A spoken monologue (YouTube talk) by Eckhart Tolle describing the psychological/spiritual concept of the "pain body": an emotional energy field formed from accumulated childhood and later emotional pain that intermittently takes people over, provoking drama and reactivity in relationships. The speaker gives examples (commune, partners, family member with schizophrenia), explains how the pain body feeds on negative emotion by provoking others and resonating with similar pain bodies, and notes presence as an antidote.
When I lived in a commune for a while, I observed that you never knew who was going to come to this communal breakfast room. The same person would be different one day to the next. One day this lovely, totally present person was coming, entering the breakfast room, and the next day that person, a little monster, was or didn't say a single word, just a dark cloud. Instead of a human being. There was a dark cloud sitting there. Don't talk to me. Everything is so horrible. Everything or somebody who is some mischievous entity that wants you to, wants to provoke you into some kind of emotional reaction and says something hurtful. It knows exactly what it how to push your buttons. Come on, give me a reaction. And you find that with people living together, the same person that you dated suddenly comes with, says something hurtful or offensive, and before you know it, you are reacting. And then you feel the transformation happening to yourself also. And suddenly two completely different humans are there. And they are not happy, but they are enjoying their unhappiness. I'm talking about the pain body. Those humans are enjoying the drama of the relationship. So if you have lived with somebody, there may be exceptions to this, but in many, many cases you will have experienced and perhaps to some extent you still do, the transformation that many human beings undergo periodically when they become deeply negative. And whatever form it takes, which varies from person to person, all we know is it's a very dark negative energy field that suddenly takes them over. They are taken over by something that they seem to have no control over. And that's a shock when you first notice that in your partner. And now you've committed yourself, you've either already signed the marital contract, or at least you've signed a rental agreement together. And suddenly you have serious doubts about this person. And it could be that you did not remain conscious when this person was taken over by the unconsciousness. Because the unconsciousness that we call the pain body probably succeeded in provoking you so that you yourself got taken over by a similar energy field. You could not sustain presence because the onslaught of a pain body can be quite very powerful. And so before you know it, you're in a acting out relationship drama, shouting at each other, whatever, or saying the most hurtful things, and you're doing it to each other. And why is that? And why? First time it's a shock. And then after a while you make up and say, okay, it wasn't so bad. And then couple of weeks or whatever, this happens again. And it could even be that this time you initiate it. It's not impossible. You Wake up with this. In this sudden, your mood is suddenly so different that it colors your entire personality, this dark mood. And you feel the strong urge to provoke the other into some kind of reaction. Because you want the other to enter a similar mood so you can resonate with. But who are you at that moment? You're not you at all. You are the pain body. Now, what is that? It's an emotional field that lives in you since childhood. It has grown. It consists of emotional pain, emotional suffering. Every child in this world suffers in one way or another. Emotional pain. Because after all, you live in an insane world. How could you not suffer from emotional pain? So a child builds up pain. There's always remnants. After the child gets is emotionally hurt, remnants remain, and one remnant after another come together and form an emotional field. So the way I describe it, it's almost like an entity, an emotional entity. Because by entity I mean it's an energy field. It's not visible, but it's energetic. It's an energetic energy field, an emotional energy field that lives in you. But it's not always. Not necessarily noticeable. Sometimes, and this is. You may be able to have observed it already. It has a dormant state, which when you hardly notice it, you're fine. So the pain body is sometimes. And how long it is dormant varies from person to person. There's a dormant state, but it cannot remain in its dormant state for too long because it gets hungry. That's how I see it now. When it gets hungry, it needs to feed on more energy, the only energy it can feed on. It cannot feed on happiness or joy. It can only feed on something, an energy that corresponds to its own frequency and which is very low frequency. In other words, it is emotional pain. And it needs to feed on more emotional pain. It can only feed on a similar vibrational frequency or emotional frequency. There are two ways in which it can take on energy. It can feed. It can use another person. And when it uses another person, this thing, let's look at it as a little entity that lives in you. And this thing has. It borrows some of your intelligence. And it's very clever because the first person, it will attempt first of all to you, a person it lives with, the person you are closest to. You might attempt to use this person to feed. Or how does it feed? It provokes the same energy in the other. It says something hurtful. It knows exactly your weak points, the buttons to push, so to speak. It pushes all the buttons to get an emotional reaction from you. And usually it succeeds. And then it Awakens your own pain body. Pain bodies love to recognize each other. That's a match made in. Not in heaven, but in hell. A match made in hell is the match when two pain bodies get on well together, which means they love their drama. And there are couples who go through that periodically. And they can't do anything about it. They don't know what it is. And they always make up again afterwards. And it's okay now. Then it has to start again. So when the drama happens, the pain body is feeding. And when this happens, how long it lasts varies. It could be an hour, it could be a day, it could be two days. It feeds on the reaction. It loves the reactivity. Some people have such heavy pain bodies that these are exceptional cases. I don't know what the percentage of humans is who have that. That is never totally dormant. So sometimes you meet people who. When you look into their eyes, there's already negative emotion. When they look at you, there's already a negative emotion in their energy field. And what they are waiting is for you to say something that they can react against. They want you. They want some. Some of those people are violent, so they want you to react emotionally to them. So they're just waiting. Just say any word. And if you have to be really present. A member of my family was suffering from paranoid schizophrenia. And there was a simple case. There was an emotional entity there that looked. You had to be very careful with every sentence, every word you said, because one wrong word and the entity would get up there. So whenever I was with that person, I was in a state of absolute presence, just. And the thing couldn't come up. It couldn't do anything. So you're not. You're not holding it. It's just the light of presence. It cannot come into the light of presence. Sa.
