The Ache of Being: When the World Hurts Because We Do

Greeting’s Beloved

In my work, I spend a lot of time watching how people inhabit themselves. Beyond the words spoken, there is a whole language spoken by the body: a fidgeting hand, a leg that won’t stop its rhythmic dance, a mindless picking at a cuticle or twisting of hair.

These are not merely habits. They are whispers of a deeper dis-ease: a fundamental discomfort in one’s own skin.

It’s a somatic restlessness that speaks of a system struggling to regulate, to find a quiet center in the storm of emotion and thought. In guided mindfulness, I’ve seen how the simple invitation to be still can either be a profound relief or a moment of intense irritation. To be present with oneself is, for many, to confront a persistent ache they spend most of their time running from.

This has led me to a central, heartfelt question that feels urgent for our time:

What if our outer world of conflict is a mirror to this inner world of discomfort?

We are, I believe, wired for beauty. Our fundamental design yearns for connection, intimacy, joy, and relationship. It is our native language. But when we live outside this design, when our choices and beliefs are misaligned with this core wiring, the dissonance creates a friction that makes it unbearable to simply be.

If we are wired for love, then hatred is a foreign object the soul must contort to hold. If we are wired for connection, then prejudice and judgment are fractures in our own sense of belonging. When I dismiss someone for their ethnicity, their faith, or who they love, is that truly about them? Or is it a reflection of my own fractured self, my own inability to be at peace with who I am?

The increased volatility we see globally: the racism, xenophobia, culture wars, and sheer rage directed at the "other" feels less like a political strategy and more like a collective symptom. It is the externalization of a profound internal pain.

Historically, when have humans chosen war over peace, scarcity over sharing, domination over collaboration? It is in moments where a sense of lack of power, of safety, of worth….becomes so overwhelming that the only perceived solution is to seize it from outside. To conquer another’s land, to control another’s body, to amass wealth that towers over others, these are actions born from a void within. They are a desperate attempt to paper over a deep-seated belief that I am not enough.

Power sought from the outside is a confession that it cannot be found within.

A person who knows comfort in their own skin rests in a simple, unshakable truth: I am enough. From that place of enoughness, there is no need to control, dominate, or diminish others. There is only capacity to connect, to collaborate, to cherish.

Violence, in its many forms, is only possible when we are so estranged from ourselves that causing harm feels like a release. It is a catastrophic dysregulation, a self-hatred and emptiness so vast that the only temporary relief is to project that hurt onto the world. Hurt people, hurt people. It is not an excuse, but an explanation, a map to the root of the disease.

The cure, then, is not to win an argument or a war. The cure is to heal the wound that makes it so painful to sit in the quiet of our own being.

It is the delicate, brave work of turning toward the ache. Of healing the attachment wounds, the intergenerational trauma, the narratives of lack that we inherited. It is the journey back to the truth of our design: that we are worthy of love and connection simply because we exist. That our skin is not a prison, but a sacred boundary that allows us to experience the profound gift of aliveness.

This is not an accusatory finger pointing outward. This is a love letter, an invitation to look inward with compassion.

Our world will not heal by forcing change from the outside in. It will heal when we, one by one, find the courage to heal from the inside out. When we can sit with ourselves, in all our complexity, and finally find a comfort there.

It is from that place of comfort, that sense of enoughness, that we can finally build a world not of domination, but of embrace. A world where being alive is not a hell to be escaped, but a miracle to be cherished, together.

Doc Rain