The Hidden Pain of Spiritual Growth

Understanding the Ache of Light Leaks

Lately, I’ve been feeling deeply into the resonance of a message that keeps coming through — quiet, persistent, like a whisper rising from within. It began when I read The Man Who Could Move Clouds by Ingrid Rojas Contreras. She describes a photograph with a light leak, a beautiful imperfection that was possibly evidence of the photograph capturing something more — be it energy, spirit, soul.

That image — of light leaking through — stirred something in me. What if we are listening not just to the world around us, but to the places where light leaks through our own being?

Light is a shape-shifter, a force tunneling its way through the dark, recalibrating everything in its path. When it reaches the frozen spaces within us — those places we’ve kept locked, hidden, untouched — it doesn’t wait for permission. The light arrives, breaking us open. There, in the cracking, we feel the ache — the sweet, disorienting ache of surrender.

But this ache is not harm.

This pain is the sound of light announcing its arrival. Reshaping us, thawing us, expanding us beyond what has kept us frozen for so long.

We are the conceivers of light and the conceived, always both, always in motion. Light leaks through our cracks, and in that brilliance, we are penetrated by the very radiance we once resisted. The cracks are not our breaking; they are the places where we open, where light begins to flow again.

This is the rhythm of awakening: frozen in resistance, fractured by light, and flowing as unity. And the ache? It’s evidence that the light has arrived and the weight of our stagnation is shifting.

Like old photographs imprinted with the imperfect beauty of light leaks, we too are becoming new images — versions of ourselves shaped by the light that flows through us. We are the new, the re-imagined, the illuminated.

What was once hidden is now revealed, and in that revelation, we are radiance revealed.