Pain & Pleasure: The Sacred Jesters of a Created Life

There are few forces more misunderstood—and more potent—than pain and pleasure.

We’ve been taught to split them, to label one good and the other bad, to chase pleasure and avoid pain as if our lives depend on it. But what if that’s all backwards? What if both pain and pleasure are sacred? What if both are messengers of truth, vitality, and remembering?

This revelation came into my life through the wisdom of my mentor, Chris Saade. Chris offered me a vision of my life as a queendom—not a kingdom of conquest or hierarchy, but a living, breathing realm ruled by presence and devotion. And in this queendom, pain and pleasure are not enemies, nor opposites—they are sacred jesters. Tricksters. Carriers of insight. Disruptors of numbness. They tumble into the court of our hearts not to harm us, but to wake us up.

Chris shared with me this image I will never forget: how most human beings walk around holding pleasure in one hand, pain in the other, and trying to use one to cancel out the other. As if joy must erase grief. As if heartbreak makes laughter somehow less true. We do this balancing act, constantly numbing, avoiding, negotiating with life, rather than living it.

But what if we didn’t need to balance?

What if we didn’t need to cancel out?

What if we let both pain and pleasure crash through us like waves on the shore?

Because that’s what they are—waves from the same vast ocean.

Pleasure rolls in: a warm breeze, a kiss, a laugh with someone you love.

Pain follows: a loss, a disappointment, an ache that won’t go away.

Then, another wave of joy.

Then, perhaps, silence.

Then grief again.

Then delight.

All waves.

All part of the same tide of living.

I was recently in conversation with a friend, and together we came to an insight that surprised us:

Pain can be a great source of peace—even of happiness.

Not the kind of happiness that dances or sparkles, but a deep, steady kind. A knowing. When we no longer see pain as punishment or failure, it transforms. It becomes sacred. It becomes clean. It becomes love.

Pain brings us back to our breath.

It shows us what matters.

It empties us of pretense.

It teaches us surrender.

Pleasure brings us back to our bodies.

It teaches us to receive.

It reminds us of beauty and abundance.

It opens the heart.

We don’t have to choose one over the other. We don’t have to make one the hero and the other the villain. Both pain and pleasure, when fully met, have the same invitation: Come home. Come home to your body, to your heart, to this unrepeatable moment.

In the queendom of my created life, I now welcome them both. Not with resignation—but with reverence.

They are my jesters. Not comic relief, but sacred mirrors—pointing to what I have yet to see, feel, remember.

What if we stopped asking “How do I get rid of this pain?” or “How do I hold on to this pleasure?”

What if we started asking, “What is this wave bringing me?” “What part of me is being made new?”

Because the waves will come.

They always come.

And we, beloved, are the shore.