Shakti: Pain Tolerance and Navaratri

Each fall, Navaratri returns, and with it comes a sense of hope. For nine nights, we celebrate the divine feminine, the many forms of Shakti. We sing, we dance, we dress goddess idols in silk and gold. For a brief moment, womanhood and strength are revered, uplifted, and celebrated.

But when the celebration ends and daily life resumes, I often find myself wondering how much of that reverence carries over into the real world. We praise the idea of women’s strength, but we rarely think about how we treat it.

Shakti was never meant to mean limitless endurance. Somewhere along the way, resilience became an expectation, a burden. We call it empowerment when a woman holds everything together, yet label her weak the moment she can no longer do so. I’ve found that strength can become something she owes the world rather than something she chooses.

This expectation becomes especially clear in the way we treat women’s pain. When we look solely at numbers, women experience more pain than men: more chronic pain, more acute pain, more pain in their daily lives. Yet this reality is not reflected in how their pain is understood or treated.

Consider childbirth. During labor, a woman may choose an epidural, a form of anesthesia used to ease contractions and labor pain. But after giving birth, an event universally acknowledged as one of the most painful physical experiences, standard pain management often relies on nothing more than acetaminophen and ibuprofen, the same medications used for headaches. Meanwhile, men get prescribed Vicodin following vasectomies. It’s easy to call this empowerment, but it is harder to admit what it often becomes: a quiet, persistent form of sexism disguised as praise.

We sideline a woman the moment she asks for help. When she arrives at a hospital complaining of “pain,” a word we use for women far more than men, her discomfort is suspect, emotional, exaggerated. Yet a man with pain is persevering, stoic, and admirable.

Around the world, medical research consistently shows that women’s pain is underdiagnosed and undertreated. Women wait longer for relief in emergency rooms. It can take anywhere from 4 to 11 years for a woman to be diagnosed with endometriosis after the onset of symptoms. And, 60% of all cases remain undiagnosed.

Their symptoms are dismissed as anxiety, stress, or “just hormones.” The language follows them too: emotional, dramatic, hysterical. And the root of the word hysteria (hystera, meaning uterus) tells its own story.

From menstruation to childbirth, women are taught to “bear it.” Meanwhile, the real experiences pile up: cramps, migraines, endometriosis, fibroids, miscarriages. How large does a fibroid grow before anyone takes it seriously? A woman is expected to do it all, regardless of circumstance.

We often congratulate ourselves on having moved beyond sexism, as women can now vote, drive, work, and lead. But true equality is not measured by the milestones we can point to. It reveals itself in the subtle moments: the things we don’t say, the norms we don’t challenge, the conversations we avoid. Sexism endures most quietly where we assume progress has already been made.

Pain is woven into female life from adolescence onward, yet somehow the narrative still insists that women are weaker, rather than acknowledging that men lack a comparable frame of reference. What purpose does this serve except to invalidate women’s experiences further? For many of us, it feels like just one more microaggression in a lifetime of them, another way the world tells us our suffering is imaginary. 

When society celebrates only the “strong woman,” it leaves no space for the woman who is exhausted, hurting, or vulnerable. Silence gets mistaken for dignity, and suffering becomes synonymous with grace.

To honor Shakti is to honor real women; not just their resilience, but their limits, voices, and pain. When we stop expecting women to be unbreakable, we finally create space for them to be whole. That is the real celebration we owe them long after the festival lights fade.