A crucial part of the spiritual awakening process is recognizing your own behaviors, and the reasons you do what you do. Something that will totally transform the way you view the world is by understanding the pain-body. So… What is the pain-body?
It is an accumulation of painful life experience that was not fully faced and accepted in the moment it arose. It leaves behind an energy form of emotional pain. It comes together with other energy forms from other instances, and so after some years you have a “painbody,” an energy entity consisting of old emotion.
Eckhart Tolle
I strongly urge you to read what Eckhart Tolle writes about the pain-body in his book The New Earth. As I understand it, whenever we don’t fully face and process our emotional pain as it naturally occurs in daily life, that pain is then stored within our pain-body—a collection of energy that builds and gets stronger the more we “feed it”. It becomes so strong that it behaves like a parasite, taking control of us and our actions when it gets “hungry”. The pain-body is just like any other life form in that it wants to survive and thrive. But it needs more pain in order to do that. It craves only one thing: pain for you and pain for others. It will hijack you in order to get it.
The pain-body, when it takes control of you, does not have empathy or compassion. It is only rage, bitterness, hatred, and every other negative emotion. When something pushes you over the line and you burst into anger, and you feel it flooding you and blocking out all positive emotions—like during road rage, for instance—that’s your pain-body taking over. That’s why you feel so helpless in those moments. You are.
One of the biggest puzzles of my life, left unsolved for decades, which unsettled me on a very deep level, was encounters with the pain-bodies of those closest to me. Eckhart Tolle explains that the pain-body loves more than anything to provoke our friends and family into experiencing pain. It’s one of the key way it gets sustenance. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve been faced with someone who should have felt unconditional love for me but instead was essentially a heartless rage-monster who only wanted me to suffer. The heart can’t understand something like that. Of course, those moments would come and go. The pain-body would come to the forefront and the recede again in time. But it never got enough and always came back. In some people, like my parental figure, their pain-body had become strong enough to have much more control over them than what was left of their withered soul.
To know now what was happening there is a way I empower myself and find ways to feel compassion for those who hurt me in the past. They were at the mercy of their pain-body, which had grown too dense for the light of their soul to shine through.
We cannot affect the pain-body of others, but we can learn to recognize when we experience it in ourselves. As soon as we become aware of it, it loses power over us. It really is as easy as that. If rage begins to consume you, or you feel sadistic pleasure in the misfortunes of others, seeing it as the emotional entity of the pain-body and not your essence lets you take back control. It also prompts us to do the deep inner work needed to face our buried pain in order to release it. That’s the only way to defeat your inner parasite.
Be warned that the media and our society in general has been built to feed the pain-body. It wants us to be offended and alarmed. Selling fear to our pain-bodies gives them food and keeps us weak. It makes us easy to control and powerless. Too many TV shows and movies are designed to enable our pain-bodies with gratuitous violence and suffering. I promise you that you will feel happier and healthier if you avoid those things and instead choose entertainment that lifts the heart, challenges the mind, or makes you laugh. Not all depictions of pain are bad. If it is done to demonstrate the awakening process, in which we are shown how to learn from mistakes and grow, that can be a good thing. Provoking awareness is always the goal and the way we take back our world, healing it and making it a better place for all of life.
So, take a good hard look at yourself and those around you. Try to see what’s really going on, and what’s really in control. Use love and choose love as the way to conquer fear and pain.
Love and blessings, friends.
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