Contemporary author and spiritual teacher, Eckhart Tolle, believes in a psychic parasite that he calls the “pain-body”. In his book, "The Power of Now," he describes this pain-body as an accumulation of past pain stemming into early childhood “caused by the unconsciousness of the world into which you were born.” Eckhart Tolle says that some pain-bodies become physically violent, but most are emotionally violent, and that it is an attack on the physical body, so much so, that some pain-bodies can drive their hosts to suicide.
Many pain-body hosts will consistently take up an opposing opinion just so they can stir up some debate, drama, and conflict. The emotional reaction that they receive as a result of their drama is pure energy for the pain parasite to “feed on”. It is not the truth they seek, it is the energy that is created from pushing other people's buttons.
Bullies who thrive on hurting people both emotionally and physically are unconscious carriers of this psychic parasite. Heavy pain-bodies can also be found among people who are attracted to violence in TV shows, video games, or movies. The pain-body feeds on both emotional and physical violence.
But pain-body hosts can also be people who do not attack others overtly. Instead, they suppress their pain and keep it hidden. Over time, the pain-body festers and suppresses the body's immune system. Then disease sets in. Sometimes it forces the host to turn to drugs or alcohol to escape their chronic emotional pain.
The cause of all suffering lies with an identification with a non-reality and adopting a negative perception of the self. Your mind has at some point learned to subconsciously say, "I deserve to suffer. This is who I am and no one can convince me otherwise." This negative perception of self then becomes your identity and therefore converts a non-reality into a reality.
Suffering often begins with the refusal to accept reality as it is. Reality tries to communicate to us all the time and yet we continue to ignore the message. It's as if reality says, "You are creating this conflict and that problem because you are addicted to pain, and if you continue to stir up drama, it will inevitably result in more suffering for yourself." Complaining about others and blaming them for your own problems will often go hand-in-hand with a heavy pain-body. The pain parasite knows that it can be quite successful at keeping the pain alive simply by talking about it.
Obsessive thinking also plays a role in reinforcing the pain-body and our addiction to pain and suffering. The mind obsesses on a particular mode of suffering such as when a bulimic vomits up her meals or when a drug addict experiences withdrawals after a weekend binge. Or, it could be an addiction to drama in relationships and the constant bickering and fighting that manifests with couples who are constantly accusing each other of behavior that could easily be observed by a counselor or life coach as childish shenanigans. When childish behavior doesn't get transcended, we remain psychologically frozen, emotionally arrested as adolescents.
Pain will get replaced with pleasure when it becomes too unbearable and we don't want to address the truth of the matter which is; we are addicted to pain. Unfortunately, most pain-addicts are unaware of the fact that they are suffering at all. I suffered severely for many years before I acknowledged my pain. And then when it became so unbearable that I couldn't ignore it, I did everything in my power to fight it. But the more resistance I gave the pain-body, the stronger it became, and the more pain I continued to endure.
The destructive power of opinions.
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The pain-body attacks a variety of hosts.
When the pain becomes too unbearable, we turn to blotting out the pain through pleasure-seeking activities such as gambling, bar-hopping, drug abuse, spending sprees, sex, food, and other escapes. But just as in the ignoring stage, the pleasure-seeking stage doesn't really do much for addressing the underlying problem. It simply prolongs it and in many cases will bring on even more intense bouts of suffering. The pleasure-seeking addictions often screw up our lives by alienating us from people we love and by draining our banking accounts. In the end, the only way we can free ourselves from our chronic pain addiction is by going within and becoming aware of our early childhood traumas. We begin by asking ourselves, "Where did this pain begin? At what point did I start to believe that I deserve to go through life in a chronic state of pain?"
I’m very familiar with the pain-body as I carried a very heavy one for over half of my life. The physical abuse that I endured from my stepfather between the ages of six and ten, contributed to its development. The more pain you have to endure as a child, the heavier your pain-body becomes.
To better understand the pain-body, visualize yourself in a dentist's chair with the dentist probing around in your mouth with a sharp intstrument. Even though the dentist may not be poking you 100% of the time, your body will be in a state of high anxiety, anticipating the pain that may or may not be coming. This is how I lived my life everyday for over twenty years. And this is what its like to be hosting a heavy pain-body.
Needless to say, it doesn't take much to unnerve you when you're living every moment of life on pins and needles. The primal wound that I endured when I was a child recreated itself over and over through abusive friendships and relationships until I finally became conscious of the truth that I was attracting the abuse to me. When that awareness finally fermented, I became empowered to stop identifying with the pain-body and began creating a space in between my consciousness (true Self) and the pain. Subsequently, I was no longer creating painful scenarios, and no longer attracting abusive people into my life. My pain-body had begun its process of dissolution.
Observing your pain-body.
Childhood trauma needs to be addressed.
I would like to be more specific about what an opinion is since most people are not aware just how dangerous their opinions can be. There are two types of opinions. The first type I refer to as an "egoic opinion" and constitutes the high majority of all opinions. The second type is "non-egoic" and is the opinion type of the Next Human.
An egoic opinion is a group of thoughts about a thing or idea that you are so closely identified with, it is believed to be the absolute truth. And because of this emotional entanglement, that truth becomes an intricate part of who you see yourself to be, your identity. So when someone else questions your egoic opinion, that person is perceived as a threat to your very survival. Now, this is not consciously perceived of course, but it will acted out this way, nevertheless. Shadow work life coaching can help you to stop identifying so closely with your own opinions, and therefore not be threatened by the opinions of others.
A non-egoic opinion, on the other hand, is a number of thoughts about a thing or idea that you are not identified with or emotionally tethered to. You are not entangled in the opinion, and therefore remain a non-judgmental observer. You can clearly understand other people's views and respect where they're coming from, even if they disagree with you.
When you don’t want to face something in yourself, your shadow will automatically project itself onto others. For example, if you ask someone for their honest opinion about you, and you don't like their answer, you're projecting your shadow. Anytime you have an emotional opinion about someone you don't know, you're projecting your shadow. If you feel misunderstood all the time, you're projecting your shadow. When you finish sentences for another, you're projecting your shadow. Whenever you stereotype, condemn, blame, judge, or hate others for whatever reason, you will also be projecting your shadow.
During the ego development in childhood, we were all at some point deemed worthless, inferior, unacceptable, or inadequate. Consequently, the shadow manifests as a cover up process, to prove to others that we are, in truth, not these terrifying things. And so the shadow acts as a mask, a false persona that is created by the wounded ego to hide whatever it deems too painful to accept.
The shadow is, in fact, a necessary part of you that must be accepted before you can know your true Self. When an inner conflict is not made conscious, it is destined to manifest as your reality. The ego keeps the past alive with its shadow projections, and thus the cycle of pain is perpetuated, over and over until it's made fully conscious. Only then can the shadow be faced and transcended.
None of us likes to admit that we are flawed in some way. When we are made to feel inferior, we tend to do everything in our power to keep these weaknesses out of sight. Projecting on to others what we secretly despise in ourselves is what the shadow is all about. A new persona is then created so that we can receive love, attention, and the acceptance we crave. But that persona is a false representation of our true Self.
Judgment cloaks itself in many forms. Blame, intolerance, self- righteousness, condemning, criticizing and complaining are all forms of judgment. One of my favorite quotes concerning judgment comes from the spiritual teacher, Dr. Wayne Dyer, who says, "When you judge another, you do not define them. You define yourself."
Criticism, condemnation, and complaining are all forms of judgment that are projected by the shadow so that the ego can feel a little better about itself by shamelessly deriding and diminishing others. In other words, it's a subtle attempt to take power away from another by verbalizing distorted, repressed, and hidden beliefs about one self.
The type of criticism I'm referring to here is not of the constructive type but rather has to do with contemptuous derision that ultimately serves no purpose other than to mentally bully the other person. Simply put, it is a personal attack.
Like destructive criticism, complaining serves the ego's purpose to feel superior to others, more significant to life, and little else. Chronic complainers complain about life all the time as if they're superior to it. The emotional pain-body can validate itself through the act of complaining alone. When you complain, what you're truly doing is vocalizing your own suppressed feelings of inferiority in relationship to the world in which you live. You're playing the role of the victim to life, rather than honoring or respecting what is.
Chronic complaining is the pain-body's way of venting all the negative thoughts of the rambling monkey mind on a daily basis. Psychologists have estimated that we think about 60,000 thoughts in a given day. Well, you can probably guess what percentage of these thoughts are negative if you're a chronic complainer. Garbage in means garbage out.
Chronic condemners verbally annihilate everything in their path because they've convinced themselves that they know it all, and will frequently remind you that they have a better idea, better solution, better way of doing things than what is currently in place. Nothing that already is ever meets with their approval. They simply know better than everyone else, always.
The shadow thrives on blame.
The pain-body is an addiction to pain.
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"Do not judge others, and you will not be judged. Do not condemn others, or it will all come back against you. Forgive others, and you will be forgiven." -- Luke 6:37
This scripture in the Book of Luke makes an astute observation in the psychology of human behavior. When you judge another person, your shadow will be projecting your own unconscious issues outwardly. These unaddressed issues are themselves a judgment of one's own self, or more accurately put, a false perception of the self stemming from childhood trauma.
Judgment Day is not a time in the future when a judgmental, egoic god will look over your records of a previously lived life and lay down an appropriate punishment for you because of your mistakes or sins. Properly inferred, this scripture from the Book of Luke defines the natural law of judgment that can only come from the shadow or unconscious self. When you fully understand your shadow, you will realize that it is impossible to judge another without first judging yourself. The judgement does not come after the fact, and especially not after your life.
So, judging yourself is a prerequisite for judging another. Because this self-judgment gets projected into judging others automatically, the soul will continue to attract the same trauma to itself either in this life or the next, until it awakens to the truth that it alone is responsible for creating its own reality and ending the cycle of karma. Continuing to judge others only insures that you will "re-incarcerate" your soul into another lifetime of suffering.
On the other hand, when you learn forgive others, you will automatically be forgiven. Because the other is always a reflection of you, forgiving the other means that you've already forgiven yourself, and vice versa. This means that no priest, no dogma, no religion, and no god has the power to grant you forgiveness or salvation. Only you have that power.
You create your own judgment day.
The shadow is a masked, false persona.
Until you recognize how the pain-body manifests itself through you and through others, you will be fooled by it and may easily backslide into unconsciousness whenever it resurfaces. The first step is to realize that you have a pain-body. Think of it as a body or field of energy that thrives on your anger, hatred, heaviness, anxiety, depression, stress, and fears of impending doom. However it manifests, it will cause you to periodically relive your early childhood trauma at the time when your pain-body initially formed.
And so, your pain-body is like heavy baggage that you carry around with you. The heavier your pain-body, the more "baggage" you are carrying, and the easier it is to set it off and bring on an attack. In a sense, you are like a walking time bomb, hypersensitive and raw to the point where the slightest little tease results in a burning tension that consumes every muscle in your body. Anger swells and adrenaline pumps. The anger is then projected outward onto the other in an inner dialogue that says something like, "How dare she say that about me? Does she not know who I am?" The ego becomes inflamed and feelings of diminishment and inferiority are immediately compensated by deeper feelings of hatred toward the other.
If you are hosting the pain-body parasite, most of the time it will be dormant. It becomes active when you suddenly feel it very strongly. As in the above example, your pain-body will actually attract derisive comments from a friend, co-worker, or partner because it needs to be verbally abused so that it can feed on yet another experience of pain.
Think of the pain-body as a separate entity that needs food just like you and me. Eventually your pain-body will provoke others to create instant reactions from them. It instinctively knows what works and it knows what buttons to push. And you won't be aware that your pain-body will be doing any of this at the time. Your pain-body will make snide and thoughtless comments toward others that they will find terribly offensive but at the time that you say these hurtful things, you won't be the slightest aware that you're hurting them. When your pain-body does finally get a reaction from them, it will love it. The whole drama (as long as it can continue) becomes a feeding frenzy. The madness that your pain-body musters up is necessary for its ability to sustain its control over your mind as well as its power over others.
© 2012 Jason Lincoln Jeffers, Inc.
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Every thought you have is a simple form of energy. When negative thoughts are allowed to accumulate, they fester, intensify and become emotional in nature. If ignored or denied over time, these dark emotions tend to cling to our psyche, become tar-like and parasitical. The more your ego represses this negative self, the darker and denser it becomes. The eminent psychologist, Carl Jung, called this hidden self, the shadow. Left unresolved, these shadow emotions inevitably manifest as anxiety, depression, anger, and rage. In the collective unconscious, these darker aspects of the psyche feed on emotional pain. Both masochistic and sadistic at the same time, this pain-body parasite frequently preys on human hosts.
