Where do we go from here?
May. 11th, 2012 05:01 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
vostoklakeNow I know the German spiritual teacher Eckhart Tolle was recommended by Oprah, but don't hold that against him. I am finding his idea of the painbody very useful. Simply put, the "painbody" is all the "memories in boxes which you store against the light", all the past pain you didn't or couldn't deal with, turned into a kind of semi-independent subpersonality. It then comes to the surface to feed occasionally - i.e. get a fix of more pain by messing up your life, starting fights, making you do things you don't want to.
Tolle suggests also that you can't fight the painbody because that just makes it stronger, like the Tarbaby in the classic Uncle Remus tale. The only way to deal with it is: 1) "keep in your own valence", as the Scientologists would put it, i.e. stay in your preferred personality - remember that you are not it and just because it's yelling something at you doesn't mean it's real; 2) express love and caring for it, empathise with its pain, until it goes away again, hopefully one "pain-measure" smaller than it used to be. #1 is very difficult unless you've done sufficient "sitting on the floor" practice to have a viewpoint which doesn't automatically assume every feeling or thought charging through your brainpan is real.
I have done enough sitting on the floor to realise that I have a permanent "tightness in my chest" - a permanent anxiety that something terrible is going to happen because of something I've done or forgotten to do. So that's the main manifestation of my painbody when it's in its more dormant state.
So many of our neuroses, compulsions, rules of behaviour are, in this metaphor, ways to avoid encounters with the painbody. In my case, I tried to avoid the pain of being a social outcast and "bad child" by having fantasies of being an acclaimed genius beloved by all. I managed to make two things I love - my music and my politics - into painful things by insisting that the goal was to become a Rock Star or a Revolutionary Hero and thereby make people admire me. Now I realise that I can't avoid the painbody that way, the question comes... what will motivate me in the future to make music or fight for a better world? I'm waiting until an answer to those comes up.
Tolle suggests also that you can't fight the painbody because that just makes it stronger, like the Tarbaby in the classic Uncle Remus tale. The only way to deal with it is: 1) "keep in your own valence", as the Scientologists would put it, i.e. stay in your preferred personality - remember that you are not it and just because it's yelling something at you doesn't mean it's real; 2) express love and caring for it, empathise with its pain, until it goes away again, hopefully one "pain-measure" smaller than it used to be. #1 is very difficult unless you've done sufficient "sitting on the floor" practice to have a viewpoint which doesn't automatically assume every feeling or thought charging through your brainpan is real.
I have done enough sitting on the floor to realise that I have a permanent "tightness in my chest" - a permanent anxiety that something terrible is going to happen because of something I've done or forgotten to do. So that's the main manifestation of my painbody when it's in its more dormant state.
So many of our neuroses, compulsions, rules of behaviour are, in this metaphor, ways to avoid encounters with the painbody. In my case, I tried to avoid the pain of being a social outcast and "bad child" by having fantasies of being an acclaimed genius beloved by all. I managed to make two things I love - my music and my politics - into painful things by insisting that the goal was to become a Rock Star or a Revolutionary Hero and thereby make people admire me. Now I realise that I can't avoid the painbody that way, the question comes... what will motivate me in the future to make music or fight for a better world? I'm waiting until an answer to those comes up.
