Letter 11: The Sacred Purpose of Pain

Why Avoiding Our Deepest Feelings Keeps Us From Our Truest Selves

“Although the world is full of suffering, it is also full of the overcoming of it.”
- Helen Keller

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Dear Future Human,

In my last two letters, I discussed what I believe to be the most challenging divide that exists within us. The first letter, The Gap Between Knowing and Being, examined the gap between what we understand intellectually, and what we embody and live. The Love Letter highlighted two forces that live within us, often seeming to pull us in opposite directions. In both of these letters, there is one theme: the need for integration. The integration of conceptual knowledge with our body, and the integration of our survival drives with our consciousness, is the invisible creative force of love.

This compartmentalization is understandable, given our evolutionary development. We are still a work in progress, and as more of our consciousness comes online, we will be better able to perceive the gap. But as I have written before, we cannot afford to wait for the slow process of evolution; we need to find ways that actively support this integration.

It is the most crucial work of our time, both individually and collectively.

When we’re internally integrated, our behavior changes in everyday ways. We choose the stairs over the elevator not because we “should” but because movement feels good. We close the social media app after ten minutes and pick up the phone to actually call our friend. We listen when our child wants to tell us about their game even though we’re exhausted. We stay in the conversation when our partner brings up something difficult, instead of walking away. We notice the grocery store cashier is having a rough day and offer a genuine smile. We live our values and acknowledge our mistakes without defensive explanations.

We show up more patient and caring in life.

The questions that emerge then are: How do we cultivate this integration? How do we bring together this complexity of the human experience into a unified and authentic expression of who we are?

Becoming aware of the gap is only the first step. Once we can see it, at least on an intellectual level, we need to ask what is preventing us from naturally integrating the different parts of us.

Two major factors stand in our way of achieving integration: our predisposition to avoid our pain, and our fear of death.

In this letter I will discuss our relationship to pain.

But what is pain really?

If we reflect on what pain is, we may come to appreciate that it is nothing more than information. It alerts us to danger or signals unmet needs. It is our bodies’ alarm system, linked to our survival.^¹ Pain is not a failure or a punishment—it is part of the intelligence that keeps us alive.

Most of us carry the belief that we shouldn’t feel pain, rather than seeing it as a natural signal. We resist it simply because it’s uncomfortable. While pain can be profoundly debilitating, our resistance blocks us from listening to what it is alerting us to.

But here’s what makes tolerating pain even more complex: when we experience pain—whether physical or emotional—our nervous system does exactly what it was designed to do, it contracts. Our capacity to process information narrows to a single focus: Threat. Danger. Survival.

As you may remember from my story, I have contended with a great deal of pain throughout my life—and still do. Not just my own, but that of everyone around me. Born without the typical protective mechanisms against pain (denial, projection, distraction), I was forced to be with pain. I had no way of escaping it. Prior to the intervention that prevented my suicide attempt, my pain seemed pointless. I was suffering endlessly; there seemed to be no way out.

It wasn’t depression, but something closer to its opposite. I didn’t experience the usual symptoms—poor concentration, loss of appetite, sleep disturbances.² I was—and still am—highly sensitive, feeling both pleasure and pain with intensity. What I couldn’t adapt to was the madness around me, the cruelty, the indifference, the illusion of separation. The moment before I went up to the roof to kill myself felt like a divine interruption. The message came through with clarity: There is purpose.

This revelation changed my life. This visceral experience revealed a deep understanding: that there is meaning and purpose to my pain. I learned that pain is not meaningless; pain is an informant.

That day I also learned that I could transform my suffering into purpose.

With this deep understanding, I set out to understand the source of our pain and help others find their purpose. This path has taken me through some of the hardest experiences life offers.

In this letter, I want to focus on the quieter, everyday forms of pain that can be just as devastating—the emotional and psychic pain I have witnessed in my personal life, as well as in my clinical and corporate work.

It’s usually in the everyday moments with people closest to us that we feel the most anger, hurt, and self-doubt—at home, with friends, or at work.

I have felt the quiet, the loud, and the silent pain that courses through the lives of many as they carry their pain; feeling alone and helpless in the face of it all. Having had the privilege to become intimate with thousands of people from all walks of life, I came to see one universal truth: every person we pass on the street, every family member, and every colleague at work is carrying their own pain.

Heartbreaks, disappointments, and feelings of unworthiness are part of life. Watching people move through life caught in their own suffering, believing their pain is unique and that no one can understand, has been most painful to me. I remembered how my own sense of isolation deepened my suffering. Facing life’s challenges alone only compounds the pain unnecessarily.

The belief that “I am all alone” is the most painful and perhaps the most pervasive and tragic illusion of the human condition.

The reality is that the very nature of being alive includes experiencing pain. We are surrounded by physical, emotional, and psychological pain. No matter how much we know that pain is inevitably a part of life, most of us still carry the unconscious belief that we should not be experiencing pain. We expect life to be smooth, free from struggle, as if pain were a mistake rather than a natural response, a signal.

Many of our uncomfortable feelings originated in early childhood experiences and conditioning. When we don’t listen to them, we only reinforce the patterns that maintain our suffering.

Most of us never learned how to navigate our emotions because our caregivers didn’t know how to do it themselves. My next letter will explore this in depth.

What we resist, persists.³

This is why paying attention to uncomfortable or painful feelings is as vital as paying attention to physical discomfort and pain. When we experience physical pain or discomfort, particularly when it is severe or lasts longer, we seek medical advice. However, emotional pain is rarely approached with the same kind of seriousness. Most often, when we are experiencing unsettling or deeply painful feelings, we perpetuate our disconnection from that pain by numbing it through substances, distractions, overwork, performance, or endless online consumption.⁴

I have great concern about our culture’s relationship to emotional pain. We have become a society that reflexively reaches to suppress pain rather than listen to it. While psychiatric medications serve essential purposes for conditions like bipolar disorder, clinical major depression, and schizophrenia, the surge in prescriptions—particularly the 64% increase in antidepressant prescriptions among adolescents during the pandemic⁵—suggests we may be treating pain as a problem to eliminate rather than as information to heed.⁶

Just as physical pain is the body’s alarm that something is physically wrong, emotional pain alerts us to relational or psychological dangers. And when we pay attention, in most cases we can heal ourselves by heeding its call.⁷

Pain can be a path to growth. Just as we accept the pain that comes with exercise or lifting weights, “no pain, no gain,” we can learn to meet emotional and psychic pain with the same mindset. This is the paradox we need to accept: while we are naturally wired to avoid pain, it can also be the catalyst for transformation.

Pain is a bridge.

It asks us to slow down, notice our resistance, and meet it with curiosity and care—listening instead of running away.

As we become more intimate with pain, we discover its source: our disconnection from ourselves and each other. Pain shows us not only who we are, but how we fit into our world. It can lead us to wholeness.

Our tendency to avoid pain often distances us from the caring community that could help us carry it. The tragedy is that we face our pain alone because we feel alone, which only deepens our loneliness.

This is why I decided to invite people into an experiment: Leap Forward. Twelve years ago, I designed a safe container specifically to help people see that they are not alone, to experience firsthand the universality of our insecurities, hurts, and disappointments. The idea was to create a caring environment where people could discover their capacity to be with their pain, to hold and explore it so that they could discover its source. The goal was to support one another in carrying the pain, with the hope that we would come to discover our real selves, and each other, together. I’ll return to this initiative in a future letter.

It is my pain that has brought me to this moment, every step of the way. This pain has driven my research into the underlying causes of our destructive behaviors. My pain has inspired the foundation of Leap Forward, and now the vision for a Global Project to facilitate the evolution of The Future Human. My pain, the pain I feel for you, future human, has been a gift.

We don’t want to eliminate pain. Our mission is to learn how to understand and relate to it differently. To hold it. To feel it fully, while also stepping back to witness it. When we practice staying with pain and trust that we can bear it, we begin to understand it without being consumed by it.

Try this: The next time you feel emotional pain arise—anxiety, hurt, shame—pause. Ask the pain, “What are you trying to tell me?” Don’t expect an immediate answer. Just create a moment of listening. This simple act begins to rewire your relationship with pain from avoidance to curiosity.

Or, when your body is activated by pain, you can say to yourself: “I’m safe. This isn’t an emergency. I can cope with this.” This helps your nervous system learn that emotional pain does not equal danger.

These mantras create space between the pain (stimulus) and your reaction (response). They remind your body: this is the present moment, not past trauma.

We don’t know what we are capable of until we meet the challenges of life with full presence. We can learn to embrace the paradox that pain can bring us joy. As Rumi said, “The wound is the place where the Light enters you.”

My experience in my personal life and with my clients revealed to me the radiance of our light in our darkest moments, for pain and joy illuminate the full depth of what it means to be alive.

Pain opens us to light, revealing our shared humanity and how deeply we are connected.

Dear Future Human, I invite you to examine how you relate to pain. And if it is with fear and avoidance, see if you can shift to curiosity and care. Gather people in your life who may be willing to embark on this path together. You may discover that this path can shape you: deepening your connection to yourself and each other, and more fully connecting you to what it means to be fully human. Because through pain, we find strength. Through struggle, we grow.

And through love—through the pain that often comes along with real, open, raw love—we find something beyond ourselves.

Maybe through pain, we discover the divine.

With raw and endless care,

Ronit

1. David Hanscom MD, “We Have No Protection From Mental Pain,” Psychology Today, June 2023.

2. National Institute of Mental Health, “Depression,” NIH Publication No. 24, 2024.

3. Shoshana Shea PhD, “What We Resist Persists,” San Diego Psychotherapy, June 2018.

4. Maika Steinborn PhD, “How to Stop Numbing and Repressing Feelings and Emotions With Busyness, Alcohol, Drugs, Sugar or Worrying,” Dr. Maika Steinborn, August 2022.

5. Kao-Ping Chua MD, PhD, “Antidepressant Dispensing to US Adolescents and Young Adults: 2016–2022,” Pediatrics, February 2024.

6. Jon Jureidini PhD, “Why Are So Many Australians Taking Antidepressants?,” The Conversation, February 2024.

7. Susanne Babbel, “The Body’s Role in Emotional Healing,” Psychology Today, May 2025.

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