Presence and Healing the Pain Body

The past is only the past when we become present to it.

A new client arrived for her Core Wound Release session last week. She'd recently heard how powerfully healing and liberating the process was. I recall how excited and eager she was to schedule her session just a few weeks earlier. Yet, from the time that she arrived, I felt her reluctance. When I asked her about the reluctance I was sensing, she confessed that she had been listening to Eckhart Tolle in the car on the way to over and was getting tired of dealing with the past and just wanted to learn to be present.

This sounded very familiar. I've heard it before as an objection to the core wound release work that I do, which is really a direct approach to releasing stuck energy in the pain body by bringing full presence to it, as Eckhart teaches. My hope here is to bring clarity to subject of the pain body, my core wound release work and how it compliments Eckhart Tolle's teachings.

"All Emotional pain that is not fully faced, felt and accepted becomes part of the pain body." -Eckhart Tolle

The term pain body has been around for a while and recently been made famous by Eckhart Tolle's work. A pain body is formed when the ego experiences something it cannot process, something so horrific or over-whelming happens that it can't be faced. The negative energy of the experience becomes stuck somewhere in the body. I call these experiences core wounds. Most of us can relate to having painful circumstances in our childhoods that often affect our response to life as adults today, particularly in our closest relationships. The adult ego will usually try to hide these early hurts through either avoidance or overcompensation. Yet they remain unresolved in the mind and energetically stuck the body. Until healed and released, the unconscious will continue to create self sabotaging circumstances that hijack us from the present moment and reinforce our emotional pain. It is as if the stuck energy has a gravitational pull that attracts people and circumstances into the persons life for the purpose of the hurt being experienced and finally released, yet the protective ego wont allow this to happen.

We can never totally remain in the present moment when we have old wounds that are the source of our ego-reactions today. These wounds when triggered call us out of the present moment and into the past. We may think that we are upset about something in the present, but it is actually a ghost from the past. Before we can move forward, emotional wounds must be healed and the energy that surrounds them in the pain body released. To do anything else is to further suppress our emotions and take us further from the present moment kind of living that we seek.

"Whatever is not conscious will be experienced as fate"
-Carl Jung

Here's a typical example of someone like you might know: A young boy grows up in a strict home of high achievers. There is constant pressure for him to be the best; make all A's, be a star on the ball field and be as good at math as his father. His father's attitude is, "average is unacceptable in this family." Well, although he tries, he's not as gifted in math or baseball as his father. His pain body becomes filled with shame and the mind adopts the story, "I'll never measure up." As an adult he overcompensates by needing to appear successful, impressive, winning at all cost, preoccupied with acquisitions, drawing attention to and even exaggerating his accomplishments. All extrinsic motivations. Or, he goes in the opposite direction of avoidance, having given up, he hides behind drugs, alcohol or some other form of escape. He may shift back and forth between the two. Until he is ready to wake up, the last thing he will do is become present to the emotional pain of his pain body by conscious choice. In one way or another the happiness and wholeness that he really seeks will allude him. Know anyone like this? When he finally has the courage to fully face, feel and accept his actual experience of hurt and shame with compassionate presence, it dissolves and he is free.

Why are people so afraid to experience their hurt feelings of fear, shame, anger and sadness?
1. The mistaken belief that the pain will be greater than is actually so.
2. Fear that the feelings will overtake them and they may not be able to recover, remaining stuck in the discomfort.
3. Fear of being or appearing week.

One of my greatest discoveries, both personally and professionally, is that any emotional pain or limiting belief that is experienced fully, for just one moment, is healed and released, often permanently. I believe that each of comes into adulthood with core wound crying to be healed and a core purpose calling to be fulfilled.

"Whatever we resist persists. Yet, whatever we have the courage to fully face, feel and embrace becomes grace."
-Yours Truly