You don’t have to feel pain to be happy. But enlightenment is not happiness, it’s truth. So if it’s authentic enlightenment you’re seeking, then the answer is, unfortunately, yes. The full truth hurts very much, and pain is unavoidable. Beyond the pain, fear and tears is serenity. It is not the same as happiness, it’s incomparably deeper than happiness.

Avoiding pain is resisting pain, it’s suppressing it. In surrendering to your pain, you’re allowing yourself to experience it. When experienced, it leaves you. It’s not possible to experience pain that is not already there. You can only experience what’s yours. When all pain is accepted, there is no more pain.

Pain is what gives birth to cruelty. For as long as you can still experience pain, there’s still cruelty in you, either towards yourself or towards others. Quite a lot of people who are awake, but not enlightened, have learned not to be cruel to themselves, so when they feel pain, they direct their cruelty onto others by judging them as less evolved than they are.

All pain must dissolve into love, then you are free.