The Doorway Beyond Suffering

We Were Never Meant to Stay There

If you’ve been following my work, you know that I am facing the greatest hardship of my entire life…

being separated from my young daughter across continents,

without knowing when we’ll reunite again.

This kind of grief could easily define me.

It could take over my life completely and no one would question it.

But I didn’t let it.

I grieved.

I grieved her fully.

I let myself descend into the darkness. I didn’t bypass it or try to explain it away.

I touched the bottom of it. I met the silence at its core.

And then something shifted.

I feel free.

Not because it stopped hurting. Not because it’s resolved.

But because I no longer fear it.

I have faced my worst nightmare.

I know that place. I know the ache. I know the shadow. And I don’t live there anymore.

I live.

I write.

I dance.

I create.

I dream forward.

I live my life for me, because in the end, I am all that I have. And from that place, I can give everything I am.

And this is what I want to say, not just for me, but for us:

We can learn through joy.

That sentence might feel almost sacrilegious in a world that has bowed to pain as its primary teacher. Humanity has evolved through grief, through rupture, through cycles of abandonment and return. And we have learned so much. But the time is coming when we are ready to learn in new ways.

We are beginning to choose a different path.

A path of peace. A path of curiosity. A path of wonder. A path where we grow not because we are broken, but because we are becoming.

This is not to deny suffering.

This is not to look away from what still aches.

It is to say, we are allowed to imagine what else might be possible.

Because suffering is not the only teacher.

It never was.

Joy can teach. So can love. So can play. So can the rhythm of the wind and the quiet of the forest and the gaze of a child who sees clearly.

And yes, challenges will still come. Physical pain. Emotional turmoil. Moments of chaos or fear. But those moments do not need to become our identity. They do not need to define our worth or our way.

To face challenge is not the same as to suffer.

To face challenge is to be called.

To be invited to rise.

To meet life as a mirror of your own becoming.

Each moment we are asked: Will I meet this from love or fear? Will I remember who I am? Will I listen for the deeper invitation?

This is what it means to walk through the doorway beyond suffering.

To understand that pain may knock, but you don’t have to let it live in your home.

You can greet it. You can honor it. You can bless it as it leaves.

We were never meant to stay there.

So as the world groans and reshapes itself, as old stories fall away and new ones emerge, know that you are not wrong for choosing joy.

You are not naïve for choosing to grow from beauty.

You are not bypassing life by meeting it with grace.

You are walking a path that many are just beginning to remember.

So walk it boldly.

Walk it gently.

And walk it in the company of others who are choosing the same.

The doorway is open.