Unmasking the Pain Body - Repost

[Guest guest]

Unmasking the Pain-body

 

The Pain-Body

Excerpts from " A New Earth "

by Eckhart Tolle

 

 

Any negative emotion that is not fully faced and seen

for what it is in the moment it arises does not completely

dissolve. It leaves behind a remnant of pain.

 

The remnants of pain left behind by every strong negative emotion

that is not fully faced, accepted, and then let go of join together

to form an energy field that lives in the very cells of your body. It

consists not just of childhood pain, but also painful emotions that

were added to it later in adolescence and during your adult life,

much of it created by the voice of the ego. It is the emotional pain

that is your unavoidable companion when a false sense of self is

the basis of your life.

 

This energy field of old but still very-much-alive emotion that

lives in almost every human being is the pain-body.

 

The pain-body is a semiautonomous energy-form that lives within

most human beings, an entity made up of emotion. It has its own

primitive intelligence, not unlike a cunning animal, and its

intelligence is directed primarily at survival. Like all life-forms,

it periodically needs to feed--to take in new energy--and the food

it requires to replenish itself consists of energy that is compatible

with its own, which is to say, energy that vibrates at a similar

frequency. Any emotional painful experience can be used as food by

the pain-body. That's why it thrives on negative thinking as well as

drama in relation-ships. The pain-body is an addiction to unhappiness.

 

It may be shocking when you realize for the first time that there is

something within you that periodically seeks emotional negativity,

seeks unhappiness. You need even more awareness to see it in

yourself than to recognize it in another person. Once the unhappiness

has taken you over, not only do you not want an end to it, but you

want to make others just as miserable as you are in order to feed on

their negative emotional reactions.

 

In most people, the pain-body has a dormant and an active stage.

When it is dormant, you easily forget that you carry a heavy dark

cloud or a dormant volcano inside you, depending on the energy

field of your particular pain-body. How long it remains dormant

varies from person to person: a few weeks is the most common, but

it can be a few days or months. In rare cases the pain-body can

lie in hibernation for years before it gets triggered by some event.

 

How the Pain-Body Feeds on Your Thoughts

 

The pain-body awakens from its dormancy when it gets hungry,

when it is time to replenish itself. Alternatively, it may get

triggered by an event at any time. The pain-body that is ready

to feed can use the most insignificant event as a trigger,

something somebody says or does, or even a thought. If you live alone

or there is nobody around at the time, the pain-body will

feed on your thoughts. Suddenly, your thinking becomes deeply

negative. You were most likely unaware that just prior to the

influx of negative thinking a wave of emotion invaded your mind--

as a dark and heavy mood, as anxiety or fiery anger. All

thought is energy and the pain-body is now feeding on the energy of

your thoughts. But it cannot feed on any thought. You don't need

to be particularly sensitive to notice that a positive thought has

totally different feeling-tone than a negative one. It is the same

energy, but it vibrates at a different frequency. A happy, positive

thought is undigestible to the pain-body. It can only feed on

negative thoughts because only those thoughts are compatible with

its own energy field.

 

Emotion from the pain-body quickly gains control of your thinking,

and once your mind has been taken over by the pain-body, your

thinking becomes negative. The voice in your head will be telling

sad, anxious, or angry stories about yourself or your life, and about

other people, about past, future, or imaginary events. The voice will

be blaming, accusing, complaining, imagining. And you are totally

identified with whatever the voice says, believe all its distorted

thoughts. At that point, the addiction to unhappiness has set in.

 

It is not so much that you cannot stop your train of negative

thoughts, but that you don't want to. This is because the pain-body

at that time is living through you, pretending to be you. And to the

pain-body, pain is pleasure. It eagerly devours every negative

thought. In fact, the usual voice in your head has now become the

voice of the pain-body. It has taken over the internal dialogue. A

vicious circle becomes established between the pain-body and your

thinking. Every thought feeds the pain-body and in turn the pain-body

generates more thoughts. At some point, after a few hours or even a

few days, it has replenished itself and returns to its dormant stage,

leaving behind a depleted organism and a body that is much more

susceptible to illness. If that sounds to you like a psychic

parasite, you are right. That's exactly what it is.

 

How The Pain-Body Feeds On Drama

 

If there are other people around, preferably your partner or a close

family member, the pain-body will attempt to provoke them--push their

buttons, as the expression goes--so it can feed on the ensuing drama.

Pain-bodies love intimate relationships and families because that is

where they get most of their food. It is hard to resist another

person's pain-body that is determined to draw you into a reaction.

Instinctively it knows your weakest, most vulnerable points. If it

doesn't succeed the first time, it will try again

and again. It is raw emotion looking for more emotion. The other

person's pain-body wants to awaken yours so that both pain-bodies

can mutually energize each other.

 

Many relationships go through violent and destructive pain-body

episodes at regular intervals. It is almost unbearably painful for

a young child to have to witness the emotional violence of their

parent's pain-bodies, and yet that is the fate of millions of children

all over the world, the nightmare of their daily existence. That is

also one of the main ways in which the human pain-body is passed on

from generation to generation.

 

(There is a great deal more in the book about the pain-body, and I

highly recommend the education, lol! ...I would

like to move on to how to break free of it at this point.)

 

Breaking Free

 

The beginning of freedom from the pain-body lies first of all in the

realization that you have a pain-body. Then, more important, in

your ability to stay present enough, alert enough, to notice the

pain-body in yourself as a heavy influx of negative emotion when

it becomes active. 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 and so cannot renew itself anymore

by feeding on your thoughts. The pain-body in most cases does not

dissolve immediately, but once you have severed the link between

it and your thinking, the pain-body begins to lose energy. 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. In this way, the pain-body becomes fuel for

consciousness. This is why many of the wisest, most enlightened men

and women on our planet once had a heavy pain-body.

 

(The book is a great read with much more on the subject!)

 

Love, dhyana