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The Pain Body

(plus Placebos and Nocebos)

We stuffed these emotions into a gunnysack and stored them... In our gut? In our heart? In our head? And carefully saved them for our pain body to offer as a full course meal for the ego to feed upon when certain triggers appear in our adulthood. As adults we don't need the ego's protection. But the ego doesn't know that we are big and smart and able to take care of ourselves now so, mostly, we are still stuck way back there in the original hurt.

We have all allowed our ego to become much more than it was originally intended, which is the primary sorter and sifter of reality. Instead the ego seems to have taken on the role of Bully Psychiatrist/God. It does continue to take care of life as it should when it tells us things like "Don't step in front of the train" (reasonable). But it steps out of bounds when it tells us garbage like "Don't go into the busy, noisy, bright back of Costco because you will be trapped there and won't know how to get out." (unreasonable) The ego should be emotionless and act more like Mr. Spock or a computer or a tool and... let me ask you something: Would you ask Mr. Spock for advice on your love life? Would you ask your computer the meaning of life? Would you ask the shovel in your shed how to find God?

Most "awakened" people like Nisargadatta, or Adyashanti or Eckhart Tolle have worked very hard over many years to recognize and find ways to release the negative ego's hold over their lives. Personally, I don't think that you ever really get rid of the ego. Who is going to balance your checkbook? But sort of like a chronic illness, you learn to manage it. However, maybe this is because I have not yet awakened from the comatose state that my ego has relegated me to for its selfish and misguided reasons. "I will keep you safe from your childhood pain (even though you don't remember it) but in exchange for that you will agree to experience pain, rage, fear and occasional torment."

Our pain bodies and negative egos are usually activated by the triggering of some past pain. Tolle claims that we are all born with some sort of a pain body, having taken on the pain of our parents and their parents and their parents plus the pain of the universal consciousness. Sometimes the pain, fear and sadness we are feeling is not actually our own, but a hijacking of our etheric bodies by the universal pain, rage, fear and sadness thrown at us from "out there."

Let's say that you, a woman, were emotionally or even physically abandoned by your father. Now, when your husband or boyfriend acts like or says something even remotely resembling abandonment, your pain body will rouse itself from its serpentine nap, offering the ego some pain and suffering from the gunnysack of emotions. The ego then begins to feed and you get to re-experience as an adult all the sucky abandonment stuff you experienced as a child.

If you are not aware of what is happening, you might think that that awful feeling you are having about the abandonment that is occurring to you as an adult is who you really are, that it is you the adult who is sad, and mad and fearful, etc. But now you know it's not really you the adult but the child - the pain body feeding the ego who is mindlessly following orders that were put into place from your childhood experiences. Protect her from pain, sadness, and fear! How? By giving her the same experience of abandonment that she had as a child, but now as an adult. It's similar to putting your hand on a hot stove burner. Usually we won't do that again, but the ego has no faith in our maturity and still thinks of us in terms of a four year old. As a child we thought we would "die" from the hurt so the ego is just protecting us, really, from a death of sorts. Thus it feeds into the triggers thrust upon us, all in the guise of protecting us. The ego is not a bad guy, but just doing its job in a sort of misinformed way. And so it goes, on and on and on.

The best way I have found to deal with the pain body is just to become aware of it. Become familiar with your triggers whether they are abandonment, getting old, getting sick, being poor, whatever floats your pain boat. Tell yourself that this isn't an experience in present time, but an ancient feeling carried on through your current lifetime, and even many past lifetimes and start putting it all into perspective. And guess what? Over time, you will become more and more aware of when your buttons are being pushed, you will learn to handle the triggered situations and the emotions in a different way and the pain body will eventually release its stranglehold on your happiness. And you might just become one of the lucky ones, who will awaken to the universal witness behind the ego (and all the pain) and you might just learn to live more from that beautiful grounded place of divine eternal being.

Placebos and Nocebos: This is sort of related to the above discourse on the Pain Body as I pretty much believe that what we tell ourselves shapes our very lives. Our consistent and persistent thoughts and the allowing of our pain bodies to run our lives will eventually manifest into reality. Our negative natterings may very well create the bad things that we are most terrified of. As a friend of mine likes to quote: "Your worst fear becomes your most fervent prayer."

We all know what placebos are and the most common example is sugar pills acting like the real thing and actually creating a change in physiology. Another example is the recent exploration of how ineffective most knee surgery is: Researchers found that the people put under anesthesia and not operated on fared just as well as the ones put under anesthesia and operated on. Nocebos are the evil twins of placebos. A nocebo means that if you assume the worst, then it might happen. It's a negative self-fulfilling prophecy. For example, about ten years ago, researchers stumbled onto a striking finding that women who believed that they were prone to heart disease were nearly four times as likely to die as women with similar risk factors who didn't hold such fatalistic views.

What I try to do is this: I try to recognize when my pain body is throwing nocebos at me or when my pain body is alive and well and messing with me. I also try to catch myself talking trash about myself to myself. Woody Allen and I tend to worry about our health a lot. I have already figured out that this is not a good thing, since I believe that I create much of my reality through my thoughts. So I have trained myself to use a mental "delete" button and I have also taped little post-it notes with pithy affirmations beside my bed, on my bathroom mirror, on the dashboard of my car, on my computer, on my forehead. May I never be without a positive thought!

Sometimes I am horrified at what patients tell me their M.D. has told them. Larry Dossey, M.D., in his book The Dark Side of Consciousness, gives several examples of "words that maim" or in plainer language, "voodoo hexes" that his patients reported having been told by other doctors.

Like, "You are a walking time bomb (unless you take this drug)." Or, " You could have a heart attack any moment (unless you have this surgery)." or "There is not much hope for you (unless you have this chemotherapy)." Or, "You are living on borrowed time (unless you do exactly what I say)." These extremely destructive nocebos are usually spoken in an egoic and misguided attempt by the doctor to force his patients into some sort of treatment that in his tradition, he believes, will be beneficial. Please run as fast as you can if some doc tries to strong arm you like this.

It really is like voodoo. Haven't you wondered why an evil witch doctor can tell someone they have put a "hex" on them and three days later, mysteriously, the hexee is dead? I suggest that we all find our personal nocebos - our voodoo statements - and eliminate them instantly. I suggest that we talk nicely to one another, too. Most of us are unaware of the power our words carry.

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