For those who have read the works of Eckhart Tolle, you will be familiar with the below:-
What is the pain-body?
Old emotional pain living inside you. It is an accumulation of painful life experiences that have not been accepted and processed. It leaves behind an energy form of emotional pain. Over the years we build and accumulate more emotional pain and the pain body becomes heavier. An energy entity consisting of old, unresolved emotions.
The voice in the head has a life of its own. Most people are at the mercy of that voice; they are possessed by thought, by the mind. Since the mind is conditioned by the past, you are then forced to re-enact the past again and again.
Through complete identification with the mind, a false sense of self – the ego – came into existence. Thinking is no more than a tiny aspect of the totality of consciousness, the totality of who you are. Some people are constantly trapped in the egoic state. They are alienated from themselves, as well as from others and the world around them. Most of their attention is absorbed by thinking, so they don’t really see you and are not really listening to you.
As long as you are unable to access the Power of the Now, every emotional pain that you experience leaves behind a residue of pain that lives on in you. It merges with the pain from the past, which was already there, and becomes lodged in your mind and body. This, of course, includes the pain you suffered as a child, caused by the unconsciousness of the world into which you were born.
This accumulated pain is a negative energy field that occupies your body and mind. It is the emotional pain-body. It has two modes of being: dormant and active. A pain-body may be dormant 90 percent of the time; in a deeply unhappy person, though, it may be active up to 100 percent of the time. Some people live almost entirely through their pain-body, while others may experience it only in certain situations, such as intimate relationships, or situations linked with past loss or abandonment, physical or emotional hurt, and so on. Anything can trigger it, particularly if it resonates with a pain pattern from your past. When it is ready to awaken from its dormant stage, even a thought or an innocent remark made by someone close to you, can activate it.
Watch out for any sign of unhappiness in yourself, in whatever form — it may be the awakening pain-body. This can take the form of irritation, impatience, a sombre mood, anger, rage, depression, a need to have some drama in your relationship. Catch it the moment it awakens from its dormant state.
How the Pain-Body Feeds on your Thoughts
A happy, positive thought is indigestible to the pain-body. It can only feed on negative thoughts because only those thoughts are compatible with its own energy field. The pain-body is like a psychic parasite, feeding itself with your negative thoughts, leaving a depleted organism and a body susceptible to illness.
The pain-body wants to survive, just like every other entity in existence, and it can only survive if it gets you to unconsciously identify with it. It will feed on any experience that resonates with its own kind of energy, anything that creates further pain in whatever form: anger, destructiveness, hatred, grief, emotional drama, violence, and even illness. Pain can only feed on pain. Pain cannot feed on joy.
Once the pain-body has taken you over, you want more pain. You become a victim or a perpetrator. You want to inflict pain, or you want to suffer pain or both. There isn’t really much difference between the two. You are not conscious of this, of course, and will vehemently claim that you do not want pain. But look closely and you will find that your thinking and behavior are designed to keep the pain going. If you were truly conscious of it, the pattern would dissolve, for to want more pain is insanity, and nobody is consciously insane.
The pain-body, which is the dark shadow cast by the ego, is actually afraid of the light of your consciousness. It is afraid of being found out. Its survival depends on your unconscious identification with it, as well as on your unconscious fear of facing the pain that lives in you. But if you don’t face it, if you don’t bring the light of your consciousness into the pain, you will be forced to relive it again and again. The pain-body may seem to you like a dangerous monster, but it is an insubstantial phantom that cannot prevail against the power of your presence.
The inability or unwillingness of the human mind to let go of the past is illustrated in the story of two Zen monks. One monk carried a young woman across a muddy road. The other monk asked why he had done that as monks were not supposed to do this. He answered, “I put the girl down hours ago, are you still carrying her?” This is what most people do, collecting more and more stuff to be carried around like bags of cement. Your personality, which is conditioned by the past, then becomes your prison. This ‘me’ is an illusion that obscures your true identity as timeless and formless Presence.
Some spiritual teachings state that all pain is ultimately an illusion, and this is true. The question is: Is it true for you? Do you want to experience pain for the rest of your life and keep saying that it is an illusion? Does that free you from the pain?
Breaking Free
The beginning of freedom from the pain-body lies first of all in the realization that you have a pain-body. When it is recognized, it can no longer pretend to be you and live and renew itself through you. It is your conscious Presence that breaks the identification with the pain-body. When you don’t identify with it, the pain-body can no longer control your thinking so cannot renew itself anymore by feeding on your thoughts.
When your thinking ceases to be clouded by emotion, your present perceptions are no longer distorted by the past. The energy that was trapped in the pain-body then changes its vibrational frequency and is transmuted into Presence.
When you realize that pain-bodies unconsciously seek more pain, they want something bad to happen, you will understand that many traffic accidents are caused by drivers whose pain-bodies are active at the time.
When our pain-bodies are active, we are out of alignment with the evolutionary impulse of the universe. When you can’t stand the endless cycle of suffering anymore, you begin to awaken.
So the pain-body doesn’t want you to observe it directly and see it for what it is. The moment you observe it, feel its energy field within you and take your attention into it, the identification is broken. A higher dimension of consciousness has come in – presence. You are now the witness or the watcher of the pain-body. This means that it cannot use you anymore by pretending to be you, and it can no longer replenish itself through you. You have faced it and found your own innermost strength. You have accessed the Power of Now.
If you are present, the pain-body cannot feed on your thoughts anymore, or on other people’s reactions. You can simply observe it, and be the witness, be the space for it. Then gradually, its energy will decrease.
How to Break Free
Book a holistic Reiki session and understand where the negative energy comes from, how we accumulate it, and what to do to start breaking it down.
The Chakra Course goes into each chakra in detail, explaining what traumas and abuses cause the imbalances, what to do to open these energy centres and bring them back into balance.
