After a long, passionless stint during a few months of living in survival mode, my psychic friend pulled an oracle card for me: passion, it said.
A few days later, as I swayed to the pain-laced ballad, "Better" by Banks, tears poured out of my eyes. The cries of her voice echoed the muted ghosts of my own. I could feel them getting louder with the crescendo and pulsing with the bass. It'd been so long since I let myself go here. I felt her pain. I felt my pain. I also felt free. It wasn't just co-misery, it wasn't wallowing, it was a transmutation, a debut. I was writing on last week's blog on pain while it was happening, moving everything through me in my own most intentional, raw form of expression. I was finally letting it be here and it was fueling me. I raised my fist in the air in concurrence with my own empowering awakening.
I realized my pain is my portal to passion and I had been depriving myself of pain for so long.
When I realized that showcasing and expressing my pain in an intentional way is the direct ignition to stoking all my inner flames, my body celebrated viscerally in a way I'd never felt it celebrate in my life. It felt so liberating to express this way: to let my pain be fully expressed - even celebrated - and not repressed. My pain is my pleasure and my passion - it just needs to expressed to integrate into one.
Sounds strange, huh?
Don't we want to avoid pain?
Pain is a huge part of being a human. Excluding that natural part of me has only caused me more pain and shut my pleasure and passion down - and I have a feeling it's doing the same for a lot of humankind.
If you read my last blog, or knew me in my adolescence, you'd know that pain is a huge part of my personal mood board. My favorite artists of every genre and medium exhibit their pain more than anything else. Pain inspires their creation itself, and their creation makes us feel alive because pain is life itself.
There is something to be said about the tortured artist and on the general addiction to pain humanity has. For this, I consulted my therapist.
"But I'm scared that by expressing and embracing my pain, I'll become like these people who do: Kurt Cobain, Frida Kahlo, Franz Kafka... I don't want to live in my suffering!" I worried.
"Expressing your pain as it comes is much different than living in your pain. Allowing yourself to be seen in your pain is much different than becoming addicted to your pain because you're afraid to lose your spark, your creativity, your personality and your edge." She illustrated, "That's what makes the tortured artist."
And what about society's strange obsession with pain, too? Euphoria, 13 Reasons Why, Billie Eilish. Could it be that as a society we are all a bit repressive and avoidant of our pain? Sure, there's a place for pain in art, but maybe the entertainment space wouldn't be so saturated and consumed if we learned to express our pain to those closest to us or to transmute it through our own creative means.
It's kind of like the notion about legalizing drugs or making sex less taboo so the allure goes away. The more we take out of the shadows, the less obsessed we become and the more safely we can actually address those things.
Why is it that pain and passion are so strangely synonymous with each other?
How is it that the sacral chakra is both the energy center of creativity and passion. What are the odds that it's also where the womb space is for many people.
Pain is creation. Ever given birth? Or at least heard of it?
Pain is passion. The two wind together like the thorns of Christ and resurrection as love with heartbreak.
You see that these examples aren't inevitable outcomes of one another, but I'm not certain you can have pleasure, beauty and goodness without pain. Life on earth is beautiful and painful. Pain is at the beginning and the end of every earthly experience: growing pains to realization to grief.
Anything and everything we find pleasurable, we can also find painful by sheerly imagining ourselves without it. That's what fuels our passion.
In fact, one of the top tips for refueling passion is to recall the beginning of whatever you used to be more passionate about. Think about the beginning of a relationship, career, petition, or project. The road wasn't fully clear, but you knew you were following your pleasure en route to create something new. And how exciting it was! Thrill: a perfect balance of pain and pleasure. A perfect recipe for passion.
Passion needs thrill and thrill is in a hot, flirtatious relationship with pain.
My friend, a tantra expert and sex, love and relationship coach, believes that the highest level of personal evolution is reached when we no longer distinguish the difference between pleasure and purification (aka pain), but rather see the two polarities as the same: pleasure.
So can we embrace pain? Can we use it as it comes as a portal to passion, pleasure and integration?
When will we realize it's an integral part of our existence so we might as well get off to it and create art out life itself?
I can't wait to show you more of how I intentionally express to alchemize my pain.
Write me a line if you're interested in working 1:1 on transmuting your pain to passion, creation and pleasure.
