Make Pain Great Again
The Year of the Snake is still ongoing until the 16th of February and it is inviting a deep shedding—of old skins, outdated identities, and inherited patterns….and WOW, have I been feeling it!
This year has so far been, let me be honest: painful. Almost daily I receive news that feel like swords being stabbed through my heart. I know this sounds balkan style dramatic, and some of it is. But a lot of it has really been quite heart breaking and bringing me to my knees like only ego deaths can. A friend of mine died after fighting cancer for some time. I feel rejected after a love story ended. Someone else I was in love with for years, moved on and is having a child. The success and break-throughs I hoped for in 2025 are still not there. Nothing seems to be working out and I am in a place of complete not-knowing-what-the-hell-to-do. I have the feeling I tried it all and nothing of it worked. Maybe you know this feeling of utter helplessness. Where the desperation leads to the only possible destination: surrender.
Everyone who has ever truly surrendered, knows how painful it is. When the ego has no intelligent solution anymore. When the old ways of thinking and operating don’t work any longer. When you take an honest look at yourself and your life and have to accept that things are not going as planned. The topic of acceptance and surrender started to emerge in my last Vipassana (more on the power of acceptance here) and it is as if life is giving me now the opportunity to put into practice what I have learnt in the container of 10 days in silence and isolation. Accept your reality as it is. Stop resisting, avoiding, and distracting. The very thing we try to resist, avoid and distract ourselves from is what subconsciously governs our lives. As Carl Jung said: “Until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate.” And so I decided to surrender to the last weeks of the snake and shed all the identities, patterns and beliefs that kept me in this limited reality of mine. And what I found was: pain. So much pain.
The intimate encounter with my pain is so deeply personal and vulnerable. And yet I decided that I really want to share it with you because I think I learnt something incredibly important for each of us, something that can change how we live our lives forever (this I mean in a non-balkan dramatic way).
We’ve been taught the wrong relationship to pain. We treat it like an enemy.
Like something that shouldn’t be here. Like proof that something went wrong - with our choices, our healing, or ourselves. We try to heal pain as fast as possible. We want it gone. We distract from it. Take pain killers. Drink, eat, drugs, binge watch, scroll, swipe, have sex, work ourselves into burnout.
But the longer I sit with it, the clearer it becomes: Pain is not random. Pain is highly intelligent. Pain is precise. It shows up exactly where something mattered. Where love was interrupted. Where safety was missing. Where anger couldn’t be expressed. Pain is what stays when something important didn’t get attention. And now it is waiting. Waiting for your attention. Waiting for honesty. Waiting for you to stop trying to get rid of it and actually feel it and be intimate with it.
So pain is not something to avoid. Pain is the portal. Pain is the threshold between who you had to become in order to survive and who you really are underneath that. It burns through the false layers, the coping strategies, the identities that once helped but no longer fit. If you let it, pain will break you open to your true self. So by all means, feel it! Feel your pain. Allow it. Let it be seen and felt. Let it soften you. Walk through the portal into a new destiny. But don’t walk alone! Walk with a loved one. Let yourself be witnessed in your pain by someone whom you trust and who will hold your hand. We were never meant to do this alone. We were alone when the pain entered our cells in childhood. Now to meet it again, we need another. Confide your pain to a partner, friend, a therapist. We were taught to not show our pain to the world as if it is shameful. What a foolish thing. We all experience pain, it is a universal human experience. And in this experience we connect with each other. It is indeed a deeply beautiful human experience to share with one another.
If you are in pain right now, it doesn’t mean you are failing. It actually means the opposite. It means you are not numb anymore. Not dissociated. Not asleep. It means you are on your path of actually changing something. Because the pain that has been felt, left your body and does not need to manifest in your external reality any longer to be seen. Knowing this, I welcome my pain now. I acknowledge it as part of every real transformation. Any spiritual practice, therapy, coaching or healing modality that avoids pain is, sorry to break it to you, a waste of your time and money. So yes, aura sprays and crystals are cute, but if you are serious about living your best life, you gotta meet your pain with open arms. On the other side of pain is love. Always.
I want to start a movement to make pain great again. Yes “again”, because the great sages always knew that pain is the portal to God. And today we would not only have better lives individually but we would heal our collective pain, too which would lead to a more loving and peaceful world. Let’s normalize pain. If you are in pain or would like to explore this topic further, please take heart and reach out to me.
With love, Tat