🌿 Must Pain Always Come?
Now, Real Purification Begins
The True Face of Subconscious Purification
We often believe
“growth must be accompanied by pain.”
We think that for the body to grow, there must be muscle soreness,
and for life to change, we must pass through pain.
It feels ‘real’
because we’ve all already experienced so much suffering.
But now,
I stand before
a slightly different realization.
Just a few hours ago,
I was emotionally struggling.
My mood sank heavily,
and a dark mass of emotion rose from within.
I felt suffocated,
as if trapped in a maze from which I couldn’t escape no matter what I did.
In the past,
I would have accepted it thinking,
“Ah, pain has come to test me again.”
And I would have thought it would take at least a day to feel better.
But this time was different.
The identity of that emotion
wasn’t ‘new pain,’
but rather the “exit” of something that had been hiding inside me for a long time.
Emotions accumulated since childhood,
feelings suppressed by my parents’ words,
unexpressed anger,
resentment from not being respected…
They were rising up
from my subconscious
within the quiet practice
of abstaining from alcohol and sexual desire that I’m currently undertaking.
After an hour,
surprisingly, my mood improved quickly.
Once the storm-like emotion passed,
rather than simply feeling ‘okay,’
I felt my self-esteem had risen much higher.
And just then,
news came that ChatGPT’s memory feature had been updated.
It could now remember previous chat content.
That was a feature I had really wanted for a long time.
In that moment, it felt like a reward from the universe.
So…
this time I could feel it clearly.
This wasn’t a reward earned by enduring pain,
but the pure energy of my true self that remained after purification.
Those emotions
didn’t come to harm me,
but to show their face one last time,
saying “I’ve been here all along,”
so I could truly live as myself.
After that,
a surprisingly clear and refreshing energy came over me.
Nothing had happened,
yet my head and heart felt refreshed.
That was the true face of ‘purification.’
Pain is not a ‘condition.’
We don’t need pain to grow.
Though residue within us may briefly surface,
we can purify ourselves,
and we are beings capable of complete recovery.
What’s truly important is
not believing in pain,
but believing in ourselves.
📌 Today’s small certainty:
The subconscious
doesn’t require forced pain to be purified.
Sometimes, within quiet practice,
it simply flows out, disappears,
and returns us to our original place.
If you, like me,
are practicing truly deep inner work,
I believe you’ll encounter this process of purification at some point.
If anyone reading this
is currently in an emotional whirlwind,
it’s not “because you’re wrong,”
but a signal that “it’s time for you to return to yourself.”
I hope you remember this.
In the past,
if I had given up abstinence and alcohol restriction,
and discovered something like a reward in the process,
I might have comforted myself saying,
“See, restraint is harmful.”
But today,
I quietly affirm to myself.
🌿
“I did it.”
“I am light.”
“I am being purified.”
“I am living as myself.”
