Why We Run from Ourselves
The Intelligence of Avoidance
A Guest Reflection from VedicSoul - By~ A Bhardwaj
One of the things I love most about this strange, beautiful corner of the internet we’ve built together is the way ideas begin to echo across voices. A thought appears in one place, a reflection deepens it somewhere else, and before long you realize you’re witnessing something more like a conversation than a collection of essays.
That’s the spirit behind the Entangled Voices Collaboration Series.
From time to time, I invite writers whose work resonates with the same deeper questions many of us wrestle with here; questions about consciousness, identity, awareness, and the quiet architecture of the inner life. These pieces are not responses to my writing so much as companions to it, different lanterns illuminating the same landscape.
Today’s reflection comes from VedicSoul (A. Bhardwaj).
In this piece, VedicSoul explores something many of us quietly struggle with but rarely examine without judgment: avoidance. Rather than treating it as weakness or failure, he approaches it with the patience of Vedantic inquiry, asking whether the impulse to turn away might once have been an intelligence of protection rather than a flaw in our character.
Drawing from the Bhagavad Gita and the Upanishads, the essay gently shifts the lens from what we avoid to what is aware of the avoiding itself. The result is not a lecture on self-improvement, but a contemplative exploration of the witness that remains present beneath every adaptation we’ve ever made.
It’s a thoughtful and generous piece, and I’m grateful to share it with you.
Take a slow breath, settle into your robe if you’ve got one handy, and step into the reflection.
It begins before we notice it.
A conversation shifts toward something tender. A thought rises at the edge of awareness. A silence lingers a moment too long. And something in us, not quite a decision and not quite a refusal, turns away. The hand reaches for the phone. The subject changes. The silence is filled before it can ask its question.
Only later do we say, “I avoided that.”
But in the moment itself, it does not feel like avoidance. It feels like relief. Like safety. Like the subtle easing of an inner pressure we could not yet name. We have learned to call this failure. We have learned to judge ourselves for the turning. In many contemporary conversations about growth, we are encouraged to face everything directly, to feel everything fully, and to move toward what frightens us without hesitation. And so, we add another layer of suffering: shame for the very movement that once kept us intact.
But what if the impulse to run was not against us, but for us, until it no longer needed to be? What if avoidance, before it became a problem, was a solution? An intelligence that arose before the mind could name what required protection.
This is not an inquiry into what we are avoiding. It is an inquiry into the movement itself. Something turns within us at the moment of turning. Hiding makes continuity possible. And something remains present, even while we run. We are here to look at that turning. Not to stop it. Not to condemn it. But to recognize what it may have been doing for us all along.
The Body Knows Before the Mind Concludes
Long before thought organizes experience, the body responds. A conversation tilts toward vulnerability, and something in us shifts. Not quite a flinch. Not quite a withdrawal. A subtle contraction. A redirection of attention. A movement away from what feels too exposed.
If we observe closely, without judgment and without urgency, something precise becomes visible. The response arises before deliberation. It resembles a reflex more than a strategy. Like a hand withdrawing from heat before the mind constructs the narrative of danger. This is not a choice in the conventional sense. It is sensitivity shaped by experience. A nervous system that learned, through repetition, where presence felt unsafe. The early adaptations formed before we had language for the environments that shaped us.
A child may learn to quiet themselves before understanding why their excitement unsettles the room. Another learns to agree quickly because disagreement risks disapproval. Someone else discovers that withdrawing feels safer than staying visible. These are not weaknesses. They are quiet adjustments made long before explanation becomes available. They are survivals written into posture and tone and breath.
And here we pause. Not to analyse. But to acknowledge that turning away was once a movement toward safety, toward continuity, toward the preservation of a self that could endure long enough to mature.
What the Early Turning Reveals
There is an intelligence in adaptation that the mind often recognizes only much later. When we learned to dim our light, we were not choosing smallness. We were choosing survival. When we learned to remain silent, we were not rejecting truth. We were protecting connection as we understood it. It is conditioned intelligence operating within limitation.
Yet Vedanta invites a further discernment. If adaptation occurred, something must have been aware of it. If the body contracted, something registered that contraction. If we turned away, something knew that turning was happening. The reflex is conditioned. The awareness of the reflex is not.
न जायते म्रियते वा कदाचित्
‘The Self is never born, nor does it ever die.’ ~ The Bhagavad Gita (2.20)
If what we are is not born and does not die, then what we are cannot be reduced to learned behaviour. The turning has a history. The awareness in which the turning appears does not. The Upanishadic vision does not ask us to reject what protected us. It invites us to discern what was always present beneath protection. The light that was dimmed did not cease to exist. It was simply filtered through circumstance.
The Self does not evolve. It does not become wounded or healed. What evolves are the conditions through which it appears to express itself. The question, then, is not whether we turned away.
The question is: what was aware of the turning?
The Architecture We Mistook for Identity
Protection repeated becomes structure. What began as necessary retreat gradually solidifies into architecture. We inhabit these structures so thoroughly that we begin to mistake them for ourselves. Perpetual busyness ensures that stillness cannot interrogate us. Self-sufficiency becomes so complete that no one reaches what aches most deeply. Emotional minimization is practiced so fluently that it feels like temperament. A curated coherence is presented outwardly while tremors remain unexamined within. These are not dysfunctions; they are constructions shaped under constraint. They once ensured continuity.
At the thresholds of this architecture stand guardians. Fear of rejection. Fear of misunderstanding. Fear of exposure before readiness. Fear that if we stopped running, something overwhelming would surface. Yet guardians exist only where something valuable is kept. Protection implies treasure. So, the inquiry matures.
Not: Why do we run? But: What is so vital that it required this degree of vigilance?
आत्मैवेदं सर्वम्
‘All this, verily, is the Self.’ ~ The Chandogya Upanishad (7.25.2)
If this is so, then what we built was never outside what we are. The walls appeared within awareness. The guardians arose within awareness. Even the forgetting appeared within awareness. This does not mean the Self changed or became divided. It means that all movements, protection and fear included, occur within an indivisible field that remains untouched by what arises in it. The treasure and the walls appear in the same awareness. They are appearances within the same reality.
The Witness That Does Not Move
There is something in us that never turns away. Even in the moment of contraction, awareness is present. Even in the architecture of hiding, awareness knows the walls are there. Even in forgetting, there is awareness that forgetting has occurred.
द्वा सुपर्णा सयुजा सखाया, समानं वृक्षं परिषस्वजाते
तयोरन्यः पिप्पलं स्वाद्वत्ति, अनश्नन्नन्यो अभिचाकशीति
‘Two birds, close companions, perch on the same tree. One eats the fruit. The other, not eating, simply watches.’ ~ The Mundaka Upanishad (3.1.1)
One bird tastes, reacts, builds, fears, runs. The other does not participate. It illuminates. Yet the metaphor must be understood carefully. The witnessing awareness does not become the runner. Running appears within awareness. The witness is not modified by what it illumines.
Thoughts arise within awareness. Contractions arise within awareness. Avoidance arises within awareness. But awareness itself does not contract. It does not flinch, it does not hide and it does not move toward or away. It is directly observable. Right now, sensations arise. Interpretations form. Agreement or resistance appears. And simultaneously, there is awareness of all of it.
That awareness does not run.
When Running Reaches Its Edge
Avoidance rarely dissolves through confrontation. There is usually no dramatic breakthrough. No heroic renunciation of fear. More often, something quieter occurs. The familiar strategies, distraction, distance, subtle turning away, begin to lose their conviction. They still function, but something in us no longer believes they define reality. This is maturation.
Exhaustion, in this sense, is the gradual erosion of belief in the old narrative. The narrative that says safety lies in perpetual motion. The narrative that says walls guarantee invulnerability. The narrative that says the runner and the witness are separate. These narratives do not end in spectacle. They simply weaken. In the space they leave, presence becomes noticeable. Not as a new achievement, but as what was always there.
Looking back, avoidance appears less as opposition to truth and more as preservation of integrity until truth could be met without fragmentation. It was not running from ourselves. It was running within ourselves.
आत्मनस्तु कामाय सर्वं प्रियं भवति
‘It is for the sake of the Self that all is loved.’
~ The Brihadaranyaka Upanishad (2.4.5)
Even this. Even the running. Even the hiding. Even the elaborate architecture we mistook for identity. All of it was oriented toward preservation of what we fundamentally are, even when we did not consciously know it.
The Return That Never Departed
The return is not dramatic. No thunder. No decisive breakthrough. No victorious arrival at some distant shore. Only the gradual recognition that what we sought through movement was never elsewhere. The treasure was not outside the walls. The guardians were not adversaries. The architecture was not the ultimate problem. The forgetting of our nature was the only confusion. And quietly, something becomes evident. The one who watches the runner. The one who never contracted. The one who could not be avoided because it was never separate from what appeared to be avoided. Not a better version of ourselves. Not an improved personality. Not a future attainment. Simply awareness, present before the first adaptation, present during every turning, present now.
The runner appeared within it.
The hider appeared within it.
The builder of walls appeared within it.
When exhaustion softens resistance and curiosity replaces fear, what remains is not something newly created. It is what never departed. The hiding was not failure. It was holding. A provisional form of protection until discernment matured. We are not asked to eliminate avoidance. We are invited to see clearly.
The turning was intelligent. The protection was understandable. The architecture was functional. But what we are was never confined by any of it. The detour was not outside the path. It was movement within wholeness.
पूर्णमदः पूर्णमिदम् पूर्णात्पूर्णमुदच्यते
पूर्णस्य पूर्णमादाय पूर्णमेवावशिष्यते
‘That is whole. This is whole. From wholeness, wholeness emerges.
Taking wholeness from wholeness, wholeness alone remains.’
~ The Isha Upanishad
Nothing was ever truly lost. Not an ending. A doorway recognized as never having been closed.
Reflections like this are exactly why I love the Entangled Voices series. Different paths, different traditions, yet somehow we keep circling the same quiet center.
My thanks to VedicSoul for offering this thoughtful exploration.
If the piece stirred something in you, I’d love to hear your reflections in the comments. Conversations like these are how this strange little robe-wrapped corner of the internet keeps deepening.
If you’d like to support my publication, you can become a paid subscriber, buy me a tea, or
share this with someone who might need it.
Every little act helps keep the robe warm, the mesh humming, and this work unfolding.
If you’re new:
And please visit my Official Home page at: The Entangularity Project
Stay entangled, my friend.
—The Bathrobe Guy
 | A guest post by
|
I really appreciated the gentleness of this piece. The way it reframes avoidance felt quietly compassionate. Almost like turning toward an old friend we’d misunderstood for years. So much of the modern conversation about growth pushes us to confront everything head-on, as if any hesitation is weakness. But this reflection pauses and asks a kinder question: what if that turning away once protected something tender until we were strong enough to look more closely? That recognition alone softens a lot of unnecessary self-judgment. And the image from the Upanishads—the two birds on the same tree, one tasting the fruit and the other simply watching—still feels like one of the most beautiful ways to describe the inner life.
Reading it also stirred another quiet layer of the conversation for me. The witnessing awareness the essay points to is a powerful discovery, but teachers like A. C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Prabhupada, speaking through Bhagavad-gita As It Is, often describe that witness not as an impersonal field but as the living soul itself: conscious, relational, always accompanied by the Divine presence within the heart. Seen that way, even our running and hiding start to look less like failure and more like part of a long human journey. The soul tastes the fruits of life, sometimes joyfully, sometimes clumsily, while the deeper awareness patiently remains. And slowly (often very slowly) we begin to notice it was there all along.
I really appreciate the way this reflection reframes avoidance with such patience and compassion. The idea that what once protected us may have been an intelligence rather than a flaw is a powerful shift in perspective. Thank you both for offering such a thoughtful exploration.