In this excerpt Eckhart Tolle explains that the majority of unhappiness (about 90%) is created by the mind through thoughts, while a smaller portion stems from deep emotional residues—what he calls the "pain‑body"—formed by painful childhood experiences and, for some, even past‑life trauma. He describes how these layers of unhappiness generate a vicious cycle: unhappy thoughts feed unhappy emotions, which in turn generate more negative thoughts, leading to an identification with the unhappy self. Tolle offers a practical remedy: cultivating awareness or presence, which is the spaciousness that surrounds any feeling. By expanding this space of awareness, the intensity of the unhappy emotion diminishes, and even if it does not fully dissolve, one can live with it without being defined by it. Acceptance of the pain‑body as it is, rather than resisting it, accelerates this process. He notes that for many people the pain‑body shrinks or dissolves over months or years, while for others it remains as a subtle background, still serving as a motivating force for deeper awakening. The overall message is that recognizing the egoic identification with unhappiness and consistently practicing presence can free one from being an "unhappy person".
Chapters
So you are an unhappy person, and you can recognize when you look at people around you, there are many people around you, you can see maybe even family members who are unhappy people a lot of the time, and perhaps at other times they're just covering it up. There are unhappy people walking around everywhere. So just experiment with that. First of all, when you are being made unhappy by your thoughts— and that's about 90% of unhappiness, is you're being made unhappy by your thoughts— one could say 100%, but that's a debatable thing. Somebody might have— a loved one may just have died, Just right now, do you feel unhappy? Of course you feel unhappy, you're not happy. But there can be a deeper connectedness with Being that— in relation to which unhappiness is only a surface movement, so you're no longer being completely taken over by unhappiness. But 90% of unhappiness is mind-produced, and so the rest— and then the field of unhappiness that lives in you, even when you're no longer feeding it, that is still there, but it's been produced by years and years of Feeding the unhappiness through your mind. It's also been produced, well, of course, by very painful life experiences in childhood—the pain body. So accepting it for what it is is usually the quickest way. Beyond it, but you don't even— you don't even want to go beyond it. You're okay with whatever it is you're experiencing at this moment. And then there is what you're experiencing at this moment, and there is an awareness of what it is that you're experiencing. The awareness of what it is you're experiencing is the space around the thing that you're experiencing. And at first it's just a little bit of awareness. And then the space or spaciousness around whatever it is that you're experiencing grows, and then you have— you can have an unhappy emotion still living in you, but you have a space of awareness around it, so to speak. You are not the unhappiness anymore. Right. You are the space that knows that this thing still lives in you, and that the more you practice that, the more the awareness around it grows bigger, and the more the unhappiness that is still there in you begins to become... Less. Yes, in many cases begins to shrink, and even if it doesn't, if it stays, even if it didn't shrink, you would be able to live with it without it totally interfering with your life and making you into an unhappy person. So there are many, there's still millions of humans who are carrying, almost everybody, Carrying emotional— a residue of emotional unhappiness going back to childhood, previous lifetimes, even if you don't believe in previous lifetimes, you don't have to, but definitely childhood. Every child suffers and there's a residue of unhappiness, sometimes very strong, and that lives in you. In the unconscious, unawakened state, The residue of unhappiness rises into your mind, produces unhappy thoughts, and then you have the vicious cycle, the vicious circle of unhappy thinking fueled by unhappy emotion and giving further energy to the emotion, the vicious circle, unhappy thinking, unhappy emotion, the link, and identification with that. Movement becomes an unhappy person. So you are an unhappy person, and you can recognize when you look at people around you, there are many people around you, you can see maybe even family members who are unhappy people a lot of the time, and perhaps at other times they're just covering it up. There are unhappy people walking around everywhere. So that's complete identification with that, and that's the unawakened state, and that's the ego, egoic state. And so freedom lies in recognizing that in you And this recognition is the awareness, the awareness around it. And there are some forms of pain, body unhappiness that may be so deeply lodged that it may not go away completely in this lifetime, but as you become more— but in many cases, yes, it does dissolve or becomes almost insignificant, yes. But there are other cases where the emotional residue of unhappy emotion is so strong you can't get rid of it completely, and it doesn't matter anymore as the awareness around it grows. It's just— you can still feel that it's like— It's not who you are anymore. It's just something that's still there, and increasingly who you are is realized as the awareness around it, as the space around it, and there it is. And so this can become a motivating force for people, people who have a strong pain body, as I call it, as you know. People have a strong pain body living inside them that can be the motivating force for awakening, and as you awaken and as the awakening deepens or accelerates, pain bodies do tend to shrink and in certain cases, quite often, dissolve after A few months, a few years, but in other cases they don't necessarily— they dissolve completely, and that's fine. That provides then a continuing incentive for presence.
