What Batters You: On the Alchemy of Pain

Minutes after concluding the first session of the Active Hope book club, I watched the videos coming out of Northern Ontario showing people fleeing burning villages, walls of fire and smoke at their backs. It was surreal. If I hadn’t known it was really happening, I’d have thought I was watching a disaster film.

It was time to practice exactly what we’d done in the session – tending to my pain for the world rather than shutting it down or closing off.

I don’t pretend to know what it’s like to lose one’s home or to watch one’s village destroyed – a horrifying reality that no person should have to live through. I also know that the guilt I feel in recognizing how unfair it is that the climate emergency disproportionately affects Indigenous communities isn’t a useful place to dwell either.

But dwelling isn’t the same as sitting with it.

I let myself watch longer than felt comfortable, safe in my apartment, viewing from a distance. I practiced Breathing Through. Based on Tonglen meditation, it uses the breath to transmute painful feelings. Instead of turning away, I opened to the fear, guilt, and fury arising within me and breathed them back out into the larger web of life.

The feelings didn't disappear. But softening into them instead of resisting created space. It returned me to a place of tenderness. A wave of compassion and solidarity arose. I did what I could in that moment: I donated to relief efforts and shared what I knew with my networks.

One of Joanna Macy’s favorite poems by Rainer Maria Rilke speaks to building strength by going into our pain rather than avoiding it:

Let this darkness be a bell tower

and you the bell. As you ring,

what batters you becomes your strength. 

– Sonnets to Orpheus II.29

It's a magnificent promise: our pain, when fully felt, can lead us to discover a deeper source of strength.

How does this alchemy happen? How does pain transform into strength rather than simply wearing us down?

Yoga offers some possibilities.

The self-reflective capacity we develop in practice allows us to witness our pain without identifying with it as who we are. We aren’t distancing ourselves from what we’re feeling, but we’re also not mistaking those feelings for the whole of who we are. This spacious awareness allows us to meet our pain without being overwhelmed by it. 

From the stillness of a quieted mind, something remarkable becomes possible. We can see that the source of our pain is also the source of our strength. We grieve because we love. We feel outrage because we care about justice. Our sorrow is evidence of our connection, not our weakness.

The unity of yoga isn’t just a metaphor or a description of a perfected state of being, it’s what’s already true beneath the illusion of separateness. Opening to that oneness reconnects us with the compassion and courage that arise from our deepest nature, and we become more capable of acting from that place.  

Asana practice and breathwork can also be practiced in ways that support this alchemy by moving emotions so they don’t stay stuck in the mind or lodged in the body. Grief closing off the chest, anger tightening the jaw, fear restricting the breath - practice gives ways to clear tension and metabolize tough feelings.

Watching the displacement of Indigenous communities, I don't feel weaker. I feel more alive, vulnerable, and connected. I also feel more resolved and motivated to contribute. The strength and conviction I feel come not from distancing myself from that pain but from allowing it to anchor me in the deeper unity from which both grief and love arise.

Joanna Macy has said that when we're no longer afraid of our pain for the world, nothing can stop us. I'm not there yet, but it's something I am learning. I notice in myself the tendency to push pain away, how quickly I want to move toward something positive before fully allowing myself to feel what’s actually there.

This is what a community like the Active Hope book club is for, and what I believe our yoga practice can offer: not a place where painful feelings disappear, but where we learn to remain open enough for them to be alchemized — into a donation, a shared link, a meaningful conversation. 

As it does, it returns us to the underlying ground of our being, where love — and the most benevolent qualities of the heart that flow from it — naturally shine forth.

Like Rilke's bell, the heart doesn't ring despite being struck; it rings because it has been struck. What batters us can become the very thing that allows our love, and the noble virtues that it gives rise to, to sound more robustly through our lives.