Why healing can sometimes hurt before it feels like freedom

After our retreats, some participants often tell me something that, at first, can be hard to understand:

“I thought I’d come here to feel better, but now I feel more sensitive, more confused, even sadder than before.”

And yes, depending on the person and the process, that can happen.

When someone feels the call to work with plants, to start therapy, to meditate, to pray, or simply to begin a deep process of self-knowledge, they’re not always looking for the same thing.

Sometimes there’s a call to cleanse, something feels heavy, something isn’t right, we’re tired of repeating the same patterns. Other times the call runs deeper — we want to understand ourselves.

-Why we react the way we do?.

-Why we repeat certain relationships?.

-Why it’s hard to trust?.

-Why we abandon ourselves?.

And when we truly begin to go inward, we find layers. First, almost always, the mental ones: the thoughts, the fears, the beliefs, the stories we’ve repeated so many times we’ve come to believe they’re our identity. Then come the emotions, the memories, the wounds — everything that for years was covered by different forms of anesthesia.

Food can become anesthesia. Alcohol. Drugs. Work. Toxic relationships. The constant need for approval. Always staying busy. Even certain spiritual practices can become a way of avoiding what we still don’t want to look at.

And when we remove the anesthesia, we sometimes feel more. That doesn’t automatically mean something went wrong.

Pain Can Also Be a Calling

For me, pain doesn’t always mean something is functioning badly. Often it’s a sign that we’re alive, and that something needs our attention.

We all have a kind of inner compass. I don’t think it’s exactly the same for everyone — each person has their own values, their own history, their own way of understanding life — but I do believe there’s a deep perception inside us of what’s aligned with our truth and what isn’t.

We often suffer when we allow, over and over, situations we ourselves know are hurting us. And that’s deeply connected to self-love. Sometimes we confuse following our heart with turning ourselves into martyrs. But we don’t need to suffer to prove that we love.

If we decide to build a happy life, we also have to learn not to keep holding on to what brings us unhappiness — in our romantic relationships, our family, our work, our purpose, and above all, in the relationship we have with ourselves.

When we ignore a physical wound, it can get worse. It can become infected. Something similar can happen with an emotional wound: what we don’t look at doesn’t necessarily disappear. It can show up as fear, sadness, distrust, anxiety, compulsive behavior, difficulty relating to others, or a deep sense of disconnection.

Of course, mental health is complex, and not everything has a single emotional explanation. There are moments when a person needs psychological or medical support, and that’s also part of the care. But within a process of self-knowledge, learning to listen to what we feel can help us discover what has been asking for attention for a long time.

Finding the Pieces of the Puzzle

Things happen to us in life whose impact shows up years later. Sometimes we don’t even understand the connection.

Therapy, deep conversations, meditation, and in certain contexts, work with plants, can help us find connections we couldn’t see before. Sometimes a memory surfaces. Sometimes an emotion. Sometimes just a bodily sensation or an understanding. And yes, sometimes remembering can hurt a great deal — especially when we’re talking about abuse, violence, loss, or traumatic experiences.

But looking for our history doesn’t mean staying trapped in it. For me it’s like finding the pieces of a puzzle: we don’t go back to the past to live there again. We go back to understand.

Why do I have this fear? Why do I always end up in the same kind of relationship? Why do I react this way? Why do I feel like everyone will abandon me? Why do I abandon myself first?

Understanding the origin of a wound doesn’t finish the work. But it can give us perspective. And perspective can change everything.

My Own Wound of Abandonment

It took me years to understand my relationship with my mother. For a long time I carried a wound of abandonment — part of me felt she hadn’t been there, that maybe she hadn’t loved me the way I needed. And our minds can build extremely painful stories around what we live through. We judge. We interpret. We draw conclusions. And then we suffer not only from what happened, but from the story we keep telling about it.

Over the years I came to understand something different. My mother wasn’t a villain — she had done what she could within the circumstances she had. She worked, I barely saw her, and as a child I couldn’t fully understand an adult’s decisions and limitations. When I became a mother myself, I was able to see her from another place. That didn’t erase what I felt, but it changed my perspective. I understood that my mother had always loved me. And I understood something even more important:

I am now the one responsible for not abandoning myself.

Many of those wounds had later shown up in my romantic relationships. I repeated patterns. I found myself with people who also carried wounds of abandonment. Until I began to understand. And when we understand, a word appears that can feel very uncomfortable: responsibility.

Pain and Suffering Are Not the Same

For me there’s a difference between feeling pain and remaining in suffering. Pain is part of life: there are losses that hurt, betrayals that hurt, endings that hurt, things that never should have happened and that leave deep marks. But suffering often begins when we cling completely to the pain and let our identity build itself around what happened to us.

This doesn’t mean denying that at certain moments we really were victims. There are people who have suffered abuse, abandonment, violence, or real injustices. Letting go of the role of victim doesn’t mean denying the facts. It means deciding that I don’t want to spend the rest of my life defined by what someone did to me.

At some point we can start asking ourselves: do I want to be only a victim of my story, or can I also become a student of it? What did I learn? What did I discover about myself? What do I no longer accept? What boundaries do I need? What do I want to do differently? What do I need to heal?

Apologies can be beautiful when they arrive. But some will never come. And if our peace depends on someone showing up one day and saying exactly what we need to hear, we can leave our life frozen for years. Healing on our own means reclaiming that power.

Forgiving Doesn’t Mean Going Back

For me, the most important reconciliation happens first within ourselves. And that reconciliation can lead to forgiveness.

Forgiving someone doesn’t necessarily mean going back to having a relationship with them. We don’t need to become best friends with whoever caused us harm. We can forgive and keep our distance. We can understand and still say no. We can love and protect ourselves. We can wish someone well and choose not to share our life with them.

Forgiveness can also be a way of setting down a story. When we understand that each person acts from their own level of consciousness, from their own wounds and from what they understand of themselves and the world, some things stop feeling so personal. That doesn’t remove anyone’s responsibility. But it can free us from carrying what happened forever.

When the Anesthesia Wears Off

I sometimes compare the healing process to a surgery. During the operation there’s anesthesia. Afterward, when it wears off, the pain appears. Does that mean the surgery went wrong? Not necessarily. It means there’s a wound that needs time to heal.

Something similar can happen after a ceremony. During the experience, a person can feel tremendous love, clarity, connection, understanding. They can receive answers. They can feel held. But afterward they return to everyday life, and that’s where another part of the work begins.

It’s very easy to want to numb ourselves again. Go back to the same habits. Go back to a relationship we know is hurting us. Distract ourselves. Not feel. Look for another ceremony too quickly instead of integrating the last one.

But integrating means staying present with what we understood. If we understood we need more faith, we have to practice it when worry returns. If we understood we need to take better care of our body, we have to start doing it. If we understood we need to forgive, we have to begin that process. If we understood we need to set boundaries, the moment to set them will inevitably come.

A ceremony isn’t measured only by what we feel inside it. It’s also measured by what we do with it afterward.

Life Keeps Asking Us Again

Integration has a lot to do with this: life keeps presenting us with opportunities to respond differently. If we discover that we always put others’ happiness before our own, situations or people will likely keep appearing that lead us to ask ourselves the same question.

Am I really in a position to help? Does this help actually benefit them? Is it healthy for me too? Am I helping, or am I abandoning myself again to save someone?

Loving ourselves doesn’t mean becoming selfish. It means no longer disappearing from our own life.

And as we begin to heal, the outside world also starts responding differently. Some people find themselves thinking: “I used to react one way, and now I don’t.” What used to be able to completely throw us off center starts losing its power. For me, that’s a very beautiful sign of healing.

Healing Is Also Growing Up

The tests of healing are different for each person — they depend on where we are in life and what we need to learn. In my case, some of my tests were related to moving through spiritual fears and my relationship with what I experienced as negative energies. Others were much more human and earthly: letting go of toxic relationships, no longer worrying unnecessarily, accepting that I kept holding on to something that was clearly hurting me, taking responsibility for my own decisions.

Sometimes we also need to recognize that, when we were hurting, we held on to situations that ended up making us suffer. That doesn’t mean blaming ourselves. It means understanding that now we can choose differently.

One of the biggest things we have to heal is our own mind — how we talk to ourselves, how we treat ourselves, what we think of ourselves, the beliefs we live from. Because ultimately our relationship with the world begins in the relationship we have with ourselves.

Healing is also growing up.

Learning to Discern

The spiritual path also requires discernment. It took me years — and all the experiences I’ve lived — to learn to tell apart intuition, fear, fantasy, and what I consider a real spiritual experience.

• Intuition doesn’t create fear or confusion. It’s a feeling that speaks from within — a way of knowing how to do something, or of realizing something. Like when someone lies to us, smiles at us, looks us in the eye, and something inside us says: something here doesn’t feel right. It can be energetic. It stays with you, leaves you thinking. Intuition doesn’t try to convince you — it guides you. Sometimes, not listening to intuition can give us a mild anxiety. But not fear. And it can be practiced in two ways: listening to it and seeing what happens, or not listening to it — and letting the outcome, over time, show us whether we were right.

• Fear is different. It paralyzes. It’s usually felt as a negative energy that clouds reason and can make us paranoid. It leads to inaction. It doesn’t make sense with reality. It can also connect to wounds we haven’t healed — we’re afraid of repeating something we’ve already lived through. But for those of us who feel a call to spiritual service, there’s another kind of fear. It shows up as negative energies, as forces trying to pull us away from our path, to stop us before we keep moving forward. For me, that fear is also a test — a way of seeing whether I trust myself, the plants, God. Moving through it doesn’t mean it disappears; it means that, by facing it, we grow, we expand, we discover parts of ourselves that were unknown until that fear appeared.

• Fantasies are something else — they’re created in the mind. There are romanticized fantasies and fearful ones. They usually have something in common: we look for signs to control what we want to happen, and we ignore the truth. Like when we fantasize that someone likes us and start looking for signs — gestures that might just be simple friendliness — but because we want that person so much, we fantasize instead of letting things take their natural course.

• Spiritual experiences, on the other hand, are not something we can create. They are deep and transformative. You know when you’ve had a real one because, generally, it transforms your life in a positive way: it helps us release what no longer serves us, forgive, find strength, trust, develop self-love, faith, and confidence.

Plants Are Tools

For me, ayahuasca, San Pedro, the diets, therapy, prayer, and meditation are tools. They can all help us in different ways: to go inward, to search for ourselves, to find ourselves, to hold ourselves, to understand, to release.

Plants, within my experience and tradition, can help open us spiritually, mentally, and emotionally. But opening a door doesn’t mean someone else will walk the path for us. That part is ours.

The ceremony can show us something. Therapy can accompany us. Prayer can hold us. Meditation can teach us to observe. But ultimately it’s up to us to actually live what we’ve understood.

And we also need to know when to stop. Not all suffering after an experience should be interpreted as a “transformation crisis.” If a person loses stability, has intense confusion, loses touch with reality, can’t function or take care of themselves, or their suffering becomes unmanageable, they may need psychological or medical support. That doesn’t mean they failed spiritually. Asking for help can also be a form of self-love.

Remembering Who We Are

For me, healing is deeply connected to remembering: our spiritual and personal essence, that we are beings of love and light, that we come from somewhere and will someday return there. And while we’re here, a question stays with us: who am I? Why am I here? Why am I exactly this person? What is my purpose?

When we begin to remember, many things start to find their place. I believe everything has a purpose — from the stars to the sand on the beaches, from the rain to the storms, from day to night. And our life too: the place where we were born, our family, the people we meet, the experiences we go through. As we live, our purpose can become clearer.

That doesn’t mean justifying the harm people can do to one another. It means understanding that even what we can no longer change can become an opportunity to grow, to know ourselves, and to decide who we want to be.

Life Itself Is a Ceremony

For me, suffering begins when we stop asking ourselves what our purpose is — when we forget our spiritual nature and live completely trapped in the material, in trivialities, in attachment and pain. Healing begins when we decide: it’s time to stop living only from suffering and to find myself again.

And the ceremony doesn’t end when we say “the ceremony is closed.” For me, life is a ceremony, from the moment we’re born until we die. Every morning we wake up and have another chance: we can set an intention for our day, decide how we want to live, decide what we want to create. And, as happens within a ceremony, there will also be trials.

Plants can open doors to help us remember. But it’s up to us to build our memories day by day. That’s why we need to value each day. To be present. To build memories we truly want to carry with us.

Today I understand that healing doesn’t mean waiting for everything to be perfect. Healing is also understanding that life, exactly as it presents itself, can teach us something. It’s letting go of interpreting every difficulty as personal. It’s asking ourselves: what can I learn from this? Who am I choosing to be in the face of this? How can this experience help me become a better human being?

For me, healing is reconnecting with the spiritual world. It’s returning to center. It’s feeling peace, sleeping in peace, living in peace. It’s finding a balance between our mind, our emotions, and our spirit.

And in the end, maybe that’s exactly what healing is:

Choosing the cure over the anesthesia.

Not shutting down what we feel. Not running from our story. Not waiting for someone else to come save us. But learning to look at what hurts, understand it, integrate it, and then let it go.

Because in the end, healing is freeing ourselves from suffering without ceasing to be deeply alive.

Love and gratitude

Naysha Silva