Vachon Imagined

There is nothing more important than now.

The now where minutes can turn into hours and you are still here. It does not matter what shows up. You are here, and you remain.

This takes practice. A practice of a lifetime: understanding that this lifetime is so short, it is practically over before it ever began.

We are given so many indications of this passing, both personal and universal. We have a thought, and then another. A feeling rises, and then another takes its place. A life is happening, and we see its effects, but not always the life itself—pure, unadulterated, before we have interpreted it, judged it, or changed our relationship to it.

One of my favorite stories in the Bible is Mary watching her only son be crucified.

She stayed there.

She watched the inevitable happen to her son, a gift given to her, and she never left his side. She could not stop it. She could not make it different. She could only remain.

And she was not the only woman who stayed.

Mary Magdalene stayed too. She remained near Jesus through his suffering and death, and later became one of the first witnesses to the empty tomb.

Two women. One his mother, one his devoted follower. Neither could change what was happening. Neither could make it better. They witnessed it.

They stayed.

And after it was over, Mary had to lay it down herself. She had to change her relationship to what had happened.

She did not choose the loss, the suffering, or the death. But eventually, there was a choice in how she would live with what had happened.

We are often taught to reject what hurts us. To heal it. To get over it. To focus on the positive. To call it crazy, evil, unacceptable, or wrong.

But when we are constantly trying to heal what we are experiencing, we can create a war within the body. One part of us is experiencing the moment, while another part is telling us we should be somewhere else.

We reject the very consciousness we are in. And this is the divide of all people; two people entering the same consciousness and dividing themselves into right and wrong, evil and just.

As humans we often want to forgive before we have grieved. We want to let go before we have held. We want peace before we have allowed ourselves to acknowledge what has wounded us.

But what if we stopped trying to heal for a moment?

What if we simply stayed?

Being in what is happening without judgment does not mean approving of it. It means allowing it to exist without immediately trying to change it. And in that allowing, something begins to release, not because we forced it to leave, but because we stopped fighting it.

This can take a lifetime.

People will leave us, reject us, or punish us for not letting go soon enough. They may tell us we should be over it by now.

But we are doing our best with the life we have been given.

And when we understand that, we can practice compassion for what seems unacceptable.

Peace with what appears deadly because we have stopped abandoning ourselves in the presence of what is not okay.

Mary stayed.

Mary Magdalene stayed.

And if these women could remain present with the death of Jesus, imagine what we can learn to remain present with in ourselves.

From there, we behave differently. We love differently.

Not because we changed ourselves, but because we stopped fighting ourselves long enough for something deeper to emerge.

We let life be what it is before we reject it.

We let a feeling be a feeling before we call it weakness.

We let grief be grief before we demand that it become acceptance.

We stay.

And in staying, our relationship to life changes.

The life itself was always happening.

We were learning how to remain long enough to meet it.