“You must recognise and bring awareness to the pain-body in order to begin to dissolve it. As it is an unconscious and self-sabotaging aspect of the mind, becoming conscious of it and recognising where it’s coming from will diminish its power”.
What Is The Pain-Body?
If you’ve come across this article from one of my other posts, or by searching for it, then you probably know about the pain-body and its role in your daily suffering. However, if you’ve stumbled across this article some other way and were interested to find out more, you may benefit from some more context.
In a nutshell, the emotional pain-body is an accumulation of the residue of all the emotional pain that you’ve experienced throughout your life. Introduced by spiritual teacher and best selling author Eckhart Tolls, it’s an invisible body of emotional pain – a reservoir of negativity that is constantly seeking to be fed and cause further pain.
In a way, this is a metaphor. Tolle creates this personification of an aspect of the mind in order to help you identify its ‘behaviours’ more easily when they arise. To learn more about the pain-body and how it causes pain and suffering in your life, read my article on the topic here.
Now that you’re hopefully up to date with what the pain-body is and why you might want to start eliminationg it from your life, let’s look at the key step you need to take to start ‘dissolving’ the pain body.
Recognising The Pain-Body
The very first and possibly most important step in dissolving the pain-body is simply learning to recognise it within yourself.
Whenever you notice yourself feeling any kind of negative emotions or thinking negative thoughts, this is quite likely to be the pain-body surfacing. According to Eckhart, the awakening pain body can take the form of irritation, impatience, a somber mood, a desire to hurt, anger, rage, depression, or a need to have some drama in a relationship.
When we begin to see these reactions and behaviours within ourselves and recognise them to be the pain-body awakening, we have learned to the first step to dissolving the pain body, which is simply catching it as it arises.
Dissolving The Pain-Body Through Awareness
Once we have identifies the pain-body and its attempts to cause further pain and suffering, we simply need to try to keep our awareness on it and watch it produce negative thoughts and emotions. When you hold your conscious awareness on this process, the process eventually stops as you start to see it for the unconscious reaction that it is.
Eckhart explains that ‘you’ll find that your thinking and behaviour are designed to keep the pain going. If you were truly conscious of it, the pattern would evolve, as to want more pain is insanity, and nobody is consciously insane’. He also states ‘The pain-body, which is the dark shadow of your ego, is actually afraid of the light of your consciousness’. When you ‘shine the light’ of consciousness onto your unconscious mind, it too becomes consciousness.
Dis-identifying With The Pain-Body
Once you have become aware of the pain-body, the mind with begin to see it for what it really is and dis-identify with it. The pain-body wants to survive, but it can only survive if it gets you to consciously identify with it. The moment you observe the pain-body and take your attention into it, the identification is broken. It can no-longer use you by pretending to be you.
Non-Judgement Of The Pain Body
The second step to dissolve the emotional pain-body is acceptance. According to Tolle, acceptance means acknowledging the pain-body without resistance or judgement. When we resist our emotional pain, we give it power, and it can grow stronger. However, when we accept our pain, we take away its power. Acceptance allows us to be compassionate towards ourselves and our pain, which can help it to dissolve.
Dissolving the emotional pain-body is a process that requires patience, self-compassion, and a commitment to staying present. By practicing presence, awareness, and non-judgement, we can begin to let go of the negative emotional energy that has been causing us pain. As Eckhart Tolle reminds us, our emotional pain is not who we are – it is simply a part of our human experience. By dissolving the pain-body, we can free ourselves from the past and live more fully in the present.