The tables are turned

 

 

I don’t know if I ever told you about the ‘pain body’. It is a concept coined by Eckhart Tolle in A New Earth. As soon as I read the term, many years ago, I knew what he meant without further explanation, and I knew mine was heavy and dense. When we don’t adequately deal with negative emotions as they occurr, we store (part of) that pain outside of our consciousness. The totality of that pain, plus the pain we absorbed from our loved ones and the part of the collective human pain we carry, Tolle calls the pain body. What struck me about his description was the idea that the pain body is a separate entity that can overtake us, that it needs drama to survive, and will do anything to get it. Tolle says we can only dissolve our pain body through Presence, being here now. When I read those words for the first time, that was kind of out there. Be present was hard enough as it was. Being present when confronted with emotional pain, that was something I had no clue how to do. As I read the chapters on the pain body again this morning, I was amazed at how I had ‘forgotten’ what I had read and at the same time have become so much more conscious of exactly what Tolle talks about in those pages. And how I have found a way to actually be present and dissolve the pain body that lives within me successfully.

Last Thursday, as I was experiencing silent weightlessness, the tiredness I had been experiencing for over a week was gone. In the afternoon, I received a message that triggered feelings of rejection. Exit silent weightlessness, enter emotional heaviness, restart the releasing process. On Sunday, the tiredness  was back. On Monday, it hit me like a ton of bricks and I was angry and frustrated with my body. I blamed the tiredness on working in the garden on Sunday, but part of me was confused; it just wasn’t logical. Somewhere in the afternoon, I recognized that my frustration with my body fitted the theme, that I was basically feeling rejected by my body. And while I was at it, I released that too. This morning, while reading about the pain body, the light bulb went on in my head as I suddenly realized that the bouts of extreme tiredness I experience are nothing but fierce resistance of the pain body. This pain body that is attached to me does not want to be dissolved, it will do anything to survive. It will do anything in its power to prevent me from being Present.

As soon as I understood the pain body’s game for survival, determination flooded my body, and the tiredness was gone. This pain body, I will not claim it, not call it mine, will soon find out that it has lost both its power and its fear factor. You see I don’t care about drama anymore, yours or mine, or pain, or a non-cooperative body. I know what pain is, I have felt it in all its dept and I am not afraid of it anymore. From now on, I will allow every suppressed emotion to come up when it does, and feel it as it is. I will fully and completely accept all that I am feeling. I will allow myself to feel everything and not get attached to it. I am turning on the Light. I will shine the light of awareness on anything that is not part of my true self. I will release and release and release. I don’t care if it is all I do in the next weeks, months, I will release everything that triggers any negative emotion. I will release and simply love everything about myself, because the Love I have for myself is stronger than this ego’s desire to control. The tables are turned. This pain body is going to be loved to death, it just doesn’t know it yet.

 

picture by Krzysztof Szkurlatowski

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published.

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.