The path through pain that frees you

There was a time when I didn't even recognize the depth of pain I was carrying. I was too busy focusing on people and things outside of myself, trying to be helpful. I made my body a listening device for the emotional atmospheres around me. I thought I was doing good, and in many ways, I was. I received a lot of positive reinforcement. As a child, I wielded my sword and shield, trying to fend off the culture and my family's ideas about what I should think, how I should be, and what I should value. These beliefs are threads braided over generations, each one doing it better than the last. We are all learning as we go here on planet Earth.

The Collective Story of Pain

This is a collective story we've all lived... well, most of us. I was not taught how to inquire into myself. Instead, I heard phrases like, “Don’t think like that,” or “That doesn’t make any sense,” or “Well, I would do this or that...” I rarely heard, “Tell me more about what you like about that.” I never heard, “Tell me what makes you angry about that.” I didn't hear, “Tell me how that inspires you—and what inspiration wants from you.”

At that time, I was carrying a lot of pain that I had no idea how to deal with. So, I turned outward, and my pain turned inward. I resorted to self-harm, cutting myself and burning my skin with cigarettes. This behavior stemmed from a power that was never allowed to move, rage that had nowhere to go, and vital energy buried so deep that it began to turn inward. Enter Ares—or Mars—the raw, unfiltered force of war and instinct. Not the strategist like Athena, but the pulsing archetype of unprocessed aggression.

The Raw Energy Within

That hot, wild energy never got to move. It was a pure charge of violence—not evil, but untamed and unmediated. This is the god exiled in a culture that doesn’t know how to handle that kind of heat. But the soul knows. The soul remembers. And the body carries the invitation to meet her, to let her move—not destructively, but directly.

This is what it means to feel that charge without splitting from ourselves. Parts of my body went offline. Whole regions—especially in my legs and feet—shut down. Sensation was lost in places where rage and shock had been frozen. My body remembered what my mind had pushed away.

Fifteen years ago, I began this work—this real work—of turning toward my pain. I entered it because I could feel something trapped inside: movement, creativity, chaos that had never had a place to go. As I moved into those places, I found fire. It was what I had deemed destructive, scary, and too big. But really, it was my creative fire.

The Power of Creative Fire

This kind of chaos can wreck, hurt, and destroy, but it also births. What I had thought was something unmanageable was, in fact, my potency, my power.

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure.”

What I had labeled as 'dysregulated' was, in some ways, just exiled vitality—waiting to be reclaimed. Many people talk about their nervous systems as delicate and fragile, but we have a capacity we are trying to reclaim through our pain. I’m still reclaiming it. Every time I drop in, every time I listen with my whole soul, I feel the ping. I consciously go into the worst nightmare places in my psyche.

The places I once pushed away, labeling them as "just my fear or unworthiness," are now places I embrace. Every time I feel that raw current, I let it pulse through me, opening up to its gifts. This is how I come back into myself. There's no 'resolving' chaos; it's finally getting a home.

Turning Toward the Dragon

We have a shadow because there are parts of us we are driven to flee, dissociate from, or keep in the dark. We do this because the capacity to hold that level of energy can be overwhelming. It creates a split, and inside that split lives our pain.

Turning toward our pain and exploring it from the inside is essential shadow work. Deliberately turning toward this pain is a heroic step. It deepens the capacity we truly have. Our shadow is where our deepest pain is stored. The more skillful we are in handling our pain, the better equipped we become to navigate the shadow.

We can become intimate with our pain—step by conscious step. Along the way, we learn to enter it, differentiate it from 'suffering', investigate its qualities, its gifts, and eventually emerge from it. Peace, happiness, and regulation don’t require the absence of pain but rather a willingness to face and consciously enter it. This is Prima Materia, the raw, chaotic, undifferentiated substance from which the alchemical process begins.

Embracing the Chaos

It is dark, impure, and formless—sometimes described as filth, lead, shadow, rot, or chaos itself. It’s what must be worked, heated, contained, and transformed to eventually yield the Philosopher’s Stone—the symbol of wholeness, integration, and the union of opposites. It's the unknown—the place where we let go of control.

We may imagine freedom as a pain-free realm, but real freedom is found in how we handle our pain—not in its absence, but in our intimacy with it. When we compassionately explore our pain, we often find ourselves settling into a sobering sense of okayness that persists even during hard days. Pain is part of life. We experience it when we don’t get what we want, when we get what we don’t want, and even when we get what we do want—because things change, and we aren’t in control.

Just as inevitably, we tend to store as much of our pain in our shadow as we can, finding strategies to numb or distract ourselves from it—blame, self-blame, defend, deny. But the more we flee the felt presence of pain, the more deeply it takes root.

The Bare Bones Answer

So, what are we to do? The bare bones answer is simple: we turn toward our pain. We face and feel it. We lie inside the image of it, the sensations, the qualities, the metaphors. We inhabit it. We enter it. We move closer to it, step by mindful step. As we’ll see in the sections ahead, entering our pain is the only way to eventually emerge from it.

Often, when we say we’re in pain, we’re not actually inside it—we’re outside it, just closer than we’d like to be. It’s understandable to ask: Isn’t the point to get rid of pain? Why move closer to it? Our aversion to pain is understandable. Turning toward pain could seem counterintuitive, misguided, or even masochistic. But there’s no need to shame ourselves for the instinct to turn away.

The negrido phase in alchemy, the black phase, is where we notice it. The unconscious is becoming conscious. That noticing is the beginning of something new. With compassionate curiosity, we explore where these instincts come from—often rooted in our early efforts to survive and our ancestors' efforts to survive. As we turn toward our pain, the energy we once invested in evading it becomes available for life-giving purposes.

Turning toward pain doesn’t increase it for very long. It actually decreases relatively soon because we stop exhausting ourselves trying to avoid it. It also expands and eases us. Being with pain doesn’t mean getting swallowed completely by it (our fear). It means staying close to it, not getting lost or dissociating.

“One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.” - Nietzsche

Though it’s easy to be overwhelmed by pain or detach from it, the practice of remaining present—though difficult—is learnable. The more we stay present with pain, the less it pains us. We hold it. We contain and express it under the right conditions. Here, we become intimate with our pain, which differentiates the suffering from it.

The Stand We Take - The Frame

Turning toward our pain means facing it and unresistingly feeling its raw reality. It means tracing it back to our wounding, often from early life and our lineage. You don’t even need to do that sometimes; it’s enough just to say: This hurts.

But the frame you hold around pain changes everything. If you approach it as pathology, it becomes a problem. If you meet it as punishment, it becomes unbearable. But if you meet it as invitation, as initiation, as prima materia—then something opens. Pain is no longer the obstacle; it becomes the terrain. It matters what eyes you use when you look at it. It matters whether you rush in to fix it or slow down enough to wonder what intelligence lives inside it.

The frame determines whether you collapse into it, dissociate from it, or relate to it. The way you hold pain is the way you meet your soul. Turning toward pain also means bringing into our heart what we’ve rejected in ourselves: shame, terror, rage, envy, greed, hatred, grief, dread, and more.

Just as we wouldn’t let a child drive a car, we don’t let a disowned part of us control our life. Most of us do until we enter here, into prima materia. We proceed with great care. Nietzsche didn’t mean chaos as destruction, but as the generative unknown—the rawness we carry when the old self falls apart and something luminous begins to stir beneath.

Pain, long suppressed, won’t behave predictably when first met. It’s enough, in the beginning, to simply name it: “I feel pain. I feel anxious. I feel loneliness. I feel despair. I feel grief... terror... frozen... shock... etc.” Stay with it. Before reaching for a fix, pause. Ask what you’re actually feeling. Then turn toward that feeling. This is the act of deepening our stand.

You might feel the heat of the dragon’s breath, but you hold your ground. If it feels too much, step back slightly—but don’t turn away. Stay rooted.

Here is a Practice

Stand tall. Breathe deeply. As you exhale, envision your spine, each vertebra, the quality of it, the weight and size. Feel it in your back. Feel the energy moving up and down it. Stand, feeling this energy streaming down into the earth. As you inhale, see it rising up through your spine and body. Do this for ten breaths.

Even if you’re shaking inside, keep breathing strength into your stance. Do not move forward yet. No need to rush. Stay. What matters is that you take a stand and don’t wander. Keep awareness of your back body—see with the back of your heart, your shoulder blades, your sacrum. Stay with this for five minutes. Let your stance become a new kind of home.

As you stand, you may see that your pain is not grotesque—it only looked that way because it had been kept hidden in the dark for too long.

Calling It by Name

Naming pain is a simple yet radical act of intimacy. It gives us just enough space to relate to pain rather than collapse into it. We stop dramatizing and start contacting. You can begin with just one breath and the words: “Pain is here.” Stay with the sensation. Avoid spinning out into stories.

By sticking with the data—"I feel sad,” “My stomach is tight”—we stay with what’s actually happening, rather than layering meaning over it. There are many types of pain: physical, emotional, existential. Each deserves honest naming. As you name your pain, tune into its qualities: where it sits in your body, how it moves, whether it pulses or contracts. Naming is the bridge that brings pain out of shadow and into presence.

We often say, "I feel a little fear," when the truth is that your legs are experiencing shock waves moving through them, and there's a whole cocktail of anger, terror, and grief mixed in. Be real with yourself about what you're experiencing.

Into the Firelight

Now that you’ve named your pain, the invitation is to enter it. Resist the urge to analyze or interpret. Let the symptom speak in its own language, not yours. Instead, move closer to the sensation. Get curious. Let your breath be a guide. Drop the need to heal. Instead, ask: What is the soul doing here? What image is trying to emerge through this ache?

Notice resistance, fear, or drama... just observe. Pain is the psyche’s poetry, compressed, knotty, and rich with metaphor. It's not just sensation; it’s imagination pressed into the flesh. Approach it as you would a dream figure: What shape does it take? What voice might it have if it could speak? What myth does it belong to?

Soul makes itself known through pathology, through symptom, through the very things we try to eliminate. Entering our pain is not about escaping it—but about restoring its image, its dignity, its place in the larger story of our becoming.

As you enter your pain, you’ll start to sense its movement, its texture, its density. You will get a sense of the image it carries. You’ll meet not just pain—but a piece of your own core power trying to resolve itself back into your body. Pain isn’t a monolith. It’s alive; it's intelligent. As we enter it without collapsing or dismissing, it opens. We feel its currents. Eventually, we discover that we’re no longer afraid.

The Anatomy of Hurt

Pain has qualities—direction, shape, temperature, texture, even color. It may move inward like shame or outward like rage. It may have the density of a stone or the flicker of fire. As you bring awareness to pain’s form, you transform your relationship with it.

You may notice textures like sharpness or mushiness, temperatures like heat or chill, colors like murky grey or fiery red. Allow these impressions; they deepen your intimacy with pain. Describe your pain poetically. Be as precise as you can. Let your language touch what your fingers cannot. This gives you space within the pain.

Through the Other Side

The more we move through the sequence—turning toward, naming, entering, exploring—the more we embody the power and gifts that our pain was trying to give us. Eventually, pain remains, but it no longer pains us. Pain is no longer suffering. We emerge. We are no longer shaped by avoidance or resistance. Instead, we are shaped by our quintessence. We use it to awaken. It becomes a fierce grace. The dragon becomes our ally. The fire warms us, energizes us, and catalyzes our creativity.

We’re no longer trying to be free from pain. We are finding freedom through it.

Closing

Descent work is revolutionary. It’s how the cycle of planetary pain begins to unwind. What we reclaim within ourselves, we no longer project onto the world. This is planetary medicine. This journey into and through pain doesn’t rid us of hurt. But it liberates us from its tyranny. It invites us to use pain as a portal to the reclamation of Whole Self, to embodiment. Out of naiveté, we become rooted in something deeper—in soul, in the grounded wisdom of our own being and lineage.

Art: Insanity is Essential to Soul Making, Antonia Vanoro

Entering our pain is not about escaping it—but about restoring its image, its dignity, its place in the larger story of our becoming. A part of the path. A way back to ourselves. And that, in the end, is the treasure.