Eckhart Tolle explains the pain-body as an emotional-energetic structure that both causes suffering and can motivate spiritual awakening. He describes how the pain-body disrupts relationships (e.g., during divorce), may be amplified when consciousness is lowered (notably by alcohol) or by exposure to gratuitous violent media, and offers concrete child-focused practices: don’t reason with a child during an episode, discuss it afterward, encourage naming/drawing the feeling to build awareness. He emphasizes cultivating awareness in children and adolescents as more important than IQ or knowledge.
The pain body then is actually an important part of awakening because that provides the motivation. First it creates quite a bit of havoc in your life and suffering. And then you reach a point when you know that something needs to change inside and then you're ready to look at the inside. And that's why people who come perhaps already into this world with very heavy pain bodies, sometimes they are more likely to awaken than those who have very light pain bodies. But even there, it's not a general rule, but it's just a tendency and it's something to observe. It's a great incentive for awakening. Many of you are here because you have had your pain body and to some extent may still be suffering from it, but you're beginning to recognize it. And relationships can be Many relationships are destroyed by the pain body and then the pain body continues to act when you in sometimes extremely destructive ways. When you begin divorce proceedings. Divorce proceedings can make some people totally identified with pain body and totally unconscious and can have just dreadful things that go on for years sometimes. So observe your be very alert in relationships and be very alert in your mind and in your emotional field. In some people, the pain body can become act tends to become very active. When your normal state of consciousness is lowered for some reason, Even your normal state may not be very high. But in some people, it happens when they drink because drinking alcohol. Some people become happy when they drink alcohol because they don't they begin to fall below thinking. And so they're no longer tortured by their own minds and they start singing songs and dancing. But not everybody in other people, it lowers their consciousness so much that their pain body has an incredible the pain body that lives in them has now a wonderful opportunity to rise up fully because the little consciousness that they had before they started drinking is now gone completely. And this is where people become violent when they drink. That's not uncommon that people actually perpetrate acts of violence due to alcoholism. And it is often the case that alcohol lowers your consciousness to such an extent that the pain body has full reign suddenly and will inflict violence on others. The tendency perhaps it happens more in men than in women, so probably more in the male psyche than in the female psyche. But it could happen also in the female psyche. And so other things. If you to see something very destructive, a movie that is very violent to allow these the toxicity of a very violent movie into your energy field can also suddenly amplify the pain body. And you have to be really careful with the toxicity of what you allow. What you take in I'm not saying you can't watch thrillers or movies that are exciting, that's one thing. But movies that indulge in gratuitous violence, this is like eating toxic food on a physical level. You do the same to your mental emotional field when you watch those things. And those things can also trigger the pain body children, you may, if you have children or have brought up children. Children have pain bodies too already. I just mentioned babies already seem to. Some seem more unhappy than others. But most children have some form of pain body and it can manifest for example as a temper tantrum that the child suddenly becomes like a totally berserk goes. They can throw themselves on the floor or start screaming or others going to complete and total withdrawal. They just. So that's it really. These teachings would start in childhood. If you're a parent and you observe your child going through periodically through pain body episodes, it's important that you talk to the child. Not while it's happening. You can't talk to the pain body. But when the child has come back, I always recommend that you talk to the child and say what? What happened yesterday when you threw yourself on the floor or you didn't want to talk to anybody and you went off into a corner sulking for an hour. What happened? What happened to you? And then perhaps by beginning to talk about it, the child can develop some awareness around it. And then when it happens again, you say again, oh, the same thing happened to you again, didn't it? Yeah. What was that? What did it feel like when it happened? And maybe the child starts talking a little bit about it, perhaps even encourage the child to draw a picture of what is this thing that sometimes comes up in you and what is this? What color is it? Or what would it look like? And sometimes the child draws something like, or fire in your belly or whatever or some little ugly monster or something like that. And you might even encourage child to give it a name so that it's an awareness. So, and once the child has chosen a name, then next time it happens just when it starts to happen, then you can say, oh, there is so and so, he or she is back now, isn't she? Then that brings about remains to be aware even then while it happens. So after you've spoken it, after perhaps you named it, so the child names it. Then when it happens you can point it out, oh, it's there again. So you never go, you never say don't do that. No, that doesn't work obviously. So you never ask it how to suppress it or anything, but to become more conscious so the become more conscious of it. And that's a. To deal with emotions like that is so important in childhood because a child can really suffer from very destructive emotions. And adolescents even more so when they become adolescents. Teenagers can have very destructive emotions. So to learn to. To be aware of their own emotional energy field so that they're not completely taken over by it, it's vital for a child to learn. This should be the subject number one at every school. But I don't know what else they teach. It's not. So if you are a teacher, then please. You may not be able to officially incorporate these teachings into the school curriculum, but unofficially you can perhaps help children in that way. I can't tell you exactly how, but you will know how. You can help children to become more aware of their own emotional field, become more aware of what thinking they do, all these things. The greatest thing, the most important thing to develop as a child is awareness. So much more important than anything like accumulating knowledge or even iq. IQ is a small, very small aspect of intelligence and it does not guarantee awareness whatsoever. It.
