Eckhart Tolle’s pain-body: How to deal with anxiety and depression
The author and spiritual teacher Eckhart Tolle has a very useful way of understanding what anxiety is and how to deal with it when it arises.
He refers to the concept of the “pain-body”, which is an old emotional pain living inside of you. It may have accumulated from past traumatic experiences and sticks around because these painful experiences were not fully faced and accepted the moment they arose. By understanding the pain-body and how to accept your experience in the present moment, you’ll be much better able to deal with anxiety and live a much better life.
From his The New Earth:
THE DUCK WITH A HUMAN MIND
In The Power of Now, I mentioned my observation that after two ducks get into a fight, which never lasts long, they will separate and float off in opposite directions.
Then each duck will flap its wings vigorously a few times; thus releasing the surplus energy that built up during the fight.
After they flap their wings, they float on peacefully — as if nothing had ever happened.
If the duck had a human mind, it would keep the fight alive by thinking, by storymaking. This would probably be the duck’s story:
“I don’t believe what he just did. He came to within five inches of me. He thinks he owns this pond. He has no consideration for my private space. I’ll never trust him again. Next time he’ll try something else just to annoy me. I’m sure he’s plotting something already. But I’m not going to stand for this. I’ll teach him a lesson he won’t forget.”
And on and on the mind spins its tales, still thinking and talking about it days, months, or years later. As far as the body is concerned, the fight is still continuing, and the energy it generates in response to all those thoughts is emotion, which in turn generates more thinking. This becomes the emotional thinking of the ego. you can see how problematic the duck’s life would become if it had a human mind. But this is how most humans live all the time. No situation or event is ever really finished. The mind and the mind-made “me and my story” keep it going.
We are a species that has lost its way. Everything natural, every flower or tree, and every animal have important lessons to teach us if we would only stop, look and listen. Our duck’s lesson is this: Flap your wings – which translates as “let go of the story” and return to the only place of power: the present moment.
CARRYING THE PAST
The inability or rather unwillingness of the human mind to let go of the past is beautifully illustrated in the story of two Zen monks, Tanzan and Ekido, who were walking along a country road that had become extremely muddy after heavy rains.
Near a village, they came upon a young woman who was trying to cross the road, but the mud was so deep it would have ruined the silk kimono she was wearing.
Tanzan at once picked her up and carried her to the other side.
The monks walked on in silence. Five hours later, as they were approaching the lodging temple, Ekido couldn’t restrain himself any longer.
“Why did you carry that girl across the road?” he asked. “We monks are not supposed to do things like that.”
“I put the girl down hours ago,” said Tanzan. “Are you still carrying her?”
Now imagine what life would be like for someone who lived like Ekido all the time, unable or unwilling to let go internally of situations, accumulating more and more “stuff’ inside, and you get a sense of what life is like for the majority of people on our planet.
What a heavy burden of past stuff they carry around with them in their minds.
The past lives in you as memories, but memories in themselves are not a problem. in fact, it is through memory that we learn from the past and from past mistakes. It is only when memories, that is to say, thoughts about the past, take you over completely that they turn into a burden, turn problematic, and become part of your sense of self.
Your personality, which is conditioned by the past, then becomes your prison. Your memories are invested with a sense of self, and your story becomes who you perceive yourself to be. This “little me” is an illusion that obscures your true identity as timeless and formless Presence.
Your story, however, consists not only of mental but also of emotional memory – old emotion that is being revived continuously. As in the case of the monk who carried the burden of his resentment for five hours by feeding it with his thoughts, most people carry a large amount of unnecessary
baggage, both mental and emotional, throughout their lives. They limit themselves through grievances, regret, hostility, and guilt. Their emotional thinking has become their self, and so they hang on to the old emotion because it strengthens their identity.
Because of the human tendency to perpetuate old emotion, almost everyone carries in his or her energy field an accumulation of old emotional pain, which I call “the painbody.”
We can, however, stop adding to the painbody that we already have. We can learn to break the habit of accumulating and perpetuating old emotion by flapping our wings, metaphorically speaking, and refrain from mentally dwelling on the past, regardless of whether something happened
yesterday or thirty years ago. We can learn not to keep situations or events alive in our minds, but to return our attention continuously to the pristine, timeless present moment rather than be caught up in mental moviemaking.
Our very Presence then becomes our identity, rather than our thoughts and emotions. Nothing ever happened in the past that can prevent you from being present in the now; and if the past cannot prevent you from being present now, what power does it have?
INDIVIDUAL AND COLLECTIVE
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.
Children in particular find strong negative emotions too overwhelming to cope with and tend to try not to feel them. In the absence of a fully conscious adult who guides them with love and compassionate understanding into facing the emotion directly, choosing not to feel it is indeed the only option for the child at that time. Unfortunately, that early defense mechanism usually remains in place when the child becomes an adult.
The emotion still lives on in him or her quite unrecognized and manifests indirectly, for example, as anxiety, anger, outbursts of violence, a mood, or even as a physical illness.
In some cases,
it interferes with or sabotages every intimate relationship.
Most psychotherapists have met patients who claimed initially to have had a totally happy childhood, and later the opposite turned out to be the case. Those may be the more extreme cases, but nobody can go through childhood without suffering emotional pain. Even if both of your parents were enlightened, you would still find yourself growing up in a largely unconscious world.
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 painbody.
The painbody, however, is not just individual in nature. It also partakes of the pain suffered by countless humans throughout the history of humanity, which is a history of continuous tribal warfare, of enslavement, pillage, rape, torture, and other forms of violence.
This pain still lives in the collective psyche of humanity and is being added to on a daily basis, as you can verify when you watch the news tonight or look at the drama in people’s relationships.
1945 Germany
The collective painbody is probably encoded within every human’s DNA, although we haven’t discovered it there yet. Every newborn who comes into this world already carries an emotional painbody. In some it is heavier, more dense than in others.
*** Tolle avoids discussing reincarnation, which in 2005,when this book came out, still seemed too “flaky” to most Westerners, but it is obvious that a baby can only have a pain body from an earlier life.
The very famous James Huston/James Leininger case involves a pain body — and the boy has flashbacks to drowning as a young Navy pilot.
.https://johndenugent.com/images/James-Leininger-reincarnated-WWII-Navy-pilot-shot-down-in-1945-near-Iwo-Jima.mp4
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Some babies are quite happy most of the time. Others seem to carry an enormous amount of unhappiness within them. It is true that some babies cry a great deal because they are not given enough love and attention, but others cry for no apparent reason, almost as if they were trying to make everyone around them as unhappy as they are – and often they succeed.
They have come into this world with a heavy share of human pain. Other babies may cry frequently because they can sense the emanation of their mother’s and father’s negative emotion, and it causes them pain and also causes their pain-body to grow already by absorbing energy from the parents’ painbodies.
Whatever the case may be, as the baby’s physical body grows, so does the painbody.
An infant with only a light painbody is not necessarily going to be a spiritually “more advanced” man or woman than somebody with a dense one. In fact, the opposite is often the case. People with heavy painbodies usually have a better chance to awaken spiritually than those with a relatively light one.
Whereas some of them do remain trapped in their heavy pain bodies, many others reach a point where they cannot live with their unhappiness any longer, and so their motivation to awaken becomes strong.
*** In 1932 the Great Depression, caused by Wall Street in the USA, was in its third terrible year in Germany, and as radical despair set in, suddenly support an votes for Adolf Hitler an his party exploded
“Our Last Hope/Hitler”
“Workers with both head and hand vote for the combat veteran Hitler” “Against Hunger and Desperation, vote Hitler”
***
Why is the suffering body of Christ, his face distorted in agony and his body bleeding from countless wounds, such a significant image in the collective consciousness of humanity?
Millions of people, particularly in medieval times, would not have related to it as deeply as they did if something within themselves had not resonated with it, if they had not unconsciously recognized it as an outer representation of their own inner reality – the painbody.
They were not yet conscious enough to recognize it directly within themselves, but it was the beginning of their becoming aware of it.
Christ can be seen as the archetypal human, embodying both the pain and the possibility of transcendence.
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HOW THE PAINBODY RENEWS ITSELF
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The painbody is a semi-autonomous 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 its own survival.
Like all lifeforms, 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 emotionally painful experience can be used as food by the painbody. That’s why it thrives on negative thinking as well as drama in relationships.
The painbody 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, yes, that 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 painbody 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 painbody.
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 painbody can lie in hibernation for years before it gets triggered by some event.
HOW THE PAINBODY FEEDS ON YOUR THOUGHTS
The painbody 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 painbody 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 painbody will feed on your own 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 painbody 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 a totally different feeling to one than a negative one.
It is the same energy, but it vibrates at a different frequency. A happy, positive thought is indigestible to the painbody.
It can only feed on negative thoughts because only those thoughts are compatible with its own energy field.
All things are vibrating energy fields in ceaseless motion. The chair you sit on, the book you are holding in your hands appear solid and motionless only because that is how your senses perceive their vibrational frequency, that is to say, the incessant movement of the molecules, atoms, electrons and subatomic particles that together create what you perceive as a chair, a book, a tree, or a body.
What we perceive as physical matter is energy vibrating (moving) at a particular range of frequencies. Thoughts consist of the same energy vibrating at a higher frequency than matter, which is why they cannot be seen or touched.
Thoughts have their own range of frequencies, which negative thoughts at the lower end of the scale and positive thoughts at the higher. The vibrational frequency of the painbody resonates with that of negative thoughts, which is why only those negative thoughts can feed the painbody.
The usual pattern of thought creating emotion is reversed in the case of the painbody, at least initially. Emotion from the painbody quickly gains control of your thinking, and once your mind has been taken over by the painbody, your thinking becomes negative.
The voice in your head will be telling sad, anxious, or angry stories about yourself or your life, 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 painbody at that time is living through you, pretending to be you.
And to the painbody, pain is pleasure.
It eagerly devours every negative thought. In fact, the usual voice in your head has now become the voice of the painbody. It has taken over the internal dialogue. A vicious circle becomes established between the painbody andy our thinking.
Every thought feeds the painbody and in turn the painbodyg enervates 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 PAINBODY FEEDS ON DRAMA
If there are other people around, preferably your partner or a close family member, the painbody will attempt to provoke them – push their buttons, as the expression goes, so it can feed on the ensuing drama.
Painbodies love intimate relationships and families because that is where they get most of heir food.
It is hard to resist another person’s painbody 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 painbody wants to awaken yours so that both painbodies can mutually energize each other.
Many relationships go through violent and destructive painbody episodes at regular intervals.
It is almost unbearably painful for a young child to have to witness the emotional violence of their parents’ painbodies, 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 painbody is passed on from generation to generation.
After each episode, the partners make up, and there is an interval of relative peace, to the limited extent that the ego allows it.
Excessive consumption of alcohol will often activate the painbody, particularly in men, but also in some women.
When a person becomes drunk, he goes through a complete personality change as the painbody takes him over.
A deeply unconscious person whose painbody habitually replenishes itself through physical violence often directs it toward his spouse or children.
When he becomes sober, he is truly sorry and may say he will never do this again, and he means it. The person who is talking and making promises, however, is not the entity that commits the violence, and so you can be sure that it will happen again and again unless he becomes present, recognizes the painbody within himself, and thus dis-identifies from it.
In some cases, counseling can help him do that.
Most painbodies want to both inflict and suffer pain, but some are predominantly either perpetrators or victims. In either case, they feed on violence, whether emotional or physical.
Some couples who may think they have “fallen in love” are actually feeling drawn to each other because their respective painbodies complement each other.
Sometimes the roles of perpetrator and victim are already clearly prescribed the time they meet.
Some marriages that are thought to be made in heaven are actually made in hell.
If you have ever lived with a cat, you will know that even when the cat seems to be asleep, it still knows what is going on, because at the slightest unusual noise, its ears will move toward it, and its eyes may open slightly.
Dormant painbodies are the same. On some level, they are still awake, ready to jump into action when an appropriate trigger presents itself.
In intimate relationships, painbodies are often clever enough to lie low until you start living together and preferably have signed a contract committing yourself to be with this person for the rest of your life.
You don’t just marry your wife or husband, you also marry her or his painbody – and your spouse marries yours.
It can be quite a shock when, perhaps not long after moving in together after the honeymoon, you find suddenly one day there is a complete personality change in your partner.
Her voice becomes harsh or shrill as she accuses you, blames you, or shouts at you, mostly likely over a relatively trivial matter.
Or she becomes totally withdrawn. “What’s wrong?” you ask. “Nothing is wrong,” she says.
But the intensely hostile energy she emanates is saying, “Everything is wrong.” When you look into her eyes, there is no light in them anymore; it is as if a heavy veil has descended, and the being you know and love which before was able to shine through her ego, is now totally obscured.
A compete stranger seems to be looking back at you, and in her eyes there is hatred, hostility, bitterness, or anger.
When she speaks to you, it is not your spouse or partner who is speaking but the painbody speaking through them.
Whatever she is saying is the painbody’s version of reality, a reality completely distorted by fear, hostility, anger, and a desire to inflict and receive more pain.
At this point you may wonder whether this is your partner’s real face that you had never seen before and whether you made a dreadful mistake in choosing this person.
It is, of course, not the real face, just the painbody that temporarily has taken possession.
It would be hard to find a partner who doesn’t carry a painbody; but it would perhaps be wise to choose someone whose painbody is not excessively dense.
DENSE PAINBODIES
Some people carry dense painbodies that are never completely dormant. They may be smiling and making polite conversation, but you do not need to be psychic to sense that seething ball of unhappy emotion in them just underneath the surface, waiting for the next event to react to, the next person to blame or confront, the next thing to be unhappy about..
Their painbodies can never get enough, are always hungry. They magnify the ego’s need for enemies.
Through their reactivity, relatively insignificant matters are blown up out of all proportion as they try to pull other people into their drama by getting them to react. Some get involved in protracted and ultimately pointless battles or court cases with organizations or individuals.
Others are consumed by obsessive hatred toward an ex-spouse or partner. Unaware of the pain they carry inside, by their reaction, they project the pain into events and situations.
Due to a complete lack of selfawareness, they cannot tell the difference between an event and their reaction to the event. To them, the unhappiness and even the pain itself is out there in the event or situation.
Being unconscious of their inner state, they don’t even know that they are deeply unhappy, that they are suffering.
Sometimes people with such dense painbodies become activists fighting for a cause. The cause may indeed be worthy, and they are sometimes successful at first in getting things done; however the negative energy that flows into what they say and do and their unconscious need for enemies and conflict tend to generate increasing opposition to their cause.
Usually they also end up creating enemies within their own organization, because wherever they go, they find reasons for feeling bad, and so their painbody continues to find exactly what it is looking for.
To speak of pain is ultimately to speak of injustice, which gives rise to the ultimate pain.
And in these times there is no clearer case of injustice than that of Matt Hale, who is serving a 40-year prison sentence in a maximum-security federal prison for what I am convinced is a clear case of entrapment.
Hale passed the bar exam in Illinois but was denied the opportunity to be a lawyer because of his White Nationalist philosophy.
A day after this denial of Hale’s ability to be a lawyer, a member of his group drove his car to a near north neighborhood of Chicago where Jews were numerous and shot two Jews dead. Then, when cornered by the police, he shot himself dead.
The Jews considered that Hale should be held accountable for the death of the two Jews his admirer had killed, but legally this could not be done. So they were looking for an excuse to imprison him.
This opportunity arose when an undercover FBI man, who had penetrated his group and befriended him, and who was wired with recording apparatus, suggested that he kill a judge who had ruled that the book his group promoted and sold, The White Man’s Bible, written by Klaassen of “The World Church of the Creator”, violated copyrighted material of a tiny anti-racist group that had very recently copyrighted “The Church of the Creator” name, even though Klassen had used this name more than 30 years previously.
Angry, Hale had told the undercover FBI man, who was recording his words that if he wanted to kill this judge, he would not object.
These recorded words resulted in Hale being sentenced to 40 years in prison — which the Jews thought he deserved because of the two Jews that had been killed in Chicago by his friend.
The moral of the story is that if a friend kills a Jew, YOU will pay a price.
I think Hale’s prison sentence will be completed in 2036.
Thank you. I know all about this horrible case, and know someone who personally knew him.
This is why I do not go into any courthouse. I am always armed and ready to do the 300-Spartan thing.
A person can endures so much pain and suffering that it can change their DNA. I’ve had severe gut issues and suffered from severe, extreme, chronic insomnia for just over twenty years.
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And I’ve suffered from severe pelvic nerve pain for about four years.
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The pain is indescribable. It’s like razor-sharp pieces of crushed glass pushed into your pelvis.
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I was prescribed amitrypiline for it, but I thought it was a pain-killer.
***JdN
https://www.google.com/search?q=amitripiline&oq=amitripiline&gs_lcrp=EgZjaHJvbWUyBggAEEUYOTIGCAEQRRg8MgYIAhAuGEDSAQc3OTdqMGoxqAIAsAIA&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8
***
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That’s why I took it once and it didn’t work. The doctor didn’t explain to me that it’s a pain blocker.
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You have to take it for at least six weeks to build up into your system, then you need to keep taking it permanently.
I was in absolute fucking agony. I must have gone a week without sleeping. I picked up a sharp kitchen knife and I was going to cut along the imside of my wrist. The nerve pain was excruciating but I didn’t cut my wrists.
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I took the remaining amount of amitryptiline, which was close to 40.
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After that I started feeling incredibly unwell, so I called an acquaintence, someone I know, and I told them what happened. I told them that I didn’t want to go to the hospital because I hate it, and I don’t like being surrounded by cultural marxism.
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They called an ambullance and the lady who checked me out said that my blood pressure was dangerously high and I have an elevated heart rate that could kill me.
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I said that I’m happy to die at home rather then go to a horrible hospital. She said it’s her duty of care under the current rules that I have to go to the hospital.
I told her that I hate the hospital and I’m not going there. I asked her if she knew what cultural marxism is. She said I’m going to be honest with you. I don’t have a clue what that is.
I said it’s a form of communism disguised as empathy.
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So I ended up going to the hospital, which I didn’t like.
I am SO SORRY to read this about your severe pain. My wife was on morphine in her first cancer battle — 2018-20 — and it got to 8 out of 10.
This was at 4 out of 10, after the cancer returned.
I just had to block it out to keep functioning, like any nurse or doctor. I was her caregiver and someone had to keep it together.
What I learned was that if the amount of morphine matched your pain level, you did not become addicted.
I wonder if that would help, or CBD gummies?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hFFey5-UGDM
Ich ertrage es nicht.
Man fragt, warum Hitler eine Diktatur errichtete…. (mit Erlaubnis, wohlgemerkt, des deutschen Reichstages)
Aus demselben Grunde, warum die Römer in der äußersten Notzeit Diktatoren an die Macht beriefen.
Weil das Überleben der Nation auf dem Spiele stand, und die Freiheit des Einzelnen nur durch die Freiheit der Nation möglich ist….. Welche Rechte haben Versklavte?
Was this rude? Then I thought of the young woman who burned to death recently, probably made possible by her and her likeminded colleagues. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W8qear0Hink&ab_channel=HonestAmerican
Well, as for rudeness, when Nancy Pelosi, Speaker of the House, on live tv tore up Trump’s SOTU [State of the Union] speech, it was called heroic.
As for that Guatemalan illegal alien and felon, Sebastian Zapeta, he was in our country because of the Biden-Harris open-borders policy.
He had been expelled in 2019 by President Trump.
By Kamala knowing that many of these illegal aliens were hardened, violent criminals, Kamala is guilty in the fiery murder of Debrina Kawam.
Kamala is also a traitor, working for the ju enemy. If I commit rape or murder, I harm ONE person (and their circle of close friends and loved ones). If I betray my country, I harm tens of millions.
And the great fear is that thousands of these illegal aliens have been trained to rise up and go slaughter white people on signal, among them Chinese police officers. Bobby Kennedy Junior himself said that when you stand at the border you can visibly see that many of these border-jumpers are not Hispanics at all (as evil as some of them are), but Black Africans, Arabs, and East Asians. In an age of terrorism, you never have open borders!