Where Does The Pain Go?

There are days when you’re sitting in a room full of people, and still… you feel completely alone. Not misunderstood. Not ignored. Just… like you don’t belong to anything, anymore.

The world keeps spinning. You wake up. You dress up. You speak when spoken to. But somewhere between your smile and your silence, something is quietly disappearing. Not loudly. Not dramatically. But like a candle burning slowly at the edge of the night.

And no one notices.

Because you’ve become so good at pretending. Even you yourself don’t notice sometimes until the ache leaks through. In the middle of traffic, in the sound of someone else’s laughter, in the mirror, when your eyes look back at you and ask nothing… but still wait for an answer.

“It is no measure of health,” Krishnamurti once said, “to be well adjusted to a profoundly sick society.”

Perhaps the pain you carry is not a sickness to be cured, but a signal to be honored. A whisper from the part of you that remembers a different truth, a truth not shaped by false applause, performance, or proving.

You are not broken. You are being asked to return. To the place before you became “someone" and to the space before your name, your roles, your stories.... where the soul never left, but waited, with quiet patience while you wandered.

They never told you that pain, too, can be a path. That grief has hands, gentle one, guiding you inward. That loneliness isn’t punishment… but the first doorway to presence.

And so, like the earth opens after rain, you begin to soften. Not out of surrender, but out of truth. Because carrying so much is no longer noble, because healing doesn’t mean “getting back to who you were” rather it means remembering "who you were before you forgot."

the tree never begs the wind to stop,

it simply bends, and breathes,

the river does not curse the rock,

it finds another way,

the moon does not compete with the sun,

it waits in silence for its time to rise,

and so must you.

not fight, not fix,

but feel,

and in feeling, return.

I sometimes ask myself, Where does the pain go, when you finally listen to it?

Does it disappear?

Or does it transform… into presence?

And in return I hear a voice gently whispering

You are not the wounds.

You are the awareness holding them.

If these words stirred something within you, let it be. Let it breathe. Let it sit beside you like an old friend returned.

And if you wish to echo it back, in a word, in a silence, in a whisper, I will be here. Listening.

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© 2025 Beyond Silence. Written by "the one listening."

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