Pain Is the Ultimate Portal

 Pain Is the Ultimate Portal

I used to think healing meant avoiding pain, that if I was strong enough, disciplined enough, or spiritual enough, I could outmaneuver suffering. I believed that the right combination of rituals, meditation, and devotion would protect me from the hardest parts of being human. But pain doesn’t work like that. It doesn’t care how many times you’ve fasted, how clean your diet is, or how dedicated you are to your practice. Pain is relentless because it’s a teacher, and it will keep knocking until you answer. It doesn’t just make you face hardship; it makes you face yourself, your limits, your fears, your resistance. It shows you where you are holding on too tightly, where you are refusing to grow, and where your ego is still running the show. It strips away the illusions you’ve wrapped around yourself and leaves you naked in front of your own truth.

I have answered pain in so many ways, through movement, through ritual, through sweat and breath. I have answered in the stillness of ceremony, in the silence after loss, in the deep grief that shakes the bones. I have met it in moments of physical exhaustion, when my body reached its breaking point, and in the raw vulnerability of heartbreak, when my spirit felt like it couldn’t bear another wound. Each time, pain has shown me something I wasn’t ready to see until I had no choice but to face it. It isn’t a punishment; it’s a portal. It forces us through when we’d rather stay comfortable. It’s the space between the old self and the new one, the moment before transformation when everything feels impossible. And yet, if we let it, pain will guide us to exactly where we need to be.

Pain is not the enemy. The real enemy is avoidance,the ways we numb, distract, or deny what is asking to be healed. I’ve seen this in my own body, in my practice, and in the women who come to me seeking healing but afraid of the work. They come looking for relief, for an answer that will soothe them without requiring too much change. But there is no shortcut. No way around it. Only through. Pain asks for your presence, your willingness to sit in the discomfort, your trust in the process. It asks you to surrender the illusion of control and step into the unknown. That is where the real healing happens.

The question isn’t how to avoid pain,it’s how to meet it. Do we fight it, numb it, surrender to it? Do we rage against it, or do we lean in and ask what it is trying to teach us? Because pain, for all its sharp edges and brutal lessons, is also a guide. It doesn’t just break you; it breaks you open. It carves out space for something new, something truer. It strips away everything false and leaves behind only what is real.

Once you’ve stepped through the fire, you don’t come out the same. You come out knowing,deep in your belly,that you can survive anything. And that kind of knowing is freedom. It’s the kind of freedom that can’t be taken away, the kind that isn’t dependent on circumstances or luck. It is the freedom of someone who has faced themselves fully, who has walked through the fire and come out on the other side, not unscathed, but transformed.

~Shanti Freedom Das