The Chair
Sit Down and Watch
An Invitation to the Chair
For those who feel like they’re breaking.
For those who’ve tried every strategy, prayer, and plea—and are still met with silence.
This is not the end.
This is the invitation.
The Chair is where the becoming begins.
This piece is the opening threshold to the book taking a lifetime to live and write.
No matter how messy or late you feel—if you’re reading this, it’s time.
Sit down.
And watch.
from the book: The Chair, by Sunny Lancaster December 2025
There is a moment in every life—quiet and disruptive all at once—when the ground beneath you stops responding.
What once worked no longer works.
What once comforted no longer fits.
The roles you wore—mother, partner, leader, survivor—feel heavy or hollow, sometimes both.
The prayers bounce back.
The stories crack.
And before you even realize what’s happening, you’re no longer walking forward.
You’re circling something.
That something is The Chair.
Most people keep circling.
They keep swinging.
Keep explaining.
Keep praying for breakthroughs while bracing for collapse.
They find someone else to blame.
Someone else to rescue.
Someone else to become.
I should know.
I built a life out of that cycle.
I taught others how to do it—how to hold a sword in one hand and a wound in the other, how to survive on motion.
It worked, until it didn’t.
And when the spinning no longer soothed, I finally stopped.
Not because I was ready—
But because I had no other moves left.
And what I found there was not what I was taught to expect.
The chair is not shame.
It’s not punishment.
It’s not the end of your usefulness leading to your wholeness.
The chair is a threshold.
Not just a symbol—but a real turning point in the soul.
A threshold is where you are:
• No longer able to lie to yourself
• Still unsure how to live without the lie
• Not yet who you’re becoming
It’s the moment where your old language doesn’t work, and your new voice hasn’t arrived.
Where what once felt like clarity now feels like control.
Where the people who used to soothe you suddenly feel like pressure.
Most people mistake a threshold for depression, burnout, or failure.
But it’s none of those.
It’s the invitation to stop running and let truth become your new shape.
The chair asks you to lay down every version of yourself that once worked.
Not just titles or roles—
But the inner contracts you made in order to be loved.
It asks you to name and release:
• The belief that being quiet keeps the peace
• The habit of apologizing for things you didn’t do—just to
make things feel safe
• The survival pattern of loving others more when they hurt you—because that’s what you were taught love does
• The idea that your value comes from being useful, selfless, or spiritually “together”
• The story that being exhausted and overlooked means you’re doing something right
• The agreement that your suffering pleases God—or protects your family
• The lie that performance is godliness, and stillness is laziness
• The reflex to disappear when you’re misunderstood, to shrink when you’re too much, to fix when things fall apart
It asks you to sit with all the ways you made yourself small, holy, or silent—because you thought that’s what love required.
Even though it worked,
Even though it kept you alive,
Even though it made you the one they relied on—
It was never the truth of who you are.
You can pray.
You can fast.
You can ask for love, reconciliation, justice, healing, opportunity.
But if your system is still built on abandonment, fear, control, or needing to be chosen—
You are not in alignment with the very thing you’re asking for.
A gift given too soon isn’t a blessing. It’s a burden.
This is not the version of God you were handed through pulpits and rituals.
This is the Keeper of All—before names, before dogma, before performance.
The one who never abandoned you, even when you abandoned yourself.
And sometimes, the Keeper says:
“I love you too much to let you retaliate.”
“I love you too much to let you call vengeance ‘growth.’”
“I love you so much, I will let you look foolish in front of the ones who tried to destroy you—so that you don’t destroy yourself.”
So instead of fire, you’re given softness.
Instead of a platform, you’re given silence.
Instead of revenge, you’re given stillness.
And it’s not punishment.
It’s protection.
Because if you win too soon,
If you prove your point before you’re healed,
If you reclaim your power before you can carry it in truth—
You stay in the loop.
You pass the curse forward.
And some will call you cursed.
They’ll say you’re weak.
They’ll say you’re being punished.
They might even look at your life and say, “This can’t be blessed.”
And your brothers—those who should’ve seen—
Might walk by and say nothing.
They might shrug.
They might scoff.
They might say, “Good luck.”
Not because you weren’t worthy.
But because they weren’t ready to see the sacred in what looked like collapse.
They failed you.
But you are not the failure.
You’re not lost.
You’re in the chair.
And the chair is where the becoming begins.
If you don’t sit, you will pass the sword.
To your children.
To your partners.
To your inner world.
And to every world you’re invited into.
The chair breaks the loop.
But only if you stay.
I waited too long to sit.
Maybe not too late, but too long.
And now, I sit in my mother’s garden.
Not just a backyard.
Not just a quiet place.
But the spiritual site of return.
The garden is where it all began—
Where the distortions entered,
Where the poisons were wrapped in care,
Where performance was mistaken for protection.
Some of it wasn’t mine.
It came from other people’s silence, anger, avoidance, fear.
But I still drank it.
I still agreed to it.
And I still made decisions from it.
So the Keeper sent me back.
Not to be punished,
But to finish it.
To name it.
To feel it.
To leave no stone unturned.
So that nothing—no story, no person, no pain—could hold me hostage again.
This isn’t just an invitation.
It’s a reckoning.
It’s a remembrance.
You were never meant to orbit potential.
You were made for fullness.
And fullness cannot be carried in fractured hands.
Discard the role.
Discard the trap.
Discard the language that was never yours.
Let Source—not fear—reveal what comes next.
This is the beginning of a different book.
A different life.
Sit down.
And watch.
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