Vachon Imagined

Humanity divides itself when it begins to believe that life must be controlled before it can be trusted.

We were given bodies.

We were given desire.

We were given feeling.

The body naturally does things. It feels. It wants. It moves toward experience.

That is what a body is for.

To experience life in a way that life alone cannot.

But somewhere along the way, we began judging what the body experiences.

A feeling arises, and shame arrives behind it.

A desire appears, and we ask whether we are allowed to have it.

No one is in the room, and we are watching ourselves.

We notice ourselves feeling.

We notice ourselves wanting.

We notice ourselves becoming aroused, afraid, tender, angry, curious, alive.

And another self appears.

Watching.

Measuring.

Correcting.

The body feels, and we watch the feeling.

The body wants, and we judge the wanting.

The body moves, and we ask what the movement says about us.

Even our privacy is no longer private.

We have brought the world inside.

No one has to tell us we are wrong.

We do it ourselves.

This is the division.

The body becomes something to control.

Desire becomes something to suppress.

And we become both prisoner and guard.

A private feeling becomes a secret.

A natural impulse becomes evidence against ourselves.

We confuse purity with suppression.

But desire existed before the judgment.

The body existed before the rule.

Life existed before the shame.

Punishment does not destroy what is natural.

It drives it underground.

What is denied waits.

And what waits eventually finds expression.

Sometimes quietly.

Sometimes destructively.

Sometimes in secret.

The secret is not the disease.

The division is.

We take something living and declare a part of it unacceptable.

Then we spend our lives watching ourselves, trying not to become what we have decided we are.

We stop living.

We start monitoring.

So how do we return?

Humility.

Clarity.

Love itself.

We let what arises be seen without turning it into an identity.

We can feel desire without becoming desire.

We can feel fear without becoming fear.

We can experience the body without worshipping it or condemning it.

What moves through us is not necessarily who we are.

The body moves.

Desire moves.

Fear moves.

Thought moves.

We do not have to move with it.

Humility brings us to silence.

And in silence, the watcher disappears.

There is no one left to judge what is happening.

There is only what is happening.

The body was never the enemy.

Desire was never the enemy.

We were never separate.

We only learned to watch ourselves as though we were.