06/10/2026
Pain has a bad reputation in our society. Grief, shame, or every kind of hurt, are treated as problems to be solved or hidden, so we learn to swallow them or dress them up as something easier to live with, for ourselves and for the people around us.
Yet pain belongs. Each time we grow, an old self dies, and we mourn it whether or not we notice. The people we love will die, and so will we. On top of it all, there are wars, genocides and ecological breakdown making species vanish at record speed before our eyes. The grief of it all lives in our bodies.
Pain is an inevitable part of the human experience. Suffering, though, is what grows and grows when we refuse to feel it.
Any feeling we push down stays deeply tucked inside of us, waiting, and these repressions unconsciously shape how we love and how we treat one another and the world. Unexpressed emotions can also numb us or make us feel hopeless or stuck.
When we face sorrow fully and directly, and we let it move through us, through our physical body, healing begins. Yes, it’s hard, and it takes courage. But if you really allow it to surface, to let it move in any way it wants to, even if it’s ugly or uncomfortable or intense, even if it feels like it will burn you up from the inside, you will discover something absolutely beautiful.
By offering deep compassion and presence to the discomfort, an alchemical process takes place. So let it burn you. Let it unravel you. There is nothing to fear, there is only beauty and innocence to be found at the heart of it. Relief eventually comes, and with it a spaciousness and openness where joy and creativity can finally take root.
This joy and creativity is the beauty our world needs now more than ever, because from joy and creativity comes right action. Forged by the very energy we so feared inside. Wow.
Are you ready?
Artwork by John Martin