What I suggest is a very life-affirmative, life-loving way: When there is pain, go deeply into it, don’t avoid it, let it be so, be open to it, become as sensitive as possible, and let the pain and its arrow penetrate you to your very core. Suffer it. When pleasure comes, let that too move you to your innermost core, dance it. When there is pain, be with pain, and when there is pleasure, be with pleasure, become so totally sensitive that each moment of pain and pleasure is a great adventure.
– Osho: The Discipline of Transcendence
And I would like to tell you one thing: If you can do this, you will understand that pain is too beautiful; it is as beautiful as pleasure. It also brings a sharpness to your being; it also brings awareness to your being, sometimes even more than pleasure. Pleasure dulls you. That is why people who live just in indulgence will be found to be shallow; you will not see any depth in them, they have not known pain at all, they have lived only on the surface, moving from one pleasure to another, the playboys. They don’t know what pain is. Pain makes you very large, pain makes you very compassionate, and pain makes you sensitive to others’ pain, too. Pain makes you immense, huge, big; the heart grows because of pain, and it is beautiful. It has its own beauty. I am not saying seek pain, I am saying only whenever it is there, enjoy that too. It is a gift of god and there must be a hidden treasure in it; enjoy that too. Don’t reject, accept it. Welcome it, be with it. In the beginning difficult, arduous, but by and by you will learn the taste of it. The taste of it has to be learned; it is just like other tastes. It is like alcohol; if you start drinking in the beginning, the taste is just bad and bitter.
But whenever you start anything new, you have to learn the taste and, of course, the taste of pain is bitter, but once you have learn it, it gives such sharpness and brilliance to you. It shakes all dust, all stuporous sleepiness away from you, it makes you so fully mindful, that nothing else can make you so mindful. In pain, you can be more meditative than in pleasure. Pleasure is more distracting, pleasure engulfs you, in pleasure you abandon consciousness, pleasure tends to make you unconscious, pleasure is a sort of oblivion, a forgetfulness. Pain is a remembrance you cannot forget pain.
Have you not observed, whenever you are in pain, you remember God, and whenever you are happy and in pleasure, who bothers? In fact, when you are in pleasure, you forget yourself, you forget god, you forget everything. Things are going so good, but in pain you remember God. So pain can be a very creative energy; it can become a remembrance of God, it can become prayer, it can become meditation, it can become awareness.
What I teach is that when pain is there, use it as awareness, as meditation, as sharpening of the soul, and when pleasure is there, use it as a drowning, as a forgetfulness. Both are the ways to reach God, one is to remember yourself totally, and one is to forget yourself totally. Pain and pleasure both can be used, but to use them, you have to be very, very intelligent. What I am teaching is not the stupid way, what I am teaching is the intelligent, the wise men’s way. Whatever God gives you, try to find out a way to use it in such a way that it becomes a creative growth situation for you.
I keep coming back to this small video again and again. The first time I heard it, it didn’t make much sense. It felt abstract, maybe even a bit absurd. But when a certain sadness keeps coming up, when pain refuses to leave, you begin to try things that once sounded strange. Desperation has its own kind of honesty; you stop judging what makes sense and start experimenting with what might help. Maybe this will work, maybe that will work.
Pain that comes from outside, someone’s rejection, betrayal, or words—I don’t know if it’s easy or difficult, for I have not much experience with it. But I always thought if I had such pain, I could name it, trace it to someone, blame it on someone, and eventually move on. But then there is another kind of pain, quieter yet far more persistent. It lingers in the background of everything you do, like an undercurrent hum beneath all your experiences. There is no one to point a finger at, no clear reason to explain it away. And yet it’s there, steady, rising and falling like waves meeting the shore. Sometimes disappearing for a while, and you think it’s finally gone. Then, without warning, it returns familiar as ever. And so the question remains, how do you live with this kind of pain, sadness – the one that does not belong to anyone, that can’t be truly blamed on anything, and that simply is? So I kept coming back to this video again and again, hitting me every time with a certain sense of resonance. It took years to truly grasp it, I think.
We have been deeply conditioned to believe that happiness is natural, good, and right. Pleasure, happiness, is the dream state of being, and experience is to be achieved at any cost. So, there is a deep, unconscious conditioning that pain is unnatural. So we assume that if it is unnatural, we must find a cause behind it, trace it to someone or something. When sadness arises, we begin hunting for explanations anxiously: self-help books, YouTube talks, endless ideas on psychology, spirituality. All circling around the same question: Why? We think, ‘if only I could put a finger on something or someone,’ it will go away. I, too, have done that, chasing reason across every possibility: childhood trauma, energetic blockages, hypersensitivity, lack of boundaries, and so on. Each explanation feels convincing for a while, but crumbles as a new wave of pain arrives. So years go by, and you start to see that this endless searching, all this effort to explain the pain in itself, is a subtle form of escaping from the feeling itself. It is the mind’s way of avoiding what simply is. So something in you cries: Just be with me. Don’t try to explain me. Don’t try to judge me. Don’t try to put labels on me. Don’t ask why I am here. Don’t try to fix me. Just be.
When there is pain, be with pain, and when there is pleasure, be with pleasure, become so totally sensitive that each moment of pain and pleasure is a great adventure. If you can do this, you will understand that pain is too beautiful; it is as beautiful as pleasure.
Pleasure is beautiful; we understand it easily. We are happy. But pain—how can that be beautiful? Our whole experience of it is of anxiety, fear, and a sense of losing control, as if it’s a black hole from which there’s no return.
One day, I woke up in the morning with this crashing wave of sadness, as if it had taken over my whole being. Yet something was different that morning, somehow. Things were so slow, very, very slow, and clear. I cooked myself breakfast. Everything was visibly clear: the edges of the chopped onion, the smell. It is as if there is a deep hollow space inside of me, from which I could see things so, so clearly. It was so vivid. Every gesture felt gentle, precise, and full of care. The way I was handling chopping vegetables, cooking. Finally, I ate the food, and every bite was tasty. It felt like self-compassion. There was sadness, yet there was no desire not to be sad. That was perhaps my first experience of beauty, that pain is. It does have a different taste from pleasure and happiness. And once you start to taste the beauty of pain and sadness, you slowly stop being afraid to face it.
Pain makes you very mindful. It shakes all dust, all stuporous sleepiness away from you; it makes you so fully mindful that nothing else can make you so mindful. It takes a lot of time to slowly teach your whole body and nervous system not to run away from it. But slowly, with time, pain and sadness start to give gifts that pleasure can never truly give.
Pain makes you intensely sensitive and aware of everything. Even the falling of a leaf moves you. In these moments of deep sadness, everything becomes so clear: your fear, insecurities, jealousy, longing, desires, anger, values—all visible without any pinch of pretension. You get to see yourself totally without the moral code and conduct of society, of what is right and what is wrong. But perhaps the most beautiful gift pain brings is cleansing. The more you stay with it, the more it purifies your body and mind. It polishes you, refines you, and clarifies your vision. But this can’t be understood through explanation; it can only be lived experience.
I am not saying seek pain; I am saying that whenever it is there, enjoy it, too. This is the most crucial teaching of all. Not to seek pain, but whenever it is there, simply experience it, and the same goes for pleasure. To seek pain is to invite harm, to wound yourself in the name of growth, and it is dangerous. To seek pain is also to miss the simple moments of happiness and pleasure. To seek pain is to go to places and people who will hurt you, put you down, make you shrink, demean you. But to not seek is to simply allow pain when it comes. It will come like a wave, pass through you, and leave you lighter.
Pleasure is also beautiful in its own way. Whenever you are happy, soaked in pleasure, dancing, enjoying, you feel a sense of carelessness and insensitivity. You forget everything, and all that remains is the experience. But rather than enjoying moments of pleasure, we cling to pleasure. We try to stretch it, make it last forever. And in doing so, we begin pretending – pretending to be happy when sadness still lingers inside. This is where a dangerous process begins. Because when hurt comes, instead of feeling it, we rush to cover it with forced happiness, we immediately start trying to find ways to be happy, and in truth, we avoid the sadness. We split ourselves – trying to be happy yet sad inside. And in doing this again and again, for decades, the pain remains stuck in the body and mind. The pain turns into poison – anger, resentment, and bitterness. In extreme cases, it starts manifesting physically with illness and diseases.
So, to live totally is to let both flow; when pain comes, let it flow, and when pleasure comes, let it flow. Slowly, you will see that life naturally vibrates between pain and pleasure. We need not search for the meaning of why there was happiness or sadness; we simply need to let them flow and enjoy them in different ways, learning from them. Something else happens when you start to live life with this vibration. Whenever pain comes, you are a bit confident that it will pass on its own; you do not need to tremble in fear that you will never see joy and happiness again. And when pleasure comes, you stop clinging to it a bit, stop behaving needy in those moments, stop chasing people who made you feel that way, for you know that this will also pass. This is the essence of meditation: to let life flow in its totality. Pain purifying you and pleasure drowning you. And in this vibration, pulsation of pain and pleasure, something in you grows, something that can’t be truly explained in words, a quiet presence.
These simple words of Osho, I think, summarize the whole spiritual process and the essence of life itself: the vibration of life between two opposite emotions, yet both tasty in their own way. When you start to live like this, you will stumble for months and years. It is not easy because the mental conditioning to seek permanent emotion is far, far deep in your unconsciousness and our bodies. You will keep finding yourself clinging to addictions to avoid pain, again and again. You will keep chasing pleasure and happiness again and again. You will keep stumbling, but these stumbles are also natural. These mistakes and stumbling are also part of the journey. But slowly, by slowly, if you keep your awareness steady, something will grow in your life. A presence, a stability, a relaxation.
We spend so much time trying to be happy that we are barely happy. We spend so much time avoiding sadness that we end up living in quiet misery. And in this, we don’t let life flow. We don’t let emotions flow.
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