We Are Created From Polarities. A conversation with Vanessa Mannavarayan.

Dear readers,

In this blog post we are going to share with you some insights from an interesting conversation we had with Vanessa Mannavarayan in the beginning of our journey through Duality. A conversation that defined the course of our path.

We started creating value a few months ago with the question: ''How to deconstruct binary frameworks to achieve a more inclusive and creative society?''. We were three young individuals, different in our interests, but united by the understanding of our interconnectedness. Fuelled by creativity, we felt an urge to "shake" the system and turned our gaze towards disruption, the disruption of duality.

Different charismatic people from our network spoke to us and shared their views on polarity, binary systems and dualism. Vanessa was one of the first ones, making us take a sharp turn and completely change our perceptions and approaches. From disruption we transformed into connection.

Who is she actually?

Vanessa Mannavarayan is an executive coach certified by HEC Paris, a facilitator in collective intelligence, and a consultant at DB CoRe. Bilingual in English and French and originally from Canada, she brings together a rare combination of artistic sensitivity and scientific rigor, shaped by more than 14 years of experience working closely with leaders and management teams across French and international organisations.

At the heart of her work lies a deep belief: moments of uncertainty, difference, and change are invitations to evolve. Through her practice, Vanessa helps individuals and teams step beyond familiar frameworks, reconnect with intuition, and make conscious, aligned choices. Her approach to authentic leadership supports leaders in gaining clarity, strengthening confidence, and transforming insight into meaningful action—where the future is created, choice by choice, in the present moment.

"Everything appears through perception and interpretation". As a person who grew up with a lot of Right & Wrongs, Vanessa got to know our tendency as a society to divide abstract terms into socially accepted or unaccepted norms. However, the whole idea of Right & Wrong is nothing but our invention. Gradually a new understanding was fostered, one that goes beyond us as humans and our material reality.

“Every time you go in one direction, you create the opposite of what you want”. This isn’t just a psychological insight — it’s a natural law. In nature, movement is never one-sided. Every force generates a counterforce, every direction implies its opposite. In physics, Newton’s third law states it plainly: for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. Push harder in one direction, and resistance increases accordingly. This is also the Law of Polarity: light and shadow, effort and surrender, structure and freedom. You cannot move toward one without activating the other. Growth, then, doesn’t come from eliminating the opposite, but from learning to hold both — consciously.

This is precisely why form can only exist through polarity. No shapes really exist out of the binary. The moment we make a choice, draw a boundary, or give something a name, we anchor ourselves in a direction — and through that anchoring, something becomes perceptible. "We can't get rid of the binary, because then we wouldn't have a body", Vanessa explained. Creation itself is an act of polarisation. To exist in the world is to take shape, and to take shape is to enter duality. Our entire existence unfolds as a continuous dance between the non-binary — the infinite, the potential — and the binary — the visible, the experienced, the embodied.

We can observe the same dynamics through the lens of emotions and opinions. The emotion lives in the non-dual world, it exists in an abstract manner. The opinion is dual, it has a form and a defined solidified position. I believe we can all agree that neither one is "better", more "true", or more "desirable" than the other, but rather we can see their intertwined, inseparable nature.

From this perspective, shape-shifting becomes inevitable. Every creation is born from a non-binary origin — fluid, undefined, infinite — yet in order to exist in the world, it must take a shape. The moment something becomes visible, speakable, or shareable, it enters polarity. A form is chosen, a boundary appears. But the shape is never fixed. It remains temporary, mutable, alive. What we call transformation is not the abandonment of form, but the courage to let forms dissolve and re-emerge — again and again — as expressions of the same underlying unity.

It is important to remember that it is us who create structures — and who eventually begin to see them as “truths.” But what if we became individually capable of creating consciously? What if we could adjust form in real time, rather than becoming trapped by it? Perhaps then, the binary would no longer be a source of suffering, but a set of stepping stones — allowing further expression of our deeply artistic human nature.

This perspective is one of the many gifts of our conversation with Vanessa Mannavarayan, whose insights gently shifted our understanding of duality from opposition to movement, from limitation to possibility. Her way of holding paradox — without trying to resolve it — reminded us that awareness itself is already a form of freedom.

We create form, and form keeps transforming. It has to. The more we understand this fluidity, the more we master the art of living in a dual world — without forgetting the source from which all form emerges. Binary is the Creation. Remember the Source. You can affect the form because you are creating it — moment by moment. And there are no limits for that. So go for it! Shape, dissolve, reshape. Create your own identity!

Thank you!