a shoulder.

And you are the awareness that sees.

Because nothing is truly happening—not even the world—not until you give it your attention.

Not until you give it your energy.

The moment awareness touches something, it comes alive within your experience. The moment you withdraw your attention, the story begins to disappear.

The shoulder was always there.

The world was always there.

But the meaning, the struggle, the identity, the fear, the attachment—these arise only when you enter into relationship with them.

Awareness is what reveals this.

And in seeing clearly, you are no longer trapped by what appears.

You simply see.

And what you see is what is.