To many of us, pain is dangerous. We fear that, by welcoming it, we are welcoming it eternally. We fear that, if we let it in, it will "never go away", that we will be "unhappy" forever. The irony is that this supreme misunderstanding is what keeps us trapped in the very unhappiness we are trying to avoid.
Unhappiness only plagues us when pain is not allowed to be fully present in our reality. When we resist it, we tell the part of the self that hurts: "You are not worthy of my time." When we try to change the way we feel, we guarantee our own suffering.
The deep inner pain that we all share, held in our cells since we first began running from it, long ago, is the culmination of the many different moments in our lives in which we denied our true feelings, pushed them down and tried to transcend them. Those feelings were not destroyed. They remain, buried within, and show themselves whenever they find the opportunity in our day to day lives, in the hopes that they will be felt and healed.
For as long as we continue to ignore them, pain will continue to throb like a blister on our hearts. It will not go away. It CANNOT go away. It can only fight to be heard as it swims in the wound within.
What, then, is the point of avoiding and denying it? Why do we try to believe that happiness is the only acceptable way of being? Why do we forgo the rest of who we are? Why do we think that's even possible? Why do we think it's going to make us "happy"?!
If we stop running, we can start accepting who and what we are, in every moment. This will align us with our true reality. Only by becoming aligned with truth can we find balance. Sometimes, pain is our truth. We must accept this. When we do, pain will stop hurting so much; it will become just another beautiful part of who we are. It will begin to resemble joy and fulfillment. It will eventually become indistinguishable from those states. And then, the happiness/unhappiness equation will no longer hold meaning for us. The pursuit of happiness, made irrelevant, will become a thing of the past. Peace, love and forgiveness will reign supreme.
These are the states we are meant to consistently enjoy. Peace is our natural frequency. Life experience, and the denial of pain, is what has hidden our true essence from us for so long. We can find that essence again, but only by welcoming and processing our pain, in every moment.
Pain does not present itself in order to destroy our happiness. It exists so that we can learn to integrate it into our experience. In the wake of that integration, we will drop the fruitless search for the fickle thing we call "happiness", because we will begin to recognize happiness for what it is: an extremity, like pain, that is as passing as the wind.