Awakening Burned Everything Here

So I didn’t believe you unless you were ash too.

Something cracked open recently.

Not a big realization. Just a quiet seeing of how a belief had been shaping the way I viewed others. A belief I hadn’t fully noticed. One that filtered the world through the lens of what it took to break me open.

I had been carrying the sense that anyone who hadn’t been gutted from the inside couldn’t possibly be speaking from truth. That unless the whole inner world had collapsed - meaning, identity, the one who sought, the one who performed - it wasn’t real.

Not surface-level loss. Not the crumbling of life circumstances. But the internal death. The psychic dismemberment. The ripping out of what held it all together. That’s what happened here.

And so, when someone spoke of awakening while still holding onto their image, I could feel it. Not in the words. In the energy. In the subtle performance. The unshed skin. The pretending that hadn't died yet.

And for a long time, that activated something in me. Not judgment. Not rejection. But something sharper. A kind of clean contempt for spiritual pretending. For people playing at freedom while still protecting the self. For those who use the language of truth to keep avoiding it.

It was a response from the part that had no choice but to die.

Because what happened here was not gentle. It wasn’t spiritual. It wasn’t some blissful shift into clarity. It felt like being skinned alive. Like my heart was ripped out and crushed. Like every structure that once gave shape to this life was stripped away, leaving nothing but silence. And not the poetic kind. The brutal kind. The kind that doesn’t care what you thought you were.

And underneath all of that was the why.

Why did it have to happen like that.
Why so violent.
Why so complete.

For a while, I held onto that pain like it meant something. Like it proved I had really gone through it. Like it gave me the right to say what’s real and what’s not. A quiet fuck you to the ones still pretending. The ones who hadn’t faced their own collapse but still talked like they had.

And if I’m honest, part of me still wants to grab them by the shoulders and say, stop pretending.
Stop lying to yourself.
Face your fucking shit.

Not because I want them to suffer. But because truth doesn’t arrive by coddling the lie.

But that’s not where I live anymore.

That whole structure has relaxed. The fire burned what it came to burn. The grief has softened. The weight of needing the pain to mean something has dropped away.

It already did what it came to do.

There’s still the imprint of it all. The echo of what was lost. And sometimes a flash of that rawness still moves through. But it’s no longer what defines anything. It’s just what remains.

And underneath it all, there is love. The kind that doesn’t perform. The kind that doesn’t need to rescue or teach or preach. The kind that simply is. When nothing else is left.

Maybe some people see without collapsing. Maybe some don’t. I don’t know. And it’s not mine to know.

Sometimes there’s still a reaction when something smells like performance or pretending. Not because there’s a stance here, but because something no longer responds to what feels constructed. There’s no one doing that. It just happens.

Even the sense of knowing, of having paid a price, of having the right to speak, that’s been part of it too. And yes, at times it’s come with a quiet arrogance. Not personal, just something that passed through. Maybe even that’s not done. I don’t know.

There’s nothing to conclude from any of this.

It’s just what showed up.

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If something cracked open in you and you feel moved to give a gift, you're welcome to.
Not as payment. Not in return. Just as a quiet gesture of support, if that’s what stirs in you.

All gifts go toward what’s slowly unfolding through Suan Jai.

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