The Pain Body :Part 1

 The Pain Body: Part 1

One of the influential spiritual teachers of the present day is Eckhart Tolle. It must be close to or even more than twenty years when I first read his book Power of Now. Around the same time I had the opportunity to attend a couple of his live talks in California. I had the great fortune to meet him in person at the home of one of our local friends. Over the years I have seen his video snippets. He reinforces the message of being in the present moment and of the deeper dimension of consciousness. 

One of the other concepts he talks about and actually first introduced in his book The Power of Now is the Pain Body. I watched one of his live online sessions yesterday where a woman from Argentina asked him a question about pain body and whether one should dis-identify from it or work on it. For those who were new to this term he gave a very elaborate answer to explain what is a pain body, how it functions and how one can deal with it.

Eckhart may have introduced the concept but since then many people have used it to explain psychological aberrations in otherwise well behaved people. Eckhart himself has acknowledged, and he did so again during yesterday’s session, that he had a very heavy pain body. 

Pain body is negative energy stored in the psyche of an individual from traumatic experiences usually traceable to childhood. It finds it own compartment somewhere. Every so often it comes to surface when triggered by certain conditions, words or people and creates drama. It derives energy from negativity and gets stronger with every outburst. Eckhart explained yesterday giving examples of kids who throw public tantrums or even adults who episodically display fits of rage with certain triggers. During those times no words of wisdom can penetrate them. They are not willing to think differently or react in a way that is aligned with reality. Old memory of suffering thrives on renewed suffering. Thats the only language it knows.

For most people this pain body exists and yet remains a mystery that is unsolved all through life. The internal suffering never ends. Instead it perpetuates. From one suffering person to another. 

How can one effectively deal with it?

The foremost thing is to be able to recognize it. To realize it the moment it comes to the surface and begins to enact its drama. And at that point not reject it or deny its presence. Acknowledge its presence. But not identify yourself with it. Simply observe without giving it your identity. 

This is a very powerful tool indeed. To be able to have enough awareness and education to recognize, and observe and stand back from it! Slowly this exercise will weaken it and prevent it from disrupting your life. 

Over 25 years back, to be precise it will be 27 years in ten more days, I lost my brother, two years younger to me. I have written about the heart wrenching experience in posts dedicated to suicide awareness and prevention. He was 31 and I was 33 when it happened. I was not able to process the event in a normal way. There was nothing normal about it to begin with. And I did not have a normal grieving process following it. Taking on the role of a daughter consoling grieving parents who were more visibly affected by the tragedy I had overlooked the fact that the person in me was also grieving the loss of a loved one. And I would have never known that I had foregone my grieving process had it not been for some peculiar symptoms manifesting a few years later. 

During a routine gynecology visit I mentioned to my doctor, who was also a colleague and a good friend, that around the time of my monthly period I tend to get intense feeling of a sharp pain inside my brain and something that urges me to put a knife through the head and end the pain! Then in a day or so the feeling goes away. After that appointment was done my gynecologist called a psychiatrist friend and shared with her what I had confided to her. The psychiatrist then told her that this phenomenon is called identification. My brain was subconsciously identifying with the suicidal experience of my brother!! They suggested I go for psychotherapy. But I never needed it. Just becoming aware of why that was happening to me was enough to wake me up. With that awareness I was able to recover from the symptoms permanently. 

Identification with the painful circumstances of someone close to me was the first such psychological lesson I had learned.

Understanding my own pain body, recognizing it and knowing how to deal with it was the second one I learned after all these years and I am grateful to Eckhart for that. It is a profound lesson that is a game changer. 

Just like the identification I had endured earlier, pain body and its resultant symptoms are extremely painful to put it mildly. They become crippling when they surface. They leave a scar of not just renewed suffering but also of guilt and shame because once they subside the “good person” in you is left owning up the mess and unsuccessfully trying to sort it out, trying to make sense out of it. 

Eckhart brought up an important point that, paradoxically, a heavier pain body can become instrumental in spiritual awakening because of the sheer intensity of the suffering it causes. He attributed his own awakening to such immense pain from a large pain body. And I can relate to his experience. There is something inside that tells you enough is enough. I can’t take it anymore. It can drive you to hurt yourself ( like my brother chose to) but, as Eckhart also echoed, that’s not the preferable solution. The most definitively preferred option is to awaken to a higher consciousness. 

That awakening not only helps oneself overcome the suffering but also ultimately helps many others around you. I must acknowledge the great work Eckhart has been doing since his own experience with awakening. It is just inevitable that the awakened person becomes useful to others. He has personal experience of suffering and in the new consciousness there is a shared fundamental connection with everyone so you don’t want anyone to suffer like you. And you know that the suffering can end if you try to rise to that consciousness. It is as simple and straightforward as that. 

I have been thinking over this. Indeed that seems to be the whole purpose of suffering. To wake us up from spiritual slumber. To experience the higher dimension of consciousness. A higher quality of existence. A more meaningful interaction with each other. 

Recently I came across some mention about Swami Sivananda who founded the Divine Life Society. I was introduced to DLS and the writings of Swami Sivananda and his disciple Swami Krishnananda, also nearly 25-30 years back. I had heard also that when Swami Chinmayananda first went to the Himalayas seeking initiation into spiritual knowledge Swami Sivananda was the first teacher he had approached for this purpose. Swami Sivananda however directed him to Swami Tapovan Maharaj sensing a better match of a teacher in him. I hadn’t thought much about Swami Sivananda afterwards. Until now.

In that small post about Swami Sivananda there was a mention that he was a successful medical doctor before he gave it all up and turned to a life of spiritual search. In the course of my brewing thoughts about the connection between suffering and spiritual awakening I became curious to find out whether this may have anything to do with Swamiji’s decision to take up spiritual studies. And my suspicion proved right. It was the feeling that regular medical practice was addressing human suffering only at a surface level was what drove Swamiji into a life of spiritual awakening and healing.

It is indeed something to look at with new pair of eyes. The suffering we see all around us is not senseless. Like everything else in the universe even suffering has a profound purpose. If humans can grasp the purpose, that itself can be the key to their freedom from that suffering. It is not rocket science. Yet we do not arrive easily at the entrance to the pathway to awakening.

We suffer. And keep suffering. Silently most of the time. We hide the suffering. And continue to suffer. But we don’t stop even once to ask questions. Why? Is there a way out of this suffering? What is the way? Is there even a remote chance that I can successfully cure myself from my own suffering? 

My own experience about the pain body, as Eckhart calls it, is that it is like a deep wound. Once you discover it, allow it to be exposed to air, just like a physical wound. Except this is in the open space of your consciousness. Let it heal in the light of your awareness. Don’t touch it. Don’t pick at it. Just let it air. It will close with time. With understanding and compassion. Without words. Just with the help of gentleness.

It seems weird but a lot of humans are not privileged enough to experience gentleness in their entire lives. All the mind has been conditioned to see, hear and feel is violence of some sort or other, some degree or other. It is a rather strange coincidence that I am writing this on September 11th, a day that brings painful memories to all Americans in the USA. What the country experienced 25 years back was one of the biggest experiences of violence in a single day. But although not as dramatic as this was, violence remains an everyday thing in our lives no matter where we live.

Genuine and sustained gentleness is rare to experience. And therefore rare to reproduce. Human mind can reproduce what it learns from its experience. That’s a vicious cycle we humans fall into. We live in a world of so much violence that a culture of gentleness is foreign to us. The transition from our existing inner language to one of genuine tenderness takes time. But it is possible once we become aware of our deeper problems. Becoming aware is such a powerful experience. I can never overstate this one truth. 

We listen, we nod, we agree. But we don’t always bring some truths into our full awareness. Mostly because we are scared. Scared to confront the past. Scared of feeling the pain of those truths. We are not ready to believe that bringing them into awareness can help heal us ultimately, even though we may have to briefly re-live the pain. If we believe, we give ourselves another chance to become pain free. And more useful for those around us