Awakening is painful because reality is not.

Only dreams are painful, dreams are fantasies of an imagined happy future. They are fantasies, they cannot be fulfilled, so of course they are painful! These fantasies are informed by the suffering we carry from what happened to us in the past. The pain of unresolved traumas of the past is what gives rise to these fantasies. This pain creates the dreaming.

This pain should not be there. Life is full of struggles, this is true, but like an innocent child we cry one moment and we laugh the next. But the society is deeply sick and saturated with lies, so as children, we are denied the opportunity to cry, to be angry, to express our feelings. We are threatened when we do. So we learn to suppress, we learn to hide, and we begin lying as well. The society teaches us to lie, it is deceitful, so it cannot handle an honest human being, it wants to make them into a deceitful one, all the while singing praises to their innocence. That is how we treat children.

So it’s no wonder that over the course of many years, we accumulate so much of pain! We learn to wear many masks, and these masks grow into us, they become so glued to our faces, so ingrained in us, that it becomes difficult to tell where they end and we begin.

This is why true awakening is always painful. Tearing away these masks to liberate yourself is scary and disorienting. In the beginning of it, it appears like these masks are all you have ever known! There’s a tremendous fear of uncertainty, the fear of the unknown, the fear of your own unconscious, the fear of reality.

If it wasn’t painful, you wouldn’t need a spiritual awakening. You wouldn’t even understand the concept of enlightenment or be able to relate to it on any level. You would just perceive most people as sick, deceitful and deeply hurting. Unable to calmly and effortlessly speak the truth. Always hiding, always calculating. Never joyful, happy, peaceful.