Breaking Free From Pain

Excepts from Eckert Tolle's book, "A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life's Purpose" as it relates to the Gospel text in Mark 1:29-39 -


As soon as they left the synagogue, they entered the house of Simon and Andrew, with James and John. Now Simon’s mother-in-law was in bed with a fever, and they told him about her at once. He came and took her by the hand and lifted her up. Then the fever left her, and she began to serve them. That evening, at sundown, they brought to him all who were sick or possessed with demons. And the whole city was gathered around the door. And he cured many who were sick with various diseases, and cast out many demons; and he would not permit the demons to speak, because they knew him. In the morning, while it was still very dark, he got up and went out to a deserted place, and there he prayed. And Simon and his companions hunted for him. When they found him, they said to him, “Everyone is searching for you.” He answered, “Let us go on to the neighboring towns, so that I may proclaim the message there also; for that is what I came out to do.” And he went throughout Galilee, proclaiming the message in their synagogues and casting out demons.



That is such a great line from the movie Shrek, “Ogres are like onions! Lots of layers.” Emotional pain is like Shrek’s ogre, layer upon layer of tears. Yet like the onion, the more layers you peel back, the lighter it feels, and the greater your relief. If you peel back the pain far enough you discover that it has no lasting substance and less hold on your life in the present moment.

Emotion is the body’s reaction to the mind. An instinctive response is the body’s direct response to some external situation. An emotion, on the other hand, is the body’s response to a thought. Although the body is very intelligent, it cannot tell the difference between an actual situation and a thought. It reacts to every thought as if it were a reality.

I recently had a frustrating text message exchange with someone who was very rude and insulting to me. This person has some serious problems...and was obviously activated by me call. I was so angry that I thought and thought about this text message exchange for hours. Before I knew it I was having a mental argument with the person. I was replaying in my head over and over what I should have said to them, how I was going to punish them for their insults, and even contact their place of employment to lodge a formal complaint against them. After obsessing about it for a few days, I realized that I had turned a few callous words into a full fledged fight to the death! I assumed so many negative things out of this really meaningless exchange.

Unconscious assumptions create emotions in the body which in turn generate mind activity and/or instant reactions. In this way they create your personal reality. 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.

Why indeed, do we choose to carry on living with the enormous residue of pain that mars a full experience of life? Both Tolle and the teaching of the Bible offer practical ways to lessen the pain. Christ can be seen as the archetypal human, embodying both the pain and the possibility of transcendence.

Pain is cumulative. Some of it predates your birth; including the sins of the fathers and mothers, e.g. the inherited cycle of abuse or addiction. Some of it is from childhood trauma, or unconscious messages of self-limitation and self-sabotage. The pain festers unresolved and sometimes suppressed. You add new pain to the mass every time you hold on to a grievance or a disappointment. The mass of pain becomes familiar, even comforting. The ego uses it to justify playing small or being a victim. In many cases, it becomes so massive that it begins to take over your identity.

Any emotionally painful experience can be used as food by the pain body. Because the pain-body has an addiction to unhappiness, it awakens 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. Suddenly, your thinking becomes very negative—followed by a wave of emotion invading your mind that might manifest as a dark or heavy mood, anxiety or fiery anger. Eventually the pain-body takes over and you become completely identified with the voice in your head that tells sad, anxious or angry stories about yourself or your life, about other people, or past, future or imaginary events. 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. In essence—you were exposed to a psychic parasite.

If there are other people around during your exposure, the pain-body will attempt to provoke them—push their buttons, and feed on the ensuing drama. Pain-bodies love intimate relationships and families because that is where they get most of their food. Consider the layers of pain that relate to an insult. Someone insults you. Their words hurt. The pain reminds you of another time you were hurt. You make the insults mean something about your identity. Maybe you decide that you are unlovable. That heaps many new layers on the pain mass, and all because of a set of stories you told yourself. There has to be a better way to live.

Tolle says that if you begin to watch the tendency of your own mind to create stories, you will lessen your attachment to those stories. You can notice them from a distance and not allow them to run your life. It’s amazing how liberating it is to take just this one step. When you hear someone insult you, notice that this person is speaking from their pain and the story you create isn’t so personal and hurtful. Notice when you are speaking out of your pain, and you won’t hold on to resentment so fiercely. It’s not all about them, and it’s not all about you.

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. Conscious presence 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 its thoughts.

Someone with a heavy pain body easily finds reasons for being upset, angry, hurt, sad or fearful. Relatively insignificant things that someone else might shrug off become the apparent cause of intense unhappiness. They bring back to life the old accumulated emotions that then move into the head and amplify and energize egoic mind structures. You look at the present through the eyes of the emotional past within you. What you see and experience is not in the event or situation but in you.

When you are completely trapped in the movement of thought and the accompanying emotion, stepping outside is not possible because you don’t even know that there is an outside. You are trapped in your own movie or dream, trapped in your own hell. To you it is reality and no other reality is possible. And as far as you are concerned, your reaction is the only possible reaction.

If you are able to stay present, it sometimes happens that your Presence enables the other person to disidentify form his or her own pain-body and experience the miracle of sudden awakening. In Zen Buddhism, this sudden glimpse is called satori, which is a moment of presence, a brief stepping out of the voice in your head, the thought process, and their reflection in the body as emotion. It is the arising of inner spaciousness where before there was the clutter of thought and the turmoil of emotion.

In the stillness of Presence, you can sense the formless essence of yourself and in the other as one. Knowing the oneness of yourself and the other is true love, true care, true compassion.