{"id":5487,"date":"2009-10-23T15:58:00","date_gmt":"2009-10-23T20:58:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/horizonsmagazine.com\/blog\/?p=5487"},"modified":"2009-10-23T15:58:00","modified_gmt":"2009-10-23T20:58:00","slug":"the-pain-body-by-valerie-saurer-guest-blogger","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/horizonsmagazine.com\/blog\/the-pain-body-by-valerie-saurer-guest-blogger\/","title":{"rendered":"The Pain Body by Valerie Saurer, Guest Blogger"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Valerie<\/a>

Valerie Saurer<\/p><\/div>\n

From guest blogger, Valerie Saurer<\/a>.\u00a0 I love it when someone says it better than I! <\/em><\/p>\n

Does this sound familiar?\u00a0 You’re going along being all spiritual, mood is light, and you’re able to handle whatever comes along without breaking your stride.\u00a0 You’re proud of the progress you’ve made, and you feel like your ride on that emotional roller coaster you used to be trapped on is finally behind you.\u00a0 Then, someone says something that totally sets you off:\u00a0 your blood starts boiling and you fly into a rage.\u00a0 Or, if you swing the other way and your anger tends to get directed inward, you tumble down into a deep depression.\u00a0 What just happened?<\/p>\n

I have a friend who used to be a heavy drinker.\u00a0 Generally, he tends to be an easy-going and generous guy, but when he drank he turned into someone he called Him.\u00a0 Him was just down-right mean and abusive.\u00a0\u00a0 You could always tell when Him woke up and was ready to wreak havoc:\u00a0 He would push his glasses down to the end of his nose and peer over them in a warning glare, then he’d let you have it.\u00a0 Even now that he’s been sober for a long time, every now and then Him will rear his ugly little head from time to time.<\/p>\n

We all have a Him inside of us.\u00a0 Only in my case, it’s a Her.\u00a0 A few years back I picked up a copy of Eckhart Tolle’s book The Power of Now, in which Tolle explains what is going on here.\u00a0 Tolle calls this emotionally-charged alter-ego The Pain Body.\u00a0 The Pain Body is made up of all of the unresolved emotional issues from our past.\u00a0 In her book Molecules of Emotion, scientist Candace Pert explains that any time we do not fully process emotions, they actually become a part of our physical biology and embed themselves in our cells until a future episode awakens them.\u00a0\u00a0 Over time, these molecules of emotion take on a life of their own and become our Pain Body.<\/p>\n

We basically have two intelligences working inside us.\u00a0 First, there is our thinking, which is basically the stories we tell ourselves inside our head.\u00a0 Thinking can be a very useful tool, but most of us confuse what we think with who we are.\u00a0 Second, we have emotion, which is our body’s intelligence.\u00a0 Abraham-Hicks calls our emotions our Guidance System:\u00a0 emotions tell us when something is good or bad, when we are moving toward or away from that which our real self knows to be true and good.\u00a0 Your thinking has the power to control your emotion.\u00a0 This is a wonderful thing to know if you are able to control your thinking.\u00a0 If, however, you believe that the voice in your head is really you, you will tend to forget that you shouldn’t believe everything that you think.\u00a0 You’ll also notice that when you tell yourself certain stories in your head you tend to get REALLY upset.\u00a0 Then your Him surfaces and all bets are off.<\/p>\n

Emotions are very useful when they are a reaction to a real event; unfortunately, they react just as strongly to a perceived event, which is why if you have certain conversations or think along certain lines you can activate your Pain Body.\u00a0 The Pain Body is an energetic entity located within, but separated from our total energetic field.\u00a0 We all have one.\u00a0 Usually it lies dormant until something happens to set it off.\u00a0 When that happens we are no longer the ones steering the ship:\u00a0 the Pain Body has taken control and the best that we can learn to do is manage it until it subsides again.\u00a0 If we are emotionally mature or very fortunate, our Pain Body lies dormant most of the time.\u00a0 Some people, however, are almost entirely controlled by their Pain Body.\u00a0 You know them when you see them:\u00a0 they thrive on drama and are always reactive and easy to offend.<\/p>\n

So how do we learn to control this evil twin that lives inside us?\u00a0 How can we learn not to become possessed by Him, or to send Him packing when he rears his pointy little head?\u00a0\u00a0 The Pain Body thrives on pain.\u00a0 It can be activated by pain, offense, insult, worry, fear … and once it awakens, its survival instinct will take over and it will want FOOD, which it will expect your thinking to provide.\u00a0 When the Pain Body awakens you will notice that your thinking changes along with it.\u00a0 You begin telling yourself stories in your head that serve to perpetuate the anger, fear, or worry … whatever is the dominant emotion of your Pain Body.\u00a0 You’ll call your friends and tell THEM the story so that you can hear it all over again.\u00a0 The more you tell it, the more angry, fearful, or worried you become.\u00a0 If you tend to be depressed instead of angry, you will crawl into your dark place and wallow.<\/p>\n

The only way to prevent the Pain Body from taking over, or to send it back to sleep in its coffin, is not to feed it.\u00a0 We must become aware enough of what is happening that we can stop the negative thinking that is feeding our Pain Body.\u00a0 Remember the two intelligences?\u00a0 Of the two, the only one we can control is our thinking.\u00a0 Emotion just happens.\u00a0 When we are sad, we are really sad.\u00a0 When we are angry, there is no doubt that the anger is real.\u00a0 Even though we may describe ourselves as emotionally immature and we think that our emotions are the problem, they’re really not.\u00a0 It’s always our thinking that’s the problem.<\/p>\n

Next time you notice that your Pain Body has taken over and you find yourself overwhelmed with negative emotion, try this technique:\u00a0 First, feel the pain.\u00a0 Really feel it.\u00a0 Remember that your Pain Body grew out of your unwillingness to fully process the emotion the first time around.\u00a0 So in order to heal your Pain Body you must, sooner or later, feel the emotional pain.\u00a0 But here’s the difference:\u00a0 This time you will practice feeling the full force of the pain without the accompanying story you tell yourself in your head.\u00a0 Instead, you will think something like:\u00a0 “Oh, there’s anger here.\u00a0 I feel really angry.\u00a0 This is what it feels like to be angry.”\u00a0 Allow yourself to fully feel the anger.\u00a0 Notice what is happening to your body when you are angry.\u00a0 Where in your body do you feel the anger?\u00a0 Do you clench your teeth?\u00a0 Your fists?\u00a0 Does your stomach get tied up in knots?\u00a0 What exactly is happening to you?<\/p>\n

If you find yourself telling the story of your anger, STOP.\u00a0 Strive to become an observer, only.\u00a0 By watching the anger instead of becoming identified with it, you cease to feed the Pain Body and begin to actually heal the pain.\u00a0 Remember, some of us have very powerful Pain Bodies, so you will have to allow it space to run its full course.\u00a0 Without food, though, it will fall dormant again sooner rather than later.\u00a0 At first this might be hard:\u00a0 When the Pain Body has awakened, it is running the show and it will not want to be killed off.\u00a0 It will take control of your thinking, speaking, doing.\u00a0 You must regain control, and you can do that by dis-identifying with your thoughts.\u00a0 When the Pain Body takes over, become aware that it is definitely Him and NOT you who is throwing this temper tantrum.\u00a0 Stand aside and observe.\u00a0 If you do this every time, your Pain Body will eventually become weaker and will awaken less frequently and with less force.<\/p>\n

Does this mean that you will never get angry again?\u00a0 Of course not.\u00a0 There are real reasons to become angry, and our emotions are given to us to protect us and to teach us what is right and what is wrong for us.\u00a0 But you will become angry because of something that is happening in the present moment, not re-living past anger; and you will feel and express your present anger so completely in the present moment that it will not be able to turn itself into a molecule of emotion that adds to your Pain Body.<\/p>\n

Eventually, you will almost forget that you ever had a Him.<\/p>\n

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