Sacred Pain

 I used to believe suffering was something to solve.

If I could just understand it, heal it, rise above it, then I could get back to living. Pain felt like an interruption, an error in my design. Something that meant I had taken a wrong turn or failed to listen closely enough. So I became efficient at avoiding it. I stayed busy. I stayed productive. I stayed “active.” I learned how to keep moving even while something inside me was quietly bleeding.

What I see now is that suffering isn’t in the way of life.

It is doing something essential.

Suffering slows us when speed would cost us our depth. It arrives when the pace we’ve chosen no longer matches the truth of who we are becoming. It interrupts momentum not to punish us, but to return us to ourselves. Every time my life has forced me to stop, it has been because I was about to abandon something sacred, my body, my values, my intuition, my heart.

Suffering dismantles the identities that once kept us safe.

The roles, beliefs, and stories we cling to, strong one, good daughter, healer, fixer, survivor, eventually become too small. Pain exposes the places where we are living from habit rather than truth. It strips away the performances we mistake for stability. And yes, it hurts. Because identity loss always does. But what remains after that stripping is not emptiness, it is essence.

Suffering serves as initiation.

It marks the threshold between who we were and who we can no longer pretend not to be. There is no adulthood of the soul without some kind of breaking. No real wisdom without having been humbled by forces larger than our will. Suffering is how life graduates us into deeper responsibility, deeper compassion, deeper honesty.

Pain teaches us how to stay.

Not to fix. Not to explain. Not to rush toward meaning. But to stay present with what is real. This is a skill most of us were never taught. We learned to numb, distract, reframe, or override our pain. Suffering retrains us in presence. It asks us to sit in the fire without fleeing. And in doing so, it builds a quiet strength, one rooted in endurance rather than control.

Suffering makes us permeable.

When we have suffered, we stop assuming. We stop offering easy answers. We stop thinking love is about solutions. We recognize pain in others not as something to manage, but as something to honor. This is how empathy becomes embodied rather than intellectual. This is how we learn to meet one another without armor.

There is a particular humility that only suffering can teach.

It shows us how little we actually command. How fragile the structures of our lives really are. And strangely, this humility does not diminish us, it frees us. When the illusion of control falls away, we become more responsive, more attentive, more alive to the moment we are actually in.

Our suffering is sacred not because it is pleasant, but because it is transformative.

It reshapes our nervous systems, our priorities, our relationships with time and meaning. It teaches us what matters when everything superficial burns off. It reveals what we are willing to lose, and what we are not.

I no longer believe the purpose of life is comfort.

I believe it is truth. I believe it is intimacy with reality. And suffering, as unwelcome as it is, is one of the most powerful forces that brings us into that intimacy.

I don’t seek suffering. I don’t glorify it.

But I no longer run from it.

I let it speak. I let it soften me. I let it carve me into someone who can hold more, more love, more grief, more joy, more contradiction.

Because the self that emerges on the other side of suffering is not untouched.

It is tempered.

And that, I am learning, is what makes us human.

 ~Shanti Freedom Das